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Earlier in June, Skydive Suffolk continued its support of those who serve by giving combat-wounded veterans an opportunity to skydive.

Working with both the United Service Organization (USO) and Veteran Athletes United (VAU), SS worked to take 33 veterans and Gold Star family members out to skydive the vast blue skies on Saturday, June 1. Skydive Suffolk General Manager Mike Manthey says that they work with USO and Virginia Beach every year to give 30 to 60 U.S. and foreign military veterans skydive opportunities on the beach. Manthey reflected on a wheelchair-based veteran who skydived that day.

“We’ve jumped with him in the past few years too … but he’s a marine triple amputee and stepped on an IED while in Afghanistan and just came back and thought his life was over. Once he came out and we fitted him with a special harness, he was able to really feel alive again,” Manthey said. “…It’s such a neat thing to see their reaction to the skydive. You know, jumping out of an airplane, you’re over the ocean and you’re coming in to land on the strip of beach and you see the whole city, the whole coastal area of Virginia Beach and for those guys, it’s just a really cool wake up call to see them land and just be like ‘Wow! I just jumped out of a plane.’”

On giving these experiences to veterans, Manthey says that Skydive Suffolk has 12 years of work with USO with their own program, Jump for a Purpose.

“We were doing it here in Suffolk for most of that time, and then we had an opportunity with the Patriotic Festival and the USO to incorporate it into their program, and they were able to bring in other wounded warriors and veterans that we just didn’t have access to,” he said. “So it’s been quite a while! 12 years since we’ve been doing this and we’ve taken well over a thousand veterans skydiving doing this.”

Calling skydiving “something new” for him and wanting to give it a try, Retired Navy Lt. Robert Byrd, who served on the USS Midway during the Vietnam War and is also blind, talked about his experience.

“They talked with me and I felt real at ease and I was really charged up to do it,” Byrd said. “And once I got hooked up with the parachute and I got hooked up to the guy that was going to be my [jumping] buddy, which was by the way, a Navy SEAL. So me being Navy and him being Navy, we got along real well.”

The 79-year-old veteran says that while he was “apprehensive” at first, once he got in the plane, it was “… too late now. Let’s go!” 

“At that point, I’m thinking, ‘Okay, I’m in it now, I can’t get out of it. I am going to either live or I am going to die. So whichever way comes, I am okay. And when that parachute opened, then, of course, you know you’re going to make it okay, and that’s when it really got to be a lot of fun.”

Byrd says that his skydiving partner described the sky view while also letting Byrd help guide the parachute, which let them land safely on the beach. Byrd says another jump would not be out of the question for him.

“For those that have never done it and want to give it a try, the people that I skydived with, they are very professional. They know what they’re doing. They should not have anything to be afraid of,” he said.

Likewise, Retired Air Force TSgt. Eric Heideman also talked about his experience skydiving, which he called “amazing.”

“It was my first time ever doing it, and I never thought it would be so … calming,” Heideman said. “I always thought jumping out of the plane, you’d be like ‘Oh my gosh!’ But, it was exciting. You got to freefall and then when the shoot went open, it was like, there was nothing. It was silent and all you saw was what was below you and stuff like that.

Heideman, who deals with a traumatic brain injury from his time in Afghanistan, says that skydiving is “not as scary” as one might think.

“It’s a confidence thing where you feel like ‘Hey, I jumped out of an airplane, and now my confidence is so much higher. I mean…if I can do that, I can do other things that I might have thought was difficult.’ Like, climbing a mountain or something along that line,” he said. “Just being able to take it to that level was confidence.” 

On providing these opportunities for veterans as General Manager of Skydive Suffolk, Manthey reflected on his own service as a Retired Navy veteran.

“Being able to serve in the Navy and to come out of it with all my fingers and toes, I feel very lucky and I know what it’s like. The sacrifice these guys make to just be in the military, the deployments and the time away from family and friends. That’s the least we can do,” he said. “This is what we do for a living. We love sharing a piece of that with them and providing them with something that is a huge impact in their life and it’s a positive impact and gives them a sense of being again [as] part of team, part of a group. Doing something to get that adrenaline going again I guess.”

For more information, go to skydivesuffolk.com or call 757-539-3531.