During 2013 my team participated in a multinational exercise with conventional and special operations forces in the Bavarian region of Germany. Prior to conventional forces reaching the battlefield we were tasked to conduct a High Altitude High Opening (HAHO) insertion and conduct three days of Special Reconnaissance (SR) to ascertain enemy staging bases. Our sister team was tasked similarly, but they were to conduct a static line parachute jump into area of operations. Initially we identified two potential locations on the map to land and sent up a request for information (RFI) to our company to decide which was going to be our primary and alternate sites. The answer came back fairly quickly: we were limited to a single location, the bottom end of a long valley opposite from a potential enemy location. As we continued the planning process, we were told to shift our timeline left; the company had sent a Jumpmaster to the proposed drop zone and he had determined it was too …show more content…
As each man excited, cleared his immediate area and checked-in on the radio, we formed our stack and began the flight to the end of the valley. As predicted, the illumination was below ten percent, but our GPS’s kept us on azimuth. Shortly, our time to turn on final came and we headed towards the bottom of the valley, a couple hundred meters short of our pre-planned impact point. As each man came to his version of a night parachute landing fall, we conducted link-up and started moving across the valley, towards the ridgeline that began our route. It was then we saw how close we’d missed a likely catastrophe: the planned landing area we’d missed turned out to be a mass of large boulders, fenced off squares, rock piles and hills. Even during daylight hours, it would have been a nightmare to have landed there and this spot had been approved by the Jumpmaster as being safe for MFF and not static