Bird…and fools; paratrooper memories
This Associated Press story brought back some memories;
Military officials said 25 heavily armed parachutists who landed in a cornfield on the grounds of a Colorado prison last week were on a training mission but landed about 3 miles off target.
“Those were Special Operations Command forces conducting routine training,” Army Col. Hans Bush, a spokesman for the command at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., said Monday. He declined to identify the units that landed at Fremont Correctional Facility but said the target was Fremont County Airport.
[…]
“We don’t know who they were and I’m not sure we’ll ever know who they were,” [spokeswoman Katherine Sanguinetti] said. “Everyone acted appropriately.”
The parachute troops were armed only with rubber training bullets.
“The good news is everyone was able to quickly assess the situation,” Bush said.
I’m glad the whole thing turned out OK – it could’ve gone bad fast with a jittery trigger finger or two.Â
There’s a drop zone in Alaska I still haven’t seen – and I was first out the door of our aircraft. In Panama, the first three or four guys out the door over Venado Drop Zone went in the ocean everytime – but even if you hit the drop zone, you were in 10-foot elephant grass and inevitably lost.
In Germany they dropped on a farmer’s sugar beet field at night and even our battalion commander (the late then-LTC Arthur Stang) broke his ankle when he drifted into a stone wall. Â
One time we flew to Panama for jungle training before I was stationed there. We were to jump into Gatun DZ on the Atlantic side where the school was, but when we were rigging up in Homestead AFB, the pilot held the Miami Herald headline up so we could all see it – “Elite US troops to invade Panama” it said. We looked at each other and the blank adapters on our weapons and wondered how’d we’d invade anyone with near-toys.
Luckily it was just Omar Torrijos being blustery like Hugo Chavez does now. We landed in Panama instead of jumping and bussed across the Isthmus from Howard AFB. Still , it’s a funny story. I have plenty more if prodded and cajoled properly.
Category: Historical, Support the troops
