'My Mom Does Not Like It': Inside A Nighttime 82nd Airborne Jump as Troops Wait to Deploy
A group of mostly junior Army infantrymen and noncommissioned officers sat in a staging area Thursday, waiting to put on their parachutes for a nighttime jump into the Holland Drop Zone at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They were eating french fries and burgers -- a heavy meal they hoped would sustain them the whole night.
"Hopefully, eating all this doesn't cause the plane to fall from the sky," one 82nd Airborne trooper joked.
The routine training exercise was planned far in advance and is unrelated to the crisis in Eastern Europe. Soldiers may jump as often as once a month.
But it also comes as 2,000 Fort Bragg service members are in the midst of a historic deployment to Europe after Russian President Vladimir Putin surrounded Ukraine with some 130,000 troops. Despite a Biden administration announcement calling for a rapid activation of Fort Bragg forces, most have yet to deploy and it is unclear what the timetable is for those activations.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mom-does-not-inside-nighttime-185156390.html
