Six months ago, Wells Jones made an introduction that changed everything.

The Round Canopy Brotherhood

The group he connected me with isn’t a skydiving club. It’s something harder to define and more important. Rangers. SEALs. Active duty and veterans. Men who’ve been in the worst places the world has to offer and came back carrying things they don’t always have words for. They jump together. They share stories. Brotherhood and altitude as a way to process what combat leaves behind. They’re part of Round Canopy Parachuting Team, and so am I.

And then I was in Normandy and I was, as best I could tell, the only civilian in the stick.

That is not a distinction I take lightly.

Six Months of Training

You don’t just show up and jump a round canopy over Normandy. The training is real — six months of it. Round canopies behave differently than modern sport parachutes. They drift. They require you to read the wind and commit. There’s no steering toggle finesse. You exit, you float, and you land where the physics takes you — with skill, ideally, but also with a degree of surrender that feels fitting given where you’re jumping.

Over the Fields

When the door opened over Normandy and I stepped out into that sky, the patchwork of Norman fields spread out below exactly as I’d imagined it — and also nothing like I’d imagined it. Green and gold squares stitched together by hedgerows, a silver thread of river, villages unchanged in their bones from 1944.

Wells landed close. I’d drifted a bit — ran a little too far on the corn — but he was right there. First stick out, first man down, and there beside me.

Above us, the C-47 continued its pass. Two canopies below it, one green, one gold, over the same ground where 13,000 men had done this in the dark on the night of June 5th, 1944.

Humbled Doesn’t Cover It

I’ve been lucky in this life. I’ve had experiences that I know are rare. But standing in that field, harness still on, surrounded by men who’ve given things I haven’t — and being welcomed among them, included in something that sacred — that is the most genuinely humbling thing I’ve ever felt.

The logistics that RCPT and the team pulled together to make this possible — the permissions, the aircraft, the coordination — represent years of relationship and mission. I was the beneficiary of all of it. The gratitude I feel for that is not something I’ll ever fully articulate.

But I’m going to keep trying.

FAQ

What is the round canopy group? A coalition of veterans — Rangers, SEALs, and others — who use commemorative jumps and shared storytelling as a way to process combat trauma and build brotherhood.

What kind of aircraft did you jump from? A vintage WWII C-47 — the same aircraft type that dropped the 82nd and 101st Airborne over Normandy on the night of June 5, 1944.

Who is Wells Jones? Co-author of Havana Famiglia and the man who made the introduction that led to this entire experience.

What is Miles to Go? Miles Spencer’s blog on entrepreneurship, adventure, history, and the moments that reframe everything.

Author Bio

Miles Spencer is an entrepreneur, author, and co-founder of Reflekta.ai — the premier platform for intergenerational learning, legacy, and storytelling. His books include A Line in the Sand and Havana Famiglia.