50 feet.

Unlike this training jump, Jean Paul typically teamed up with pararescue guys from the Air Force and had a bigger jump zone. Today, he was with just two others, using a smaller airplane. As Jean Paul got closer to the ground, he had to perform a downwind landing to avoid power lines and set his sights on some tall grass to his left.

He was moving way too fast. If he had drifted three feet to the left or three feet to the right, he would have been in a much better position. But fate stepped in that day and placed Jean Paul right in the path of an irrigation drain.

Impact.

He hit the pipes at full speed, square across the front of his body, splitting his pelvis in half. In half.

At first, the pain didn’t register and Jean Paul simply laid in the grass, waiting for the group to find him. (He had blown so far off the path, they were forced to go back up into the aircraft to spot where he had landed.) By the time the ambulance arrived, his pain had kicked in full force and Jean Paul was doing everything he could to stay calm and conscious.

“I didn’t know it until later, of course, but I lost three times my blood volume,” Jean Paul told us. “I was bleeding so much, the doctors were forced to restart my heart three times. But miraculously, I survived.”

But his survival came at a cost. In addition to his shattered pelvis, Jean Paul suffered a spinal cord injury at T10/12, a traumatic brain injury with bleeding in the parietal and occipital lobes, blindness, deafness, nerve-damaged hands, and spent nearly six months in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). He was paralyzed from the waist down.

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