Falling into Words

In the early 1990s, I was in an elite airborne reconnaissance unit, the Long Range Surveillance Detachment (LRSD), a name carried over from the legendary LRRP—Long Range Recon Patrol. We were based in Hawaii, and part of our rhythm was to jump at least once a month. We jumped from AC-130s, C-141s, and Blackhawk helicopters, often in training scenarios that pushed our limits.

One day, we were jumping East Range with a Marine Force Recon unit. The winds were far too strong for a safe jump, but in that world you don’t question orders—you jump when they say jump. I jumped. The wind caught me, and when I hit the ground, something in my body gave way. In the days that followed, I had to face the possibility that I might never walk normally again.

Up until that moment, reading was not part of my life. I could read at maybe an eighth-grade level, but I had undiagnosed dyslexia. Words were stubborn, almost hostile. I wasn’t willing to “stand-under” them, to understand them. I refused. But when my body was broken, my mind became my only way forward.

I started to read slowly, painfully, as though every sentence were another parachute jump into unfamiliar terrain. At first, the words were opaque. Then, they became windows—openings into worlds and ways of perceiving I had never known. The power of words hit me with a force I had never felt, even in the military. They could transport me, challenge me, and change me without any coordinates.

Following those words led me to a PhD and a life as a professor. But inside the academy, I hit another realization: the infinite, liberating power of words was being strangled by the very economic system of higher education in the United States. The neoliberal “debt university” turned knowledge into a commodity, cutting off the very infinity that had first set me free.

That jump at East Range changed my life twice: first by breaking my body, and then by forcing me to learn to walk with my mind. And it left me with a commitment that still drives me today—to protect spaces where words remain free, unbound, and capable of carrying us farther than any aircraft ever could.