Chapter 9 - The Jump at Saint-Mère-Église
On a crisp, breezy Saturday morning in early June—exactly one year to the day after the wedding reception in the gravel clearing—the sky above Normandy, France, was an unbroken dome of cold, high-altitude sapphire blue.
Eighty miles west of the invasion beaches, the historic drop zone at Saint-Mère-Église was an ocean of light, fluttering red-white-and-blue tricolors, and sixty thousand spectators who had gathered beneath the church spire to commemorate the anniversary of the airborne landings.
The air was filled with the rhythmic, thunderous roar of four C-130 Hercules transport aircraft banking in wide, synchronized orbits at twelve hundred feet above the green pastureland.
Inside the open paratroop door of the lead aircraft, standing in the slipstream with the sixty-knot wind howling against her combat helmet, was Captain Morrison Dalton.
My promotion to Captain had cleared the Department of the Army thirty days ago, signed directly by the Chief of Staff.
I wore my full combat equipment: the heavy main parachute harness secured across my chest, the reserve pack strapped to my stomach, my weapon case rigged along my left leg, and my paratrooper wings gleaming beneath the jump light.
Beside me in the door, his hand resting firm and solid against my shoulder harness, stood Major Miles Dalton—now the Chief of Maintenance for the Eighteenth Airborne Corps’ Tactical Mobility Command.
The red jump light on the bulkhead flared to amber:
PREPARE TO JUMP.
Ten paratroopers behind us stood up as one body, their static lines hooked to the overhead steel cable with a sharp, synchronized metallic clatter:
CLACK-CLACK-CLACK.
Miles leaned close to my helmet, his voice cutting through the roar of the four turboprops:
"How does the drop zone look to the Company Commander, Morrison?"
I looked down through the open door.
Below us, the green pastures of France stretched out toward the English Channel—the same fields where three thousand young Americans had dropped into the dark eighty years ago to break an empire of tyranny.
Standing in the VIP reviewing enclosure on the edge of the field, holding a pair of field glasses, wearing his tweed jacket and flat cap, was Uncle Wesley.
Beside him sat forty members of our chosen family, waving the black-and-gold flag of the Eighty-Second Airborne beneath the French sun.
I looked at Miles.
My lips pulled back into that fierce, magnificent, and sovereign smile that had survived the desert, survived the cold chapel, and survived the greed of an entire dynasty.
"The drop zone is green, Miles," I shouted over the wind.
The jump light flared from amber to brilliant, burning green:
GO.
Miles and I stepped out of the door together.
The sixty-knot slipstream caught our canopies, the heavy olive-drab nylon snapping open with a concussive, triumphant CRACK that shook the air above Normandy:
One. Two. Three.
We hung suspended between the boundless blue sky and the green earth, floating down toward the landing zone side by side, our canopies drifting through the clean, untamed sunlight.
The chapel was silent.
The debts were paid in full.
May you like
The uniform was honored forever.
And the life we had built beneath the boundless American sky... was finally, beautifully, and permanently our own.
