Skydive City<\/a> as he prepared for a jump.<\/p>\nWell before he even got to the point of skydiving, his story already inspired.<\/p>\n
“No matter the operation or a mission, there’s always a process where you check your gear, right,” he said as he fastened his leg brace used for skydiving.<\/p>\n
No amount of preparation could prepare him for what happened 15 years ago.<\/p>\n
Dillman was on his second deployment to Afghanistan when the lead armored vehicle he and four other soldiers were in ran over an IED while conducting a night patrol, killing Gould and severely wounding three others, including\u00a0Dillman.<\/p>\n
The most devastating of the injuries were the burst fractures to his spine, resulting in paralysis from the mid-chest down.<\/p>\n
But, the life-changing event 15 years ago also motivated him.<\/p>\n
“It really helped me not take life for granted and to soak up every bit I can,” he said. “I still had the thirst for life; I just hadn’t found that one activity that scratched that itch. So, in 2015, the bug kind of hit my ear. There’s a place in Zephyrhills; Skydive City let\u2019s check it out.”<\/p>\n
He jumped at the opportunity.<\/p>\n
Attached to someone at first.<\/p>\n
“At first I was a little apprehensive obviously because I didn’t jump out of planes when I was in the military,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, this was my first time jumping out of a plane. Once I got out here and saw the plane, I saw the people parashooting down from the sky down to the earth right in front of my face, you know what\u2026this is a thing.”<\/p>\n
He jumped again.<\/p>\n
And again.<\/p>\n
And soon after came another idea.<\/p>\n
“One of the cameramen slash instructors…said Hey I think you can do this on your own,” said Dillman.<\/p>\n
The videographer and safety advisor at Skydive City who suggested Dillman take another leap in his skydiving journey is Chris Stubbs.<\/p>\n
“I think he was ready for it,\u201d Stubbs said. \u201cHe jumped right into it.”<\/p>\n
He said the teamwork he experienced with his skydiving trainers, instructors and teammates was remarkably familiar.<\/p>\n
“There’s not a lot of things in life that can kind of create that,” he said.<\/p>\n
The Purple Heart Veteran, however, needed the right gear because Dillman said he cannot do it physically without adaptive equipment.<\/p>\n
So, he created a leg brace for himself that would allow him to skydive on his own.<\/p>\n
And he learned at an incredible pace.<\/p>\n
“I took eight years to get the license he got in a year,” said Stubbs about Dillman.<\/p>\n
In 2015, he obtained his A license and completed jumps without the use of his legs.<\/p>\n
“And once I graduated, I fell in with the community and I hate to say the sky\u2019s the limit but there’s plenty of people to bring you in to do jumps and now you’re in a big party,” Alex said.<\/p>\n
Dillman has celebrated more than 270 jumps by now with his new community embracing him.<\/p>\n
“You know I hear a lot from people\u2026how great it is that I helped do this for him, and it’s the exact opposite,” Stubbs said.<\/p>\n
The skydiving community is already small.<\/p>\n
Not many people in the world can do it.<\/p>\n
Dillman skydives as a paraplegic, which puts him in an even smaller group of pros.<\/p>\n
He has had wonderful opportunities since becoming a professional skydiver.<\/p>\n
Last summer, he was part of a group that landed on Omaha Beach to commemorate the 81st Anniversary of the D-day invasion landings.<\/p>\n
Other opportunities include jumping with the Golden Knights which is the United States Army\u2019s premier skydiving team.<\/p>\n
Dillman still looks back at what happened 15 years ago on February 27.<\/p>\n
“Especially on the anniversary, naturally I think more about the events of the night that I was injured,\u201d he said. \u201cBut a lot’s happened since then.”<\/p>\n
His wife Holly joined him in jumps.<\/p>\n
He has a son now and wants him to go skydiving one day too.<\/p>\n
Dillman said he found healing.<\/p>\n
“And that helps me out because now I’m part of a team and now I’m back in that team mentality, just like I was in the military,\u201d he said. \u201cYou have a thing you\u2019re supposed to do, and other people are depending on that. And to have that feeling again, I can’t describe it…to be able to be depended on in such a way.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ZEPHYRHILLS, Fla. \u2014 Retired Army veteran Alex Dillmann, a Tampa-born native, is commemorating his 15th Alive Day on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171375,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[3076,274,28,1548,115,139,1338,25744,135,137,136,278,835],"class_list":{"0":"post-172251","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tampa","8":"tag-app-good-news","9":"tag-app-top-stories","10":"tag-florida","11":"tag-good-news","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-orlando","14":"tag-pasco-county","15":"tag-roy-de-jesus","16":"tag-tampa","17":"tag-tampa-headlines","18":"tag-tampa-news","19":"tag-top-stories","20":"tag-vod"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}