97-Year-Old WWII Veteran Parachutes Over Normandy

(Stars and Stripes) JOHN LEICESTER June 5 2019 CARENTAN France Parachutists are jumping over Normandy again just as soldiers did 75 years ago for D-Day but this time without being shot at. Engines throbbing C-47 transport planes dropped group after group of parachutists a couple of hundred in all - including a 97-year-old D-Day veteran Tom Rice. It went perfect perfect jump Rice said after his jump. I feel great. Id go up and do it all again. The jumpers were honoring the airborne soldiers who descended into gunfire and death ahead of the June 6 1944 seaborne invasion . The landing zone for Wednesdays operation was fields of wildflowers outside Carentan one of the objectives of the thousands of paratroopers who entered occupied France from the sky dropped over Normandy in the D-Day prelude. Rice of San Diego jumped into roughly the same area he landed in on D-Day. He said it was dark when he touched down in 1944 and he cant be sure exactly where he was.