A PARATROOPER from Basingstoke is training alongside Italian soldiers to improve their ability to operate together in response to international crises.

Private Josh Brown, of 2nd Battalion The Parachute Regiment, is on Exercise Swift Response, the largest multinational airborne exercise in Europe since the end of the Cold War.

Led by the US Army in southern Germany, it involves around 4,800 soldiers from 11 NATO countries training alongside each other.

Pt Brown has been working with Italian paratroopers from the 183 Reggimento Paracadutisti Nembo as part of a larger force built around the US Army’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division.

The British and Italian troops parachuted in to the Hohenfels Training Area from two RAF C-130J Hercules as part of a mass drop of 1,300 paratroopers from 13 aircraft.

They captured an aircraft to carry out a non-combatant evacuation operation and then, as the security situation worsened, launched offensive operations against insurgents.

Twenty-year-old Pt Brown said: “It was a great jump, I was the first to leave my plane and the sky was already full of canopies. From there, we tabbed off the drop zone overnight before assaulting an airstrip.

“It has been a really interesting experience to work alongside so many different armies on this exercise.

“We’ve been working on the ground with the Italians, done urban training with Americans and played football with the Polish!

“We’re all paratroopers and understand each other, even if we’re speaking a different language.”

Pt Brown, a former Everest Community Academy pupil, has been in the Army for a year and previously trained in Kenya and Cyprus.

His regiment, based in Colchester, alternates with 3rd Battalion The Parachute Regiment as the lead unit in the Air Assault Task Force (AATF) which is ready to deploy anywhere in the world to conduct a full range of military operations.