853: Chapter 844: The Last Drill 853: Chapter 844: The Last Drill Gao Yang didn’t know how often airborne soldiers in other places parachuted, but Grolev said that during his service, he caught Russia’s most economically strained period, so their parachuting training intensity varied greatly.
At most, they could jump four or five times a month, and at the least, just twice a year.
As for Gao Yang and his group, they jumped four times a day, at least four times.
In the later stages, after gaining significant parachuting experience, they even added two very dangerous night jumps.
Generally, having around a hundred jumps was considered a lot for non-professional paratroopers, definitely marking them as experienced.
However, Gao Yang and his team managed to hit a hundred jumps from zero experience in just twenty-three days.
If they hadn’t jumped with Wolfgang’s group, it’s very likely Gao Yang and his men would never have jumped so many times in their lives.
Even if they had gone to a private company to learn sport parachuting, it wouldn’t have been possible to jump so often in such a short time.
Ordinary paratroopers couldn’t finish all their training jumps in less than a year and a half; they had to take it step by step slowly.
But for Gao Yang’s team, they also took it step by step, only they were running forward.
High-altitude parachute opening was a given, the very basics.
The transition from just jumping out of the plane and having the parachute automatically open, to jumping out and opening the parachute themselves, took Gao Yang and his team just two days.
After two consecutive days of the most basic parachute opening practice, they had to open the parachutes themselves.
From high-altitude high-opening jumps to high-altitude low-opening jumps, they took merely five days.
What is a high-altitude low-opening?
That’s when you jump from, say, three thousand meters, free-fall, and wait to open the parachute until you are only three hundred or two hundred meters above the ground.
High-altitude-low-opening has many benefits: it reduces the radar cross-section, minimizes exposure time, allows faster descent, and most importantly, enables more precise landing in the target area.
The most elite paratroopers dare to open their parachutes only about a hundred meters from the ground, touching the ground just as their descent speed slows to a safe range.
Of course, high-altitude-low-opening is very dangerous, incredibly dangerous.
Mastering high-altitude-low-opening makes one a good paratrooper, depending on the standard.
For Israel’s most elite paratroopers and incredible special forces, it’s still not enough.
More dangerous than high-altitude-low-opening, of course, is low-altitude-low-opening.
The aircraft flies at an extremely low altitude, and the paratroopers must immediately adjust their posture to open their parachutes soon after jumping from less than two hundred meters up.
If the parachute is opened too late, even if it deploys, they will still hit the ground too hard, resulting in broken legs or even death.
Why is low-altitude-low-opening more dangerous than high-altitude-low-opening?
Because with high-altitude-low-opening, there’s still a chance to adjust your flight posture in the air and choose when to open the parachute based on the landing site and wind speed, etc.
But with low-altitude-low-opening, there’s no time to adjust; every step has to be perfect, or it’s fatal or injurious.
What’s more dangerous than low-altitude-low-opening?
Naturally, it’s night-time low-altitude-low-opening.
Let’s put it this way: the danger level of high-altitude-low-opening is ten times that of high-altitude-high-opening, and the danger level of low-altitude-low-opening is ten times that of high-altitude-low-opening.
At night, the same method of opening the parachute is ten times more dangerous than during the day.
Dying during night-time parachute training is not news.
Dying during night-time low-altitude-low-opening training is even less newsworthy.
If there was a large-scale night-time low-altitude-low-opening parachute training session without any deaths, that would actually be news.
As for injuries, such as twisted ankles or broken arms or legs, that’s hardly even worth mentioning; it’s already the norm.
If there are no injuries at all, that would be big news.
Ordinary airborne troops don’t even conduct night-time low-altitude-low-opening training; few units can tolerate the casualty rate.
But special forces are different.
No matter how high the casualty rate, they can’t stop training.
Otherwise, how could they become the most incredible people in the world?
They achieve this through more sweat and even blood than others.
Gao Yang and his team actually didn’t need to participate in night-time low-altitude-low-opening training either, but they participated in all the trainings without missing a single session and without losing a single man, not even a sprained ankle.
Especially worth mentioning is Tommy, who originally had severe acrophobia.
After being dragged by the instructor to jump from the plane and crying out midair for a long while, he opened his eyes, looked down at the earth beneath him, and suddenly, he was fine, completely fine.
His acrophobia was literally scared away by a single parachute jump.
Afterwards, Tommy was more enthusiastic about parachuting than anyone; perhaps this was a case of the extreme solution.
The Satan Mercenary Corps were indeed all quite fortunate.
You should know that among the people Nate led for training this time, there were over a dozen who needed breaks due to sprained ankles, one with a broken leg, another with a broken arm, and one unfortunate soul who even twisted his neck.
Fortunately, although the injury of the one who twisted his neck was severe, he was neither dead nor paralyzed nor vegetative, but his service was indeed over.
After he recovered, it was time to say goodbye to the military.
After mastering all the parachuting training, Gao Yang and his team had to leave.
There were other training items, such as wing suits, like in the movies in Transformers where a bunch of people wearing wing suits fly back and forth in the sky, or the Red Bull Dare-to-die Team jumping off a mountaintop or plane, gliding freely like birdmen in their wing suits.
Wing suits are extremely useful for aerial assaults, but the training is very dangerous.
Gliding with combat gear in a wing suit is not the same as gliding without any burden, so the soldiers selected for wing suit training are carefully chosen.
If Gao Yang had volunteered to train, he could have followed along, but since it was highly unlikely that Gao Yang and his group would need to enter the battlefield in this way, there was no need, thus they didn’t take part in this training.
The date had reached July 24, and there were only five days left before Gao Yang and his team had to leave.
Although parachute training during this time was physically demanding, it wasn’t comparable to the previous high-load training, so this period was also a buffer for Gao Yang and his team to adjust their bodies.
Wolfgang had not only sent trainers but also a medical team to take care of everyone’s physical recovery.
Gao Yang didn’t feel a bit reluctant to leave; on the contrary, he wanted to leave a deep impression on the Airborne instructors who trained him before he left.
There was no helping it.
Despite some friendships formed, training was training, and friendships were friendships.
Since the entire Satan Mercenary Corps had already been branded by Wolfgang’s unit, they had to strike hard against their competitor, the 202 Brigade Airborne Reconnaissance Unit.
Up until now, Gao Yang and his fellows didn’t even know the exact designation of the unit commanded by Wolfgang.
Meeting and immediately starting with a group fight was tradition, but it was just the appetizer.
The real feast was yet to come.
After all, they came for training, and if they incapacitated a group right at the start, training couldn’t continue, which would seriously delay the real business.
Hence, the real feast was at the end with a decisive exercise marking the finale of the training.
Two years ago, a unit from the 202 Brigade trained at Gao Yang’s base and eventually left victorious after a street fighting exercise, which nearly drove everyone from Wolfgang down to the common soldiers in the base to the verge of spitting blood.
This year, Nate’s biggest task was to lead everyone, including Gao Yang, to defeat the Airborne Soldiers in a semi-desert terrain exercise.
Gao Yang sat in the aircraft cabin, his parachute pack on his back, holding his rifle, his face painted with desert camouflage, listening to the humming of the plane, just waiting for the moment when the cabin doors opened.
This was Gao Yang’s last parachute jump here and the beginning of the final exercise, a live ammunition exercise.
The exercise had to produce a winner, but it was impossible for the two ace units to actually shoot at each other, so this showdown turned into the oldest yet most thrilling form of exercise, simply put, capturing the flag.
Set a target point, randomly place something for both sides to grab, whoever got it, won.
Extremely simple.
A red light suddenly lit up in the cabin, followed by a beeping sound.
Nate suddenly stood up and yelled, “We’re about to enter the exercise area!
Tell me, what’s our target?”
“Wipe out the Reconnaissance Battalion!
Bring home the victory!”
The red light started flashing; the rear cabin door of the airplane began to open, and then, the red light turned to green.
At this moment, Nate yelled, “Go!”
Nate was the first to jump, followed closely by everyone else streaming out one after the other.
Gao Yang also jumped out of the plane; he didn’t open his parachute, watching the people in front of him plummet rapidly.
As the ground loomed larger and he was less than two hundred meters from the ground, Gao Yang finally opened his parachute.
When his feet hit the ground, Gao Yang rolled over, stood up, quickly unstrapped his parachute, according to the exercise rules quickly packed it up in haste and, after spotting Nate, immediately ran towards him.
More than twenty people had already gathered around Nate, who was holding his rifle with one hand and checking the time with the other, while simultaneously yelling into the radio, “Close up on me, fast!
Fast!”
They needed to form up before advancing, otherwise, Gao Yang would have already started running towards the target.
A ground officer was waiting for Gao Yang and his team, wanting to know where the target was.
Nate had to gather everyone without missing a single person before he could get the map and know where the target was.
Finally, after the last soldier to land quickly ran over to Nate, Nate got the map.
After opening the map and taking a look, Nate immediately yelled, “Follow me!”(To be continued.
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