Airborne Paratrooper Quotes

Lay down Your tired & weary head my friend. We have wept too long Night is falling And you are only sleeping We have come to this journey's end It's time for us to go To meet our friends Who beckon us To jump again From across a distant sky A C-130 comes to carry us Where we shall all wait For the final green light In the light of The pale moon rising I see far on the horizon Into the world of night and darkness Feet and knees together Time has ceased But cherished memories still linger This is the way of life and all things We shall meet again You are only sleeping.

Hitler made only one big mistake when he built his Atlantic Wall,” the paratroopers liked to say. “He forgot to put a roof on it.

The men were told that Currahee was an Indian word that meant “We stand alone,” which was the way these paratroopers expected to fight. It became the battle cry of the 506th.

Is it accidental that so many ex-paratroopers from E company became teachers? Perhaps for some men a period of violence and destruction at one time attracts them to look for something creative as a balance in another part of life. We seem also to have a disproportionate number of builders of houses and other things in the group we see at reunions.

In early May 1968, RT Lion was joined by a wiry, tough-as-nails little paratrooper who introduced himself as Lou “Jake Three Zero” DeSeta. DeSeta had served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade for 13 months and had participated in the fabled Battle of Dak To.

Polish paratroopers could not have been more different. They were not like the British who just wanted to make the best of a bad war by joking and referring to any battle as ‘a party’. Nor were they like the Americans who wanted to finish it quickly so that they could go home. The Poles were exiles, fighting for the very survival of their national identity. An American officer who saw them in training described them as ‘killers under the silk’. Polish patriotism was nothing like the rather embarrassed British equivalent: theirs was a burning, spiritual flame.

The paratroopers have landed,” the voice on the radio said, “and all around me, they’re freeing themselves from their chutes.” Dr. Rashid leaned forward, hanging on every word. Tonight’s broadcast was coming all the way from Holland, where soldiers from the 101st Airborne had been dispatched to capture the bridges along the Dutch/Belgian border.

Treatment must respect the feeling of pride the paratrooper has in belonging to the airborne forces. It must be more generous, more circumspect and more comradely than anywhere else. The culture [of the airborne forces] must rest more on mutual trust to one another than on discipline and obedience. I personally made efforts to give the best example.

Whenever I visited the forces, I frequently talked to individual paratroopers and discussed their interests, their personal relationships and concerns. I asked them about their point of view and was happy whenever I received open and honest answers. In that manner, my company and battalion commanders and I brought together the airborne forces to an ever larger family, and it was an exceptionally difficult punishment for a paratrooper whenever he was kicked out of the family and assigned to another arm. To a large extent, this basic attitude was the secret to success for the airborne forces.

Airborne forces employed the first large-scale deception maneuver at exercises held at the Bergen Training Area in July 1939. Oberstleutnant Heidrich had the idea of attaching life-size dolls to parachutes and then dropping them to deceive the enemy. The dolls landed in the rear of an “enemy” combat formation, which promptly turned about to engage the non-breathing enemy.

When the Germans broke through and created the bulge and surrounded us, they identified the 101st Airborne as the ones surrounded. They though we were goners, I guess, so it was news. The 101st is surrounded! That's not news for a paratrooper.

82nd Airborne Division paratroopers.