Green Ramp tragedy anniversary
On March 23, 1994, 24 paratroopers died and more than 100 were injured. 19 of the dead were from the 2nd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment. the accident happened on the world-famous “Green Ramp” at Fort Bragg while the paratroopers were waiting for a routine parachute jump when a F-16D Fighting Falcon collided with a C-130E Hercules cargo plane. From the Fayetteville Observer;
[Keith] Masback and the other soldiers in the jumpmaster school were just outside the path of the blast, shielded by a building, according to investigators’ diagrams of the crash site.
“Of course, I heard it and felt the fireball on the back of my neck,” said Masback, then a captain with the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade working in the 18th Airborne Corps headquarters.
“It all just kind of happened very quickly. We hit the ground and most of us crawled into our building,” Masback said, describing the confusion that day. “We had no context . to be standing on a beautiful March day and for it to turn hellacious.”
Masback remembers the carnage – burning trees and burning men, blood, debris and body parts.
Despite the destruction, Masback, now president of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation in Washington, D.C., said the response of those around him is what stands out most.
“We all just reacted,” he said. “It was a horrific day, but it was a great day to be a paratrooper because of the way we all responded.”
Soldiers who escaped injury tended to those in need, Masback said. Wounded soldiers turned to help those with more severe injuries, even as ammunition from the fighter jet burned off.
“It was overwhelming,” he said. “Everywhere I turned, there were lifeless and injured bodies. Those not debilitated were aiding those that were.”
Another reminder that training is just as deadly as combat operations sometimes.
Category: Military issues
Geez, it’s been 20 years? Hard to believe. We were out on the rifle range (one of the ranges off of Chicken Road) when we got an emergency call for our ambulance to leave the range and head immediately to green ramp. We didn’t find out why until the end of the day.
If I recall, this incident happened just a couple of weeks after a Blackhawk helicopter full of GIs and Kurdish refugess was mistakenly shot down over Iraq.
I had a co-worker who was injured from that. Never knew anything until someone asked him about some scarring he has on his face.
I left the 82d in 1993 for MOS reclassification training at Fort Sam Houston. I was at Brooks Army Medical Center in San Antonio when it happened. All the students in my class for Respiratory Specialists would rotate for weeks through the burn center and work with some of the survivors. A year and a half later I returned for BNCOC and heard on the radio one morning at 05:00 that one of the survivors had finally succumbed to his wounds. I still remember that individual’s name.
CPT Ken Golla and I were commissioned together. He was a husband and father and only 29 years old.
RIP Ken, you haven’t been forgotten.
Could not believe the scope of this accident, hearing about it over in Germany…it seemed unreal that it could happen.
It is hard to believe that it’s been 20 years now. I was at the MOUT site when the crash occurred, and immediately feared for my Team eader. who was attending JM school.
I heard first hand accounts of a lot of herosim that day.
Hard to believe this happened. Was one week before I retired. That and the fuck up in Iraq with the two Black Hawks mad me realize it was time.
The years pass quickly, somehow. Soon, the Old Guard will be those who were in Desert Storm, then those who were in Afghanistan and Iraq. When I was a kid, I can’t recall knowing any family whose father hadn’t served in WW II. But when those, like the men who died in the 1994 tragedy, are remembered, time stops and they are among us again.
2/17 Air Cav:
I hear ya. COMPATWINGFIVE lost 3 P-3 Orions with all onboard in an 18 month period. 30+ aircrew. None of the accidents were related except by aircraft type and command. All three were from different squadrons. I lost two good friends in those. One of them I had a late breakfast with just hours before they went in.
I remember that Navy Times had a column entitled “Sea Service Obituaries” in each issue and there was always 2-3 dozen names listed.
RIP to all those lost. Training in our profession was always dangerous, and all those lost need to be remembered as long as possible.
I was at Bragg at the time in training and we took time to hear the story and situation of what happened.
It doesn’t seem like it was so long ago.
We retired our company’s last Vietnam vet a few years ago. Now we have E4s in uniform who were born after the end of what I think of as “the Gulf War.”
WOW. It’s been that long…..I was on a deployment exercise out of Andrews AFB in a c-141 and we decided to go to Avon Park and drop crew and aerial port folks there first and then go to Pope and then back to Andrews.
The aircrew HAD been scheduled to go to Pope *FIRST* and drop part of our folks on Green Ramp with 3rd MAPS and then head to Florida. The decided to switch it around to they flew the long leg first then stop at Pope on the way home.
Had we done it the other way around we’d have been sitting on the ramp in our C-141 when the accident occurred.
Imagine what happened an hour or so later when we had to divert to Fayetteville Civilian airport and an entire Wing ORI deployment exercise group piles off a C-141 in full battle rattle and we had to go and set up shop at the Fire Department building at the airport. The PRESS and everyone went apeshit and the base commander had to come out and have a press conference that it was just an awful coincidence and bad timing that this exercise and it’s participants arrived just after the accident and we were not going to war as many had speculated.
Angels were watching out for us that day.