Breach, Bang, Clear has an interesting photo piece matching up WWII era airborne photos with that of today’s Joes. Interestingly enough, the modern ones are of the Texas Army National Guard’s 143rd Airborne Battalion of the 36th Infantry Div (ARNG).
The 143rd is not the stereotypical National Guard unit. The battalion is full of combat veterans and Rangers, including many 75th Regiment veterans.
(Watch for the money shot after about 1.58– a pretty swag night drop)
From FFL.net In early April, legionnaires from the 1st Company of the French Foreign Legion’s 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (Le 2e régiment étranger de parachutistes- 2e REP) jumped over the Salvador Pass of northern Niger, on the Niger’s border with Libya and Algeria, in the deep Sahara.
The Salvador Pass is an important crossroads for the drug and arms trafficking carried out, according to French officials, by radical islamist groups and local rebel/criminal gangs, in the land of nowhere in the heart of the Sahara, near the Niger’s border with Libya and Algeria. As stated earlier, the legionnaires from 1st Company of 2e REP have been based in Madama, a new French forward operating base located in north-eastern Niger, near the Salvador Pass, as part of Operation Berkhane. The legionnaires from 2e REP have been conducted operations there to search and eliminate the trafficking gangs. They will have spent several months there.
The French have the reputation of, since the great pull out following the end of WWII (they were perhaps the largest colonial power on the continent from 1830-1960) of being the ‘Gendarme d’Afrique,’ with over 3,000 officers and men– often of the Legion, deployed across the continent at any given time helping to keep local governments in power and chasing bandits, insurgents and terrorists.
They even proxied a war with Libya between 1978 and 1987, defeating the best that Muammar Gaddafi’s could buy in the so-called Toyota War that pitted up-armed commercial pick up trucks and Chadian forces against Libyan T-62/72s.