US ARMY AIRBORNE PARATROOPERS

Qualifying as a military parachutist is the first step to becoming a member of any one of the US special operations forces -- the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Rangers, Recon, Delta, and many more.  Earning your jump wings is the first step to joining any of the elite American tactical units.  Although the course is taught by the Army, every class contains personnel from the Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and the armed forces of foreign nations.

About 100,000 students attend this training every year.  Some are 17-year-old Army privates, some are senior officers and NCOs in the forties or even fifties.  Around ten percent are women.  In every new class of about 500 who show up for training, around fifty will fail to pass the PT test on the first day.  Another twenty-five will fail some part of the instruction and will be recycled into another class.  Once every class or two somebody will get up in the air and freeze in the door -- a "refusal."  Occasionally students break arms, legs, ankles.  Very occasionally people are killed.  Military parachuting is not particularly dangerous but it is not for cowards, either. 

Want to become qualified as a military parachutist?  The course lasts three weeks.  You have to be in reasonable shape but you don't need to be a "gym rat."  The PT requirements are listed here. But the real requirement is a desire to test yourself, to take that step out of a perfectly good airplane, out into the prop blast.  Not everybody can do it, but for anybody who wants to participate in military special operations, it is sort of like kindergarten -- the place where it all begins. 

 

The US Army began developing parachute forces at the beginning of World War Two and used them with tremendous tactical success, especially during the invasion of France in June, 1944. The idea then was that large numbers of soldiers could be delivered to places where they would not be expected, deep behind enemy lines, where they would achieve surprise and, if the mission were properly executed, local tactical superiority.  The formal name for these types of forces is "airborne" and informally such soldiers are commonly called "paratroopers"

The US armed forces still maintain parachute forces for exactly the kind of mass tactical assaults that were conducted in Normandy and elsewhere, but they are seldom used in the kind of drops employed then.  Only one parachute division remains in the US Army, the 82nd Airborne based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. 

But Army Rangers, "Green Berets", Navy SEALs, Air Force combat controlers and para-rescuemen, Marine Recon, and other elite units require members to be qualified military parachutists.  And all of them are trained by the Army's Basic Airborne Course at Fort Benning, Georgia.