My family was under the impression that I was going on some kind of an adventure where I would also get to learn paragliding,” says Major Fozia Perveen of the Pakistan Army, who earned her parachuting ‘para-wing’ in 2013.

Women in the armed forces of Pakistan are up for all kinds of challenges and they don’t want to be let off easy just because they happen to be female, thank you very much! The ranks of paratroopers are swelling in the armed forces as more and more women officers are taking the plunge.

“I like difficult and challenging tasks. That was also why I volunteered to take the paratrooper course in the first place,” says the Major. “I also wanted that airborne insignia on my uniform. People see that on your uniform and know that you are different,” she adds.

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, Eos profiles some of the new breed of daring young women paratroopers of the Pakistan armed forces

“Then came the hard part — training,” she smiles.

“You get to find out so many things you didn’t know about yourself during training. For instance, that you are afraid of heights,” she laughs.

“However, the training is important. Being well-prepared gives you confidence. You also bond with your coursemates because all of you went through similar hardships while learning. It cannot be matched with anything else. Besides being memorable, it brings you close,” the paratrooper points out. “There were 24 women in our batch.”

“The jump itself was not so tough but the training was,” she remembers, adding that they received their paratrooper’s training from an SSG commandos group, who turned out to be “highly professional and very motivating.”

The first test was to check if one even possessed the physical fitness and endurance required for the challenges ahead. “The physical efficiency test, or PET as they call it, included endless push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, squat thrusts and distance running. We would be hanging from bars forever, with dummy ’chutes, which are even heavier than yourself,” she says.

“Yes, it was difficult but nothing is impossible if you are really determined.”

A month or so of this at the Parachute Training School in Peshawar paved the way for the jumps. That was also when Major Fozia needed her parents’ prayers. “That’s when I told them what I had really been up to. Although they were surprised I had volunteered to do such a thing, they were also very supportive, and encouraging,” she says.

Finally, the batch of well-trained young paratroopers jumped from a C-130 plane over Tarbela. The women had to complete three jumps while the men five. And that’s how Major Fozia gets to wear that single-wing insignia on her army uniform today. “It’s an honour and something to be very proud about,” she smiles.

Moment of truth

Lieutenant Hina Mujeeb Alam of the Pakistan Navy is also not afraid to jump out of an airplane — with her parachute, of course.

“We jumped from a Fokker aircraft at 1,200 feet over Ormara,” she says, explaning that paratrooping is different from skydiving. In the latter one has the luxury of jumping from 10,000 to 15,000 feet.

“There you have the time to fix issues such as checking your canopy or looking to see if another jumper is crashing into you. You also have time to open your parachute. But at 1,200 feet you better take care of all that quickly,” she says.

Paratrooping and training to jump from a shorter height is essential as many times there isn’t a choice to fly any higher in enemy territory or glide around in the air for long. It has to be a quick and precise set of actions which have to be completed in three seconds.

Lt Hina wanted to be a paratrooper from the time she heard about the course in 2012. “Back then it was not open for lady officers,” she says. But she got her chance in 2014 when she learnt that even females in the Pakistan Navy could opt for it. She received her training from the Navy Special Operations Training Centre.

About the training itself, she says it was a testing time, comprising two weeks of intense ground training from 6am to 6pm where they were constantly made to push beyond their limits. They had heavy old parachute harnesses and reserve parachutes tied to them. “The reserve parachute tied to our tummies weighs some three kilogrammes and the real one is around 11 kilogrammes,” she explains.

“I have to admit that even though I had volunteered for it, there were times during that training when I would wonder why I had wanted to do this in the first place,” she says.

“But I will always remember what one of our instructors, Commander Kashif, an SSG commando, said to us girls one day. He said that the parachute, the wind and the ground you may crash on, does not know how to differentiate between male or female paratroopers. Neither would he be giving us less work, because if we make an error we may die just like a male paratrooper.

“He was so right,” she says. Thus, they trained just as hard as the men and got blisters on their hands and bruises all over their bodies just like their fellow male trainees did.

It wasn’t all physical training. They were also trained through audiovisual aids. “We were shown a number of videos about paratrooping and how it is done in various countries. We were also shown videos about blunders made by some paratroopers with drastic consequences,” she shares.

“Still,” Lt Hina says, “whether it is your first jump or your hundredth, it is the moment of truth for all. You feel the same when the wind hits you. And everyone is afraid when the plane door is opened,” she says. “But it is a totally different feeling after you jump and have opened your parachute. Then feeling in sync with nature you can only praise the almighty as a feeling of peace overcomes you,”

“Ormara, from where we jumped off looks like a hammerhead from above. There is this patch of land and sea all around. In case you don’t land on the ground but into the water, you have to detach yourself from your parachute immediately or else it will take you down with it,” she says.

“You need a minimum of three jumps to qualify, and you are decorated with the airborne insignia or para-wing up in the air right before you are going out for your third jump. Our instructors joked that we should at least have it on even if we crash on the ground to our deaths as we have already made it through two jumps,” Hina laughs.

Brave hearts

Flight Lieutenant Bisma Shahid Khan is an engineering officer serving at the Pakistan Air Force base in Peshawar but she says that she is a soldier basically. “A soldier’s family have big brave hearts and they always remain very supportive during our challenging tasks,” she says, adding that she had informed her family about her paratrooping and the risky jumps it involved from the very beginning. “They encouraged me and prayed for my success,” adds Flt Lt Bisma.

Bisma says that she received tough training for the daring act “but, it is natural to hesitate while stepping out of the aircraft. Still, our instructors trained us in such a manner that it was not so difficult,” she says.

“All the jumpers were very motivated and we were chanting inspiring slogans before our jumps, and even while entering the aircraft and jumping out from it,” she says. She also adds that the instructors supplied a lot of guidelines about their safety “so much so that the safe practices become second nature for us,” she concludes while showing off her para-wing, which she earned only this year.

The writer is a member of staff She tweets @HasanShazia

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 5th, 2017