BUSH'S FINAL SALUTE

George Bush, 72, gave up martinis for a month to get in shape for his parachute jump, endured countless gibes from his loving but irreverent kids ("Next you'll tell us you have an 18-year-old girlfriend"), shouted "Arch!" (yes, as in arch your back) as he leaped into the blue instead of "Geronimo!" like John Wayne, bumped his head against the fuselage, but then floated exuberantly into the record books as the only parachuting former President.

Back at his desk in Houston after the jump, he was rummaging for the names and addresses of all his new skydiving buddies so he could pay up on a penalty--one case of beer--because he'd dropped the rip cord instead of fixing it back on the patch of Velcro. Unwritten rule of the skyways: Recycle your equipment. His fellow jumpers didn't mind a bit, pronouncing his jump "perfect" for a novice. But Bush cared.

He had the glow of a man fulfilled. "It was just wonderful," he said quietly, "something I'll carry with me the rest of my life." Perhaps only his family really understood how deeply his bailout from a burning Avenger torpedo bomber in World War II had shaped him. He was only three months beyond his teens when ground fire hit his plane as he thundered in with four 500-lb. bombs to drop on a radio tower and facilities on Chichi Jima, a volcanic island held by the Japanese. He followed the book, completed his drop and then told his two crewmen, Ted White and Jack Delaney, to bail out. He turned the plane to lessen wind on their hatch, looked for them but could not see them in the plane or out, figured they had jumped, and then began to cope himself.

"It was then pure terror," Bush said last week. "The cockpit was filled with smoke. I could see the flames a few inches from the gas tanks. I stuck my head out, and the wind sucked me out of the cockpit. I must have pulled the rip cord then--too early. My head grazed the elevator at the tail. The chute had several panels ripped out as it momentarily hung up. I was so lucky. An inch or two difference, and I would have been killed by the blow or dragged down with the plane.

"I grew up then," he continued. He felt devastated that his crewmen had been lost, White apparently killed in the plane, Delaney when his chute did not open. In truth there was nothing more Bush could have done. Yet he has wondered for years. War is like that. It is one of the oddities of his climb to the presidency that this story was almost unknown until he ran for the White House.

"I never really dwelled on making another jump," Bush said. "But it was always a thought back in my mind: Do it again and do it right." He doesn't say it, but maybe it was to be a last salute to his crewmen. He did not do anything about it until this February, when he gave a speech to the U.S. Parachute Association in Houston. His listeners stood and roared an ovation for one who had been there. In the presence of young adventurers, in and out of the military, Bush always gets an adrenaline rush, and right there he made the commitment to them and himself.