Maribeth Kossman, a former first grade teacher and Navy electronics technician, was 45 when she joined the Army to jump from airplanes with the service’s Golden Knights Parachute Team.
“When I was 19 years old, when I was in the Navy, there was a group of sailors that wanted to go skydiving so I went with them. I did one skydive and I thought that was going to be the last time I jumped out of a plane,” Kossman said.
A Navy enlistment and a teaching career later, Kossman, now 46 and an Army specialist, tried out for the Golden Knight’s 2024 selection this year, and made it about halfway through the roughly two-month process. She’s aiming again for the September 2025 selection. For now, she is assigned to the Golden Knights for ground operations and media relations.
The Golden Knights are the Army’s precision skydiving team, performing intricate aerobatics during freefall and pinpoint landings in front of hundreds of crowds every year. The roots of the Golden Knights trace to 1959 when a small Army team competed against former skydivers from the Soviet Union. Now a team of just under 100 active-duty soldiers and Army civilians travel to perform shows across the country and internationally. The Golden Knights fall under the Army’s Recruiting Command and act as ambassadors for the service, showcasing the sport of skydiving while paying homage to the Army’s airborne community.
To become a Golden Knight, soldiers have to be airborne qualified or willing to go to Army Airborne School. They also have to perform at least 100 military or civilian free-fall jumps before they submit an application. Kossman already has 1,280 parachute jumps under her belt.
When Kossman started thinking about the Golden Knights, she faced an additional requirement: join the Army.
Originally from San Diego, California, Kossman began her military career in 1998 when she joined the Navy. She served aboard the USNS Rappahannock, an oiler deployed to Japan that replenished ships with the USS Kitty Hawk’s battle group. She also spent time in an equipment pool based in Sicily, Italy, deployed to the Middle East during the war in Iraq and was assigned to an operation in which she served on both American and Israeli ships to provide missile defense. She left the Navy in 2004 after a final assignment with the Theater Undersea Surveillance Command “in support of monitoring our Eastern coast for bad guys,” she said. She left as an electronics technician petty officer second class, surface warfare qualified.
Once out, Kossman used her GI Bill to go to the University of California, Santa Barbara for an undergraduate degree in literature and then taught computer science at an elementary school. She found she loved teaching and went on to get her master’s degree and teaching credentials to work at schools in Los Angeles and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
While working as a teacher she took up skydiving as a way to relieve stress and for the “camaraderie between skydivers” that reminded her of being in the military.
“I’ve had people ask me ‘what’s harder: skydiving or teaching first graders?’ and I’m always like first graders,” she said. “Skydiving is the easy thing. It’s like the release valve and it lets all the stress out from either a week of teaching or a year of teaching.”
Kossman jumped hundreds of times, got advanced licenses and certifications, became a skydiving coach, taught students first-time jumpers, and even became a tandem instructor — the difficult job of carrying a passenger strapped to their body during a freefall jump.
During her summers off of school and in the air, Kossman became friends with Hanna Jean Albrecht, a national skydiving champion with the all-female Misty Blues Skydiving Team. Kossman said Albrecht noticed her passion and improvement in the sport and invited her to join the team.
While jumping with the Blues, she ran into the Army’s Golden Knights team. She talked to team members about becoming a knight even though she had assumed she was already too old to join.
“I just figured once I turned 36, that was the cut-off age,” she said. “At the time that I met the Golden Knights, I was 45.”
But one of the Knights who had previously been a recruiter corrected her. She needed to first subtract her active service years in the Navy from her current age. “In the eyes of the Army,” she said, she was 39.
“That was all I needed. I was like: sign me up now,” Kossman said. “A lot of people aren’t aware of that calculation and like me, the possibility of reenlisting and coming back into the service, it just feels like it’s over with.”
Kossman entered the Army through the Golden Knight’s “Street to Seat” program where they take civilian skydivers who have the necessary qualifications and enlist them in the Army for a chance to go through the Golden Knight assessment selection process. Kossman went through basic training and chose the shortest military occupational specialty, MOS, schooling: a motor vehicle operator.
At 45, Kossman went through basic training and said she did better than she expected.
“Doing basic training the second time around, obviously there’s the age difference,” she said. “I really kind of learned so much about myself and I honestly impressed myself by how much I was able to do compared to those who were younger than me.”
While it may have been unusual in previous years, Kossman is part of a newer trend of older recruits who are joining the service later in life. In September, Army officials said the average age of recruits is now 22 years, 4 months and still increasing. Kossman said the bulk of her recruit class was between 18 and 25 years old but there were also a few recruits over 30 and four others who were also in their 40s.
“I think it’s fantastic because we have this life experience and this – not a deeper appreciation by any means – but just a different kind of appreciation to serve,” she said.
Kossman also found herself mentoring some of the younger recruits and became a platoon guide. “I went right into teacher mode,” she laughed.
On Saturday, the Golden Knights will perform at the Army-Navy Game at Northwest Stadium in Landover, Maryland – just outside of Washington D.C. Seven jumpers from their Gold Team will descend from a C-147A DCH-8, nicknamed “Dash 8,” at 5,000 feet (weather dependent) in a “stack out” maneuver where jumpers will exit one after another and deploy their parachutes. Once their canopies safely deploy, the jumpers will pop smoke strapped to their boots and deploy a series of flags before touching down mid-stadium before the game begins.
For Kossman, the match pits the two services she credits with her past, present and future, against each other. But she’s still taking a side.
“I will always love the Navy because the Navy got me to where I am in life. I don’t know how to say this without it coming across as cliche, but the Army is giving me a whole new life and a whole new adventure. I dreamed of coming back into the military and then this opportunity came up and it was because of the Army parachute team,” Kossman said. “So of course I’m going to say, go Army! Beat Navy!”
The latest on Task & Purpose
- A push to cut veterans disability benefits is gaining traction, experts warn
- A judge ordered the VA to build thousands of new veterans housing units in Los Angeles. An appeals court halted it
- Sailors on USS Carney recall tense night of combat in fierce Red Sea fight
- To build a runway for the new stealth bomber, the Air Force is moving 17 B-1s to a new base
- VFW bashes The Economist for taking ‘turkey-sized dump’ on disabled vets