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I Became Injured

Heroes Remember

In ’95 the Airborne Regiment was disbanded so we ended up being back to Edmonton to form the para company and then ’96 was the year that I went and did a year with the parachute team, the SkyHawks. So I did that for the 25th Anniversary of the SkyHawks in 1996 and then found myself in ’97 down on Ranger School so I did the US Army Ranger School and came back. And at that time I’d figured I was far enough along in my career that I wanted to go into really what I wanted to do and go Search and Rescue. So I applied and did the PT testing and the physical testing and all that for Search and Rescue and had been selected to go on the course starting the next year and then that’s when I ended up getting injured. We were doing a daytime no equipment jump and then we were doing an evening night time full equipment jump. The jump went off fine, we were ready for our night jump and it was coming in for landing waiting for the landing to come in and a young guy still had a problem with his parachute and it hit mine and mine collapsed and it never reopened so I hit the ground. The doctors figure from about 75 feet, ya, in the end of November in Alberta so the ground wasn’t too soft at that time of the year. So I ended up breaking nine bones from my waist down. So my pelvis was open five centimetres, my right wing sacrum was broken, all my lower ab muscles were torn from my pelvis. My left leg was shattered and I hadn’t had a chance to remove my rifle from the jump so when I landed and I tried to roll as best I could, my rifle barrel went through my right foot so shattered my right foot into a lot of pieces and then I was conscious the whole time. It never knocked me out so I was laying there and it was at night and the doctors came and took me and put me on a stretcher and ended up taking me to the hospital. And that’s when I found out the extent because that night they just saw that my leg was broken because of the compound fracture and that’s all they thought that happened but when I started doing the X-rays and the CT scans and stuff they found out what the damage was and it was a lot more than I had thought.

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