Thank you for your interest. The men who first became the Triple Nickles were kitchen staff and maintenance workers—the work the military thought was appropriate for Black men. They came into the military under the qualifications issued in October of 1940 under the War Department Mobilization Regulations No. 1-9 (MR 1-9. These men volunteered to teach themselves to be paratroopers on their own time, and they more than proved themselves capable.
Height and Weight: Recruits had to be between 5 feet (60 inches) and 6 feet 6 inches (78 inches) tall, and weigh a minimum of 105 pounds. Weight was primarily used to screen for wasting diseases like tuberculosis.
The 12-Tooth Rule: A GI was required to have a minimum of 12 functional teeth—specifically, 6 opposing chewing teeth in the back and 6 opposing incisors in the front—so they could physically masticate tough Army field rations.
Vision and Hearing: Vision had to be at least 20/100 in each eye without glasses, provided it could be corrected with spectacles to 20/40 in the better eye. Hearing required detecting a whispered voice from 15 feet away.
General Health: The physical was essentially a mass screening to rule out organic diseases, severe mental disorders, or physical deformities (like severe flat feet or hernias) that would prevent a soldier from marching.
After the men proved themselves, all enlistees coming in to be paratroopers had more stringent physical qualifications.

Thank you for posting. You are so right. When you think about these men training themselves for parachute jumping—with no official trainer and only the equipment they had access to after hours—it begins to paint a picture of how difficult it would have been. This experience was all too common in the military during WWII.