JROTC commander rides the silk again

On Tuesday, Col. Cory Williams was a down-to-earth guy – after a 12,000-foot drop.

Williams, the retired Army paratrooper who leads Morgan City High’s Junior ROTC program, accepted an invitation to ride the silk again. He jumped with the Golden Knights, the Army parachuting demonstration and competition team, at Louisiana Regional Airport near Gonzalez.

“It was something for me that was nostalgic and relaxing, just being around soldiers,” Williams said.

As a soldier, Williams served as a parachute commander and trauma surgery medic for 20 years. He underwent the Army’s three-week parachuting course at Fort Moore in Georgia, formerly Fort Benning before it was renamed to honor Col. Hal Moore, the hero of the Battle of Ia Drang during the Vietnam War.

The first week of training was devoted to landing safely, which can be tricky because of crosswinds and other factors.

“Sometimes you land softly as a feather,” Williams said. “Sometimes it’s like you jumped off a two-story building.”

Those were static-line jumps, the sort of jumps you’ve seen in videos from D-Day and other paratrooper operations. Each paratrooper’s chute is attached to a line. As the trooper jumps from the plane, the chute is deployed automatically.

But on Tuesday, Williams was skydiving.

“It’s fundamentally the same,” he said, “although skydiving at 12,000 feet is different from a standard jump.”

The altitude for skydiving is much higher than the typical paratrooper jump of 900 feet. The parachute itself allows for more maneuverability. Williams jumped in a tandem with a member of the Golden Knights

And the parachutist drops in free fall for a significant distance before deploying the chute.

Williams and his jump partner were in free-fall for about a minute, followed by a five-minute descent under the parachute.

Together, the two jumpers, weighing at least 380 pounds, probably reached a free-fall speed of 160 mph.

That’s fast, but “you’re taking in the Mississippi River and the countryside,” Williams said.

The Golden Knights Performance-Competition Parachute Team is made up of 90 men and women stationed at Fort Liberty, North Carolina. The Golden Knights website says the team has won more than 3,800 medals in competitions since it was founded to compete against the Soviets in 1959.

The team wanted to show appreciation to Williams, other educators and first responders for helping high school students with future jobs, careers, college and military service.

Williams has been the leader of the Morgan City High JROTC for 10 years. The program also accepts students from Berwick and Patterson High Schools.