Paratroopers

A Maryland Army National Guard training exercise apparentl went awry last night as seven Special Forces paratroopers missed the drop site -- with one left in a tree and one hitting the water at the Lauderick Creek weekend training site, near the Edgewood Area of the Aberdeen Proving Ground, a spokesman said.Lt. Col. Howard O. Freedlander, the Guard spokesman, said that an evening parachute training exercise "encountered a problem. . . . All of our people are OK."The seven paratroopers jumped from a Chinook helicopter during a routine training mission, Colonel Freedlander said.

Albert Richard Baines Jr., a retired tool designer for Westinghouse Electric Corp. and World War II veteran, died Tuesday at his home in Arnold. He was 92. According to the funeral home handling his service, his death was due to "natural causes. " Born in Baltimore on Sept. 25, 1919, Mr. Baines was raised in Sparrows Point, where he graduated from Sparrows Point High School. He served in the Army as a paratrooper in the Pacific during World War II. He was in the 462nd Parachute Field Artillery, 503rd Regimental Combat Team.

World War II generals didn't believe black soldiers had the courage to parachute from the belly of a plane. Walter Morris proved them wrong before the war ended.George Bivens did the same in Korea. And when it was Robert L. Drake's turn during the Vietnam War, he too proved that a black man could have wings.They lived through different wars, served with different military units, parachuted from different planes. But these men share a history symbolized by a banner and a crest that hang on a wall in East Baltimore's Wooden Nickel bar: a winged gold parachute topped by a star and a black panther perched on a parachute canopy.

At its peak, the World War II 349th Troop Carrier Wing numbered about 1,500. Now, the number of veterans attending the annual reunion totals just five. When they gathered Saturday night for the commemorative dinner in an Inner Harbor hotel, they were almost, but not quite, outnumbered by the three guest speakers, though with the veterans' wives, children and grandchildren, the reunion total came to 38. Capt. Ernie "Stormie" Earle, 87, made it from Midlothian, Va., with the help of a cane and the memory of his own grandfather, who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Sgt. Ross Gwin, 86, flew in from St. Cloud, Fla. As he disembarked from the commercial jet, he told the pilot, "Real airplanes have propellers."

In the end, the memories proved stronger than the wind. Though a planned jump by the 1st Battalion of the 509th Infantry airborne unit was canceled at Aberdeen Proving Ground yesterday because of high winds, that didn't stop three former paratroopers from greeting the would-be jumpers after the plane landed. Nick Degaeta, 80, of Staten Island, N.Y., Leo Inglesby, 81, of Silver Spring, Md., and Marty Galuskin, 77, of New York, N.Y., had traveled to Phillips Army Airfield for what was supposed to have been a training jump by the approximately 50 current members of the airborne unit.

THE PHOTOGRAPH of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower speaking to paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division on the eve of the D-Day invasion remains one of the most compelling and classic images from World War II.Several years ago, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp of the historic moment.Eisenhower appears animated, with an intense expression on his face. His right hand is raised and slightly clenched, and he is speaking directly to a young paratrooper."It's almost the most famous picture of Ike, and everyone knows this picture," said Stephen E. Ambrose, author of "Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944-May 7, 1945," published last year.

SALERNO BASE, Afghanistan - They hung their assault rifles on nails and sang hymns in a chapel made of plywood and canvas. Outside, the assistant chaplain had stuck white and yellow plastic flowers on a waist-high wall of sandbags. This was Easter for members of the Army's 1st Battalion, 501st Airborne Infantry Regiment, engaged on the other, less-publicized war front - not in Iraq, but along Afghanistan's mountainous border with Pakistan. Salerno Base came under rocket attack Friday and again Saturday night as part of a recent surge in violence.

MOSCOW -- After days of government denials, top Russian officials admitted yesterday that 84 paratroopers died in a six-hour battle in Chechnya last week -- some of them apparently from "friendly fire" -- in the worst reported incident of Russian casualties since the war began. Russian newspapers and television reported that some of the paratroopers were killed when their commanders saw that they were hopelessly outnumbered and ordered an artillery attack on their own position. Only six Russian soldiers survived the battle with rebels in the separatist republic.

WILLOW GROVE, Pa. -- The C-141s came in from the north with the weight of history and the lightness of air.Pvt. Mike Junio of nearby Philadelphia was fifth in line, in the first plane, on the first pass over Willow Grove Naval Air Station.At that moment, 800 feet above the ground in a windowless airplane, the 20-year-old paratrooper wasn't thinking about the 50 years the Army's 82nd Airborne Division has been doing operations like this; wasn't thinking about the World War II campaigns in Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and Normandy, or the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, or Grenada, or Panama, or, most recently, the Desert Storm operation in Iraq.

They were eager and brash and willing to die for their country.Fifty years later, nothing has changed.Lee Hulett and Guy Whidden parachuted into France in 1944 as part of the huge Allied force that eventually defeated Germany in World War II.Now the two Marylanders plan on joining three dozen other aging paratroopers and re-enacting their jumps in June as part of the Allied commemoration of the 50th anniversary of D-Day.Mr. Hulett, who lives in Columbia, is 69. Mr. Whidden, of Frederick, is 70."

Alfred Joseph Moran, a retired telephone union official who was active in labor organizations for four decades and was a World War II veteran, died Aug. 28 at Stella Maris Hospice of surgical complications related to an aneurysm. The former Woodlawn resident was 86. Born in Baltimore and raised in Bolton Hill, he was a Corpus Christi Parochial School graduate. As a young man, he rode a bicycle to deliver blueprints in downtown Baltimore and sold office equipment for the Victor Adding Machine Co. In 1940, he enlisted in the 110th Field Artillery, a division of the Maryland National Guard.

It was the soldier's smile that struck mourners who viewed images of Spc. Ari D. Brown-Weeks yesterday as they filed into Mountain Christian Church in Harford County. The video montage of family photos spanned Brown-Weeks' 23 years of life, from beaming infant to proud uniformed soldier whose first name means "lion." "That smile stands out in all the pictures," said the Rev. Victor Harner, pastor of the church on Mountain Road in Joppa. "It is the key to his inner spirit. And that name is fitting for a warrior and hero."

SHAVEI ZION, ISRAEL -- My youngest son, Ari, was sworn in last week as a soldier in the Israeli paratroopers at Jerusalem's Western Wall, the holiest site of the Jewish people. For the paratroopers, the wall is their proudest symbol: They were the soldiers who liberated it from Jordanian control during the 1967 Six-Day War. The ceremony Jan. 5 was especially moving because at that moment, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon lay in critical condition in a hospital on the other side of Jerusalem.

William Robert McMahon Jr., a retired ironworker and World War II paratrooper, died of cancer Thursday at his home in Conover, N.C. He was 81 and a former resident of Anne Arundel County's Poplar Ridge neighborhood. Born and raised in South Baltimore, Mr. McMahon left school in the ninth grade to help support his family. During World War II, he enlisted in the Army and was assigned as a paratrooper to the 101st Airborne Division, known as the Screaming Eagles. On June 5, 1944, the eve of the D-Day invasion at Normandy, Mr. McMahon's 501st Parachute Infantry unit was flown to France, where it jumped and landed behind Utah Beach to prevent German reinforcements from reaching the area.

James C. Jackson Jr., a Baltimore firefighter for about 25 years and an Army paratrooper, died Wednesday of kidney failure at Union Memorial Hospital. He was 72 and lived in the Mondawmin area. Mr. Jackson was born in the Harlem Park neighborhood of Baltimore and graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in 1950. He then joined the Army, becoming a paratrooper. He served in Korea as a member of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, which began in World War II as the first all-black paratrooper unit.

THE BUCK stops here. - Quote attributed to President Harry S. Truman, expressing the notion that ultimate accountability rests with the chief executive of the United States. The buck doesn't even begin to slow down here. - Anonymous quote, but one which, if there were truth in governing, should be constantly on the lips of President Bush. Josuel Queiroz, the tour guide responsible for taking me to various parts of Salvador, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Bahia, had a question for me as we ate lunch one day last week.

Peter Cotes, a major force in serious British theater who was celebrated for staging the first theatrical production of Agatha // Christie's "Mousetrap" in 1952, died in London Tuesday. He was 86.Stephen Duggan, an attorney, the founding chairman of the National Resources Defense Council and a leader of a successful fight against development of Storm King Mountain, which was made famous by painters of the Hudson River School, died Sunday. He was 89.Suzanne Jackson, the Ladies Professional Golf Association's director of tournament operations since 1991 and one of the most respected rules officials in golf, died in Florida Wednesday of breast cancer.

FORT BRAGG, N.C. -- The death toll rose to 20 and is expected to go higher in the aftermath of a midair collision between two planes at Pope Air Force Base on Wednesday that sent a fighter jet skidding into hundreds of paratroopers preparing for a training flight.A day after the accident that left more than 90 soldiers injured -- many with critical burns over most of their bodies -- military officials had no explanation for why an F-16D fighter and a C-130 Hercules transport were apparently trying to land at the same time on the same runway.

SALERNO BASE, Afghanistan - They hung their assault rifles on nails and sang hymns in a chapel made of plywood and canvas. Outside, the assistant chaplain had stuck white and yellow plastic flowers on a waist-high wall of sandbags. This was Easter for members of the Army's 1st Battalion, 501st Airborne Infantry Regiment, engaged on the other, less-publicized war front - not in Iraq, but along Afghanistan's mountainous border with Pakistan. Salerno Base came under rocket attack Friday and again Saturday night as part of a recent surge in violence.

CHESTERTOWN -- A 19-year-old paratrooper from Kent County, eight months past his high school graduation, was killed in an accident outside Baghdad, becoming the eighth casualty from Maryland since U.S. forces invaded Iraq nearly a year ago. Pvt. Bryan Nicholas Spry, a driver with the elite 82nd Airborne, died Friday after the Humvee he was driving turned over, landing upside down and pinning the former junior varsity baseball player in a water-filled ditch,...