You're listening to software, radio, special operations, military meals, and straight talk with the guys in the community.

Hey, what's going on? This is Rad with another episode of Soft Rep Radio, and today, my special talented guest is Mike LeMonica.

Chief Master Sergeant retired United States Air Force, combat controller, halo, scuba, not just scuba, combat divers certified.

I think, I saw that, I think, and you could correct him if I'm wrong, and of course Airborne goes along with all those other things. So, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks Rad, appreciate you having me on the show.

Very much. Now, I like to ask this of a lot of my Airborne questions here is, did you ever have anything happen to you while you're jumping out of an airplane, like anything scary, where you're like, why did I do this today?

Well, yeah, I have. You know, jumping out of an airplane is an unnatural thing to do. I've unfortunately flown into fences at high rate speed, which was never fun.

I spent a couple days in hospital after that. One of my jumps in combat, when I left the aircraft, I had a piece of your shit glue, so it put me in a spin.

So I had to counter my spin while I was in freefall, which was not fun. And it was, we had almost zero elimination at night.

Make a choice, form a flat stable, countering my spin, and keeping my eye on my team, because, you know, we all had to counter body.

And that was a bit of a sporty event in and of itself.

So you hit the ground, and then your thoughts are what?

Well, I mean, it's, you know, when you're in freefall, you're moving 120 miles an hour with gear, like you get O2 masks on, you got weapons, you got all your equipment hanging between your legs.

So really, you're just trying to make sure you're flat and stable, and in a good position with your team, so that when you open your parachute, nobody's above you, and you're not backsliding away from your team, things like that.

Once you get under parachute, everything gets a lot better, right? Things slow down, you're able to control things a little better, assuming your parachute opens the way it's supposed to.

After that, it's just looking at your team, getting behind somebody, you get to a stack, and you all kind of make your way to do ground together.

So then you get on the ground, you go, okay, I'm here, now the job starts right now.

I've got to pack up all my stuff and hide it because you can't just leave stuff laying out in the open, you're not supposed to be there.

You get the team together and you go and move out to do your mission.

And, you know, when you get on the ground, different groups of people have different missions, right?

So on that particular mission, I was just some rangers, and their job was to pull security for what we were doing.

And then we had eight combat controllers and a pair of us coming in with myself.

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