Gender: Rising while falling
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.