Unit conducts first water jump into White Lake

By Spc. Jongsu Oh and Leslie Ozawa
95th CA Bde.

December 8, 2011

	Photo by Spc. Jongsu Oh/95th CA Bde. During a swim test at Atchely Pool, paratroopers had to demonstrate they could swim and clear a floating parachute canopy, a critical test to ensure they can properly recover if their flotation device fails during an actual water jump.

As a dull, overcast autumn dawn replaced a starless night over White Lake. Only a few boats had ventured out that morning onto the large, recreational lake about 70 miles southeast of Fort Bragg.

From the northwest, high above the sand hills of North Carolina, a cold front was moving in, bruising a warm air mass coming from the Gulf of Mexico, wringing out its moisture in curtains of rain that drenched the lake.

Morning proceeded into early afternoon. The few people floating on the surface of the lake and a small dockside crowd heard the muffled staccato of an engine coming out of the western sky.
Against the grey clouds moving silently, swiftly to the east, a black speck approached the lake from the west, gradually taking the shape of a helicopter.

At 1,500 feet above the lake, six figures dropped in succession from the midsection of helicopter, each trailed by a thin streamer that quickly took on a life of its own, blossoming into an olive green canopy. The falling figures were suddenly suspended into a slow descent into the greyish-brown waters below.

Recovery teams in black Zodiacs were already gunning their outboard motors toward the jumpers and their parachutes, as their feet hit the surface of the lake.

As patches of blue began to appear above the clouds, the helicopter repeated the scene nine times, each time disgorging six Soldiers and a trail of canopies over White Lake. By about 3:30 p.m., about 60 paratroopers of the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade had successfully completed the brigade’s first water jump. Lightning from the morning’s unseemly weather forced the rest of the jumps to be cancelled.

“I was stoked for it,” said one Soldier, who graduated just weeks before from Airborne” School at Fort Benning, Ga. It’s just like any other jump, just a softer landing.”

Asked if he was nervous about the jump, the Soldier replied, “No, not really. I mean you have to jump, so being scared isn’t going to help you at all,” he said.

“It's kind of a perk to do it in the water, because it’s close to fun,” said Sgt. 1st Class Logan Nelson, a jumpmaster from the brigade’s headquarters company. “But the main reason we’re doing this is so that if our Soldiers are inadvertently dropped into the water during a normal parachute drop, they’re better prepared to deal with it.”

The Army requires that when airborne operations are conducted within a 1,000 feet of open water, paratroopers must strap on a flotation device before jumping.

Still, it’s rare for Soldiers to actually land on water in their entire airborne career, said Sgt. 1st Class Scott Cartwright, the brigade air operations noncommissioned officer.

“It’s a soft landing, but there’s more risk involved,” Cartwright said. “Now you have a jumper in the water with a parachute, who must know how to swim free of the parachute, if his life preserver fails.”

The water jump concluded without incident, although the stormy weather delayed the jumps.
Time ran out for the other half of the paratroopers who had been preparing for the jump since early August, when Cartwright arranged three testing sessions at various on-post pools.

Over 100 brigade paratroopers answered the call. Under Cartwright’s watchful eyes, they strapped on a parachute harness before lining up at one end of the pool. Eight inches below their feet floated the thin, olive green shroud of a parachute canopy that occupied about 25 square yards of pool space.

The paratroopers had to jump into the water, unbuckle their harness without touching the bottom of the pool, and then dive under the floating canopy to find the parachute’s center seam. There, they had to raise their arms to clear a space above their heads before coming up for air. They then had to dive again beneath the canopy, reappearing at its other end, and swim on to the far end of the pool and tread water for 4 to 5 minutes.

But checking out swimming abilities of the brigade’s paratroopers was just one phase of the water jump preparation.

In orchestrating the water jump, Cartwright also enlisted Fort Bragg’s 20th Engineer Bde. to provide recovery boats and crews, as well as the United States Army Special Operations Command flight detachment for the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter used as the jump platform.

“We always talk about water landing during airborne operations during sustainment,” Cartwright said. “Now this actually let jumpers experience the real thing. So if we go on training missions somewhere, and they land somewhere they are not supposed to, they have a better idea what to do.”

The 95th CA Brigade’s air operations NCO plans to do more water jumps for the brigade.
“At least twice a year, or maybe three times,” Cartwright said.

Share