Milsurp After Hours

Time you brought them down to earth Eoin!!

My son jumped out of a plane, but attached to the instructor. He said it was exciting, but he
never did it again......

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I well remember the conversation when Colonel Hay told me that he’d approved my application to attend the basic Armourer’s course.
In part he said that the battalion was to become a parachute unit and did I want to miss out this opportunity, I told him that I had no desire to jump out of a plane.
He said that the Australian Army hadn’t lost one paratrooper since WWII, I replied that I would hate to spoil such a good record.
The Colonel laughed and wished me well and to remember that I was a member of the battalion till I was transferred on successfully completing the six month course.

I served for a while in Vietnam with an outfit that had been really "airborne" parachute troops after the last brigade of the 9th Division left Vietnam. They were no longer "airborne" before I got there, although to this day "Airborne" is attached to the 101st Division. When it became apparent that parachuting was idiotic as a tactic while you could land men by Huey all in a tight group in a precise place rather than have them hanging in trees and drowned in rivers all over the map there never was any parachuting in Vietnam. The original groups were, and are still, of the opinion jumping out of an airplane made them superior soldiers because they were trained to parachute out of a plane.

Many of the 101st infantry in Vietnam, like all, or about all, the soldiers who jumped into Normandy in WWII, never got an air medal. In the mountains around Hue, in the North part of South Vietnam, an infantry battalion would be inserted by company about once in a month by helicopter and wander around for a few weeks in the dense forest and be brought back for a week of stand down after a couple or three weeks. Guys in the 9th Division, on the other hand, earned air medals in a couple of months with combat insertions by helicopter because of "Eagle Flights" when troops would be inserted on a possible enemy location and if not making contact extracted after a short time and inserted some place else. Some days contact was light or non existent so there were several insertions in a just one day. Once you passed 25 insertions onto selected enemy targets you could be awarded an air medal.... as long as the company clerk recorded the information. Most, who remained in the field through a good part of their time in Vietnam, accumulated enough insertions to earn several air medals.

My point is that a parachutist badge is like an expert marksman badge. You don't have to have ever been in a war to get one. You just have to have jumped out of an airplane and lived to brag about it. An air medal meant, in Vietnam, that a soldier with the infantry had made over 25 combat insertions in search of the enemy for each one he was awarded.

And remember.... Only two things fall out of the sky.... Bird shit and airborne.....

I got an Air Medal, but I'll never know exactly how many insertions over 25 because I never kept count.

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The 173rd Airborne Brigade conducted the only parachute mission during the VN war. February 1967. I talked with a guy who had been there. He said "They knew we were coming and they shot the shit out of us."

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Remember when we thought the Commies in Russia were done and we had a President that did one really great diplomatic thing?

Airline logic.........