He qualified as an intelligence officer, and got orders to join the 82nd Airborne Division, a paratrooper unit in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Military planners speculated about a possibility that South Vietnam might drop a division of paratroopers into Pnompenh to secure the city, if it ap peared that Communist forces were about to capture it, and if the current Government in vited Saigon to do so.
In all, 3,600 of the division's paratroopers were deployed to New Orleans to participate in Task Force All-American.
Four years later, Mr. Hernandez, 25, is Specialist Hernandez, a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan.
"Our active military force today is remarkable; never has a force been so continuously involved for so long in combat," says Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a Democrat who served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division and is an influential voice on military matters.
My own desire to see justice brought to Osama bin Laden was one of the reasons I spent 10 years in the Army, including much of 2005 and 2006 with the 82nd Airborne Division as a Paratrooper in Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan.
He and a group of paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division had arrested Sheik Jassim al-Saadi, a young Islamic cleric who, intelligence sources said, was a threat.
Late one night in September 2000, 45 paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division dropped from the dark skies over Fort Polk, La., for a mock combat drill against other Army troops.
