Obama Visits Fort Campbell

In his first Presidential visit to Kentucky, President Obama addressed a cheering crowd at Ft. Campbell today for a short (16 minutes) but rousing speech. Acknowledging that more soldiers have been deployed - and killed - from Ft. Campbell than anyplace else in America in the war in Afghanistan, he praised Kentucky's Special Operations forces who were part on last Sunday's raid in Pakistan. He also awarded the commando units the "Presidential Unit Citation", the highest honor a President can give to a military unit.

The identities of those Ft. Campbell soldiers specifically involved are being kept secret to protect from potential terrorist reprisals, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.


Not everyone is so enthralled with Obama's handling of the situation. Discrepancies abound in the many conflictions versions being told by officials regarding the circumstances of Bin Laden's death. Some are feeling deja vu of Bush's claim that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" that turned out not to be true, as it sinks in now that Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan because that's where Bin Laden supposedly was - and now we're being told "oops, he was in Pakistan all along, sorry." And adminstration officials have stated that Bin Laden's death will have no impact whatsoever on the timetable for withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan.

The President also made no mention of the top-secret experimental stealth super-copter that crashed during the raid. The official explanation being given is that it got "caught in an air vortex" due to temperatures higher than expected. That doesn't exactly sound like much of a super-copter, if you ask me; but they didn't ask me.


Then too, there's the whole can of worms about all the reports that Osama Bin Laden has actually already been dead for years now. FOX News and the Pakistan Observer reported in 2001 that Bin Laden died from a lung complication. There was even an article about Bin Laden's 2001 funeral in an Egyptian newspaper. And in 2002, the FBI's counter-terrorism chief Dale Watson said he believed Bin Laden was probably dead.

Whatever the real truths are behind world events that have caused President Obama's hair to start greying prematurely, I just hope and pray he knows what he's doing. Even though he's keeping the identities of the soldiers a secret, I'm not sure even admitting that Kentucky was involved in the Bin Laden raid is a good idea. Feel me?

Blue Moon of Kentucky

Last night was said to be, according to those who say such things, a "blue moon". Whatever that means. There are at least four different competing memes for just what constitutes this "blue moon" they speak of, and none of them are particularly satisfying to me. Apparently much of the misconceptions about it go back to a 1946 article in Sky & Telescope that was utterly, completely wrong - which just goes to show you can't always trust the "experts".


I've already mused on this blog about the various weirdnesses involving blue moons, blue people, aliens, and Elvis, but this latest spate of media attention to the "blue moon" concept has my coffee-oiled gears turning again regarding Kentucky's peculiar obsession with blueness. Of course, what comes to mind first are those ubiquitous Kentucky Wildcats of the University of Kentucky, with their slogans like "Go Big Blue!" and "I Bleed Blue". And much of our state's blue fetish is actually about misplaced blueness - blue moons aren't really blue, and neither is bluegrass.

Blue people seem to be on the rise, culturally, what with Blue Man Group and Avatar. But for over a billion people on Earth, it's nothing new: Krishna has been predominantly portrayed as blue-skinned in the Hindu religion.


But it's the idea of blue light that interests me most, as far as our discussions about Kentucky go. Reported nocturnal sightings of eerie blue lights - sometimes called "ghost lights" - in the Kentucky mountains have been shrugged off mostly as "swamp gas" (what would skeptics do without this crutch?) but on the other hand, it is possible that in earlier times, the many burning springs and natural gas vents dotting our state's landscape burned with a blue flame.

Kentucky's curiously-named "Moonshine" also burns with a blue flame.

Many of the UFOs seen around here are blue in color, such as in this report of blue lights in the sky above Fort Campbell (although the testimony doesn't make a whole lot of sense). Coincidentally, Fort Campbell was once home to an elite corps of secret Special Forces known as Blue Light.

Then there's two different "Lady in Blue" haunting legends - one is said to haunt the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville, and a similar one dwells in the Keen Johnson Ballroom at Eastern Kentucky University (Consult your copy of Weird Kentucky for more info on both). And maybe the "Gray Lady" of Liberty Hall is actually a very pale blue. Perhaps blue just happens to be the basic color of mystical energy, or "life force", or whatever you want to call it if you believe in that sort of thing.


Interestingly, although blue has an extremely short wavelength, the receptors in the human eye are specially geared to detect blue to a greater degree.

Wave of Military Murder

The national newsmedia has been abuzz about the bizarre incident at Fort Hood, Texas, in which a Muslim psychiatrist went on a shooting spree. Although early reports stated that there were definitely two shooters - possibly three - that datum seems to have vanished and they've now changed their story and are insisting that Nidal Malik Hasan was a lone gunman.

Then, in Oak Grove, KY, a Fort Campbell military husband and wife were found dead in a murder-suicide. Police said the man had apparently shot his wife, then shot himself with a handgun.

The Oak Grove incident isn't an isolated one. We've reported here previously about the ongoing wave of suicide at Fort Campbell, of which this tragedy is just a part. According to news sources, Fort Campbell averaged one confirmed suicide per week last winter. Maybe even more deaths are actually unconfirmed suicides, because there are a considerable number of deaths that are now being reinvestigated.


Earlier this year, Fort Campbell soldier Steven Green was sentenced to serve five consecutive life sentences. Green raped a 14-year-old girl, then killed her and her entire family, then set fire to their house, then tried to blame it on Sunni Islam terrorists. Fortunately, he was far too stupid to be able to properly keep his story straight.

And then there's Billi Jo Smallwood, who has been charged with setting fire to her home on the Fort Campbell post in hopes of killing her husband and making it look like an accident. He survived, but two of their children died in the fire.

And how about Pvt. Nicholas Mikel who opened fire on a group of his fellow soldiers training at Fort Campbell? In April 2006 he was convicted of attempted premeditated murder and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment.


Or Hasan Akbar (given name Mark Kools), a 32-year-old Muslim soldier who was stationed at Fort Campbell and was made miserable by a nonstop barrage of anti-Muslim sentiment around the base. By the time he shipped out to Iraq, he had become driven so insane by the verbal abuse that he finally snapped one night while entrusted to guard a Humvee filled with ammo. He stole a carton of hand grenades, activated each of them and lobbed them into the tents where his officers were sleeping. Some who escaped the blasts were fired upon by Akbar with his standard issue AK-47.

Akbar was sent back to Kentucky to be court-martialed, and imprisoned in the brig at Fort Knox. He was subsequently sentenced to death by lethal injection.



And don't forget Fort Campbell's 21-year-old PFC Barry Winchell, who was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat because he admitted to being gay. Pvt. Calvin Glover was convicted by a military court and sentenced to life in prison for beating Winchell to death with a baseball bat last year. Winchell’s roommate, Spc. Justin R. Fisher, was sentenced to 12½ years in prison for his role in the killing.

Michelle Benecke, the co-director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, said that Fort Campbell soldiers she spoke to all admitted that "anti-gay harassment and threats are as common as the uniform", but anyone who complains then becomes harassed themselves. Some have hinted that there have been other murders like Winchell's, but that they've been swept under the rug, covered up and made to look like accidents or "friendly fire".


Fort Campbell, home to the Black Helicopters of the 160th Spec-Ops "Night Stalkers", clearly seems to be stressing its inhabitants to the snapping point. But the Fort Hood incident shows that the problem is nationwide. In Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, the whole first third of the film is devoted to how the psychological cruelty and abuse of the drill instructor (R. Lee Ermey) in basic training leads to one of his soldiers finally going berserk and shooting him, then taking his own life. Life imitates art?


Meanwhile, court testimony was recently given regarding an earlier shooting in North Carolina wherein a soldier opened fire on two Special Forces commandos. His defense was that he thought they were "roleplaying".

Life without Parole for Mahmudiyah Killer

Louisvillian Steven Green, ringleader of the infamous Mahmudiyah killings, has been sentenced by a Louisville jury to serve five consecutive life sentences for the atrocities committed while stationed in Iraq in 2006.

Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi (عبير قاسم حمزه الجنابي) was an Iraqi girl who, at the age of 14, was gang-raped and murdered together with her 6-year-old sister, mother and father, in their home, by U.S. soldiers. The soldiers then set fire to the girl's corpse and fled. When initially questioned about the incident, Green attempted to blame it on Sunni insurgents.



Judge Thomas Russell confirmed that Steven Green, who was discharged from the 101st Airborne Division (headquartered at Fort Campbell, KY), would serve five consecutive life sentences with zero chance of parole.

The damage done by Green's acts goes even further, thanks to retaliatory acts of terrorism committed in the ensuing outrage.

Jimi Hendrix and Fort Campbell

There's a conspiracy-oriented book in progress by Dave McGowan that can be read online, called Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation. According to McGowan's worldview, some sort of ill-defined CIA/Pentagon/mob conspiracy is behind the scenes of the careers of Laurel Canyon-based musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Canned Heat, Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention, Mamas & The Papas, The Turtles, Jan & Dean, The Byrds, Janis Joplin, and even The Monkees. It sounds ludicrous on the face of it, but it's actually fairly gripping reading. There's a lot of smoke there, but there's some fire.

In particular, I was stunned to learn that Jimi Hendrix served in the military and was stationed in Kentucky's super-spooky Fort Campbell. From McGowan's book:

Though he rarely spoke of it, Jimi had served a stint in the U.S. Army with the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell. His official records indicate that he was forced into the service by the courts and then released after just one year when he purportedly proved to be a poor soldier. One wonders, though, why he was assigned to such an elite division if he was indeed such a failure. One also wonders why he wasn’t subjected to disciplinary measures rather than being handed a free pass out of his ostensibly court-ordered service. In any event, Jimi himself once told reporters that he was given a medical discharge after breaking an ankle during a parachute jump.

These are indeed interesting questions, and it's also interesting to note, in this vaguely ominous context of nebulous conspiracy theory, that Fort Campbell is also home to the Black Helicopters of the 160th Spec-Ops "Night Stalkers".


I had never heard anything about Hendrix having been in the military, let alone in Kentucky of all places, but sure enough, the story checks out. Hendrix was arrested on stolen-car charges, and was indeed given the choice between prison and the Army by a judge. During his 13 months at Fort Campbell, he met bass player Billy Cox, and together they formed a band called The King Kasuals. They played mostly roadhouse saloons along the Kentucky-Tennessee border during this time, then became the backup band for an R&B singer named Johnny Jones. With Jones, they played prestigious gigs in Nashville, including appearances with Little Richard on the Night Train TV show. Surviving 1965 Night Train footage is currently the oldest video known of Hendrix performing, backing a R&B duo called Buddy & Stacey.


The Smoking Gun website has copies of documents pertaining to Jimi Hendrix's military period, which you can view here.

The borderline-kooky idea that Hendrix was murdered by the CIA has been floating around for years now - supposedly the high concept is that U.S. Government secret agents were fighting a "covert war against rock", trying to get rid of the counter-culture's heroes and destabilize the hippie movement. While I find that idea to be pure baloney (the hippie movement was already pretty much deflated by the time Jimi died in September 1970), I find it slightly less baloney-istic to consider the remote possibility that there's some sort of connection between MK-ULTRA, Hendrix's time spent at Fort Campbell, and Hendrix's death.


And that's where Hendrix's manager, one Michael Jeffery, comes in. Jeffery, believed to have been connected to both the British and the U.S. intelligence communities, has long been a source of suspicion and speculation. Just three weeks ago, the London Telegraph reported that Hendrix's ER doctor believes it is plausible that foul play may have been involved. And Tappy Wright, in his new book Rock Roadie, states that Michael Jeffery drunkenly confessed to killing Jimi Hendrix by force-feeding him pills and wine. Jeffery stood to collect millions of dollars on the star's life insurance policy, says Wright.

Dave McGowan again:

On March 5, 1973, a shadowy character named Michael Jeffery, who had managed both Hendrix and [Eric] Burden, was killed in a mid-air plane collision. Jeffery was known to openly boast of having organized crime connections and of working for the CIA. After Jimi’s death, it was discovered that Jeffery had been funneling most of Hendrix’s gross earnings into offshore accounts in the Bahamas linked to international drug trafficking.

I dunno. After awhile, this kind of stuff turns my mind to mush and I have to go lay down. Next thing you know, someone'll be saying that the CIA brought down Buddy Holly's plane. (Oh wait, someone already has.)

Berea College v. Kentucky

It never fails to weird me out just how different a world this was, not so long ago. The story of Berea College v. Kentucky is a reality-check we all need occasionally.

In July 1904, the state of Kentucky passed the mind-bogglingly unconstitutional "Day Law", which prohibited any person, any group of people, or any corporation from teaching black and white students in the same school. Further, it forbade a school running "separate but equal" black and white branches within 25 miles of each other.

The law was specifically cooked up to put a stop to Madison County's Berea College, which was the only racially integrated school in Kentucky. Berea College fought back hard, and took their case to the Kentucky Court of Appeals. They lost. The Court asserted that "the purity of racial blood" was "deeper and more important than the matter of choice".

Then Berea appealed it further, to the U.S. Supreme Court. And that's the really weird part... they lost.

The vast majority of the Supreme Court ruled against Berea College, with only John Marshall Harlan and William R. Day dissenting.

Thanks to this ruling, the door became wide open for all states to forbid integrated schooling in all public and even private institutions. It wasn't until 1950 that Kentucky amended the Day Law to allow integration. 19-freakin'-fifty. Unbelievable. And in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education put an end to Government-enforced racial segregation - at least officially, since many refused to accept it for years to come.

And that's precisely when the whole country turned upside down.


In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent black children from entering the Little Rock High School building. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky to Arkansas to force the National Guard to stand down, essentially creating a momentary literal civil war.

In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace stated in his inaugural address, "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!" to great applause. He then personally went to the University of Alabama and stopped two black students from enrolling. (Wallace considered Happy Chandler, Governor of Kentucky, as his running mate in his 1968 Presidential campaign, but dropped him when it was realized Chandler had been an ardent supporter of Jackie Robinson.)

Subsequently, civil rights crusaders Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy were all shot and killed. Wallace himself was also shot in 1972, though he survived confined to a wheelchair until 1998.

And to think the whole mess began because State Representative Carl Day of Breathitt County proposed the Day Law, which passed 73 to 5 in Kentucky's House of Representatives and 28 to 5 in Kentucky's Senate.


Photo above: George Wallace with NASA head James Webb and Operation Paperclip ex-Nazi Wernher Von Braun.

Wave of Suicide sweeps Fort Campbell

Fort Campbell, KY, home of the 101st Airborne Division, the Sabalauski Air Assault School, the 160th Spec-Ops Aviation Regiment, and plenty of black helicopters, is experiencing a strange epidemic of suicides. According to news sources, Fort Campbell averaged one confirmed suicide per week between January to March. Maybe even more deaths are actually unconfirmed suicides, because there are a considerable number of deaths that are now being reinvestigated.

After a suicide prevention campaign started at Fort Campbell in March, the suicide wave abated for six weeks. But then last week two more occurred.

So why is this happening? Good question. Although suicides in the military are generally up nationwide, the Kentucky figures are record-breaking and baffling. Fort Campbell has shut itself down for three more days of intensive suicide-prevention training. Even people in the Army have blamed it on the stress of frequent war deployments since 2001, but I have to wonder what else might be playing havoc with these soldiers' nerves. What do they know that we don't know, that weighs so heavy on their psyches? What unspoken burden are they carrying?

Black Helicopters in Kentucky

You may not be aware that the "black helicopters" of X-Files lore are indeed real, and that they're based in Kentucky, of all places.

You can spot all the black unmarked copters you want at the 160th Spec-Ops Aviation Regiment (SOAR) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Their craft, known as "Little Birds" (but they look more like Little Bugs to me) use a specially-formulated CARC paint which protects from chemical attacks but is also non-radar reflective to help them do whatever it is they're doing out there.

(Wait a minute - did I say "protects from chemical attacks"? What kind of chemical attacks are they expecting, anyway? What the heck are they doing out there?)

The copters are used for all manner of covert purposes related to Special Operations, which can cover quite a lot - and most of it we're not supposed to know about.


The motto of the 160th is "Death waits in the Dark", and their insignia is the grim reaper riding a pale horse with wings.

You can see some interesting video footage of these "Little Birds" at the Don F. Pratt Memorial Museum, and there's even a real one - a CARC-painted McDonnell-Douglas AH-6 Cayuse, to be exact - on display, hanging from the ceiling. There's also a huge exhibit devoted to Ft.Campbell's important role in Operation Iraqi Freedom, some captured Nazi souvenirs from World War II, and a rare (one of only four left in the world) CG-4 Waco Cargo Glider, which visitors can actually climb into.

Even if you couldn't care less about seeing the Cigarette-Smoking Man's unmarked helicopters, visiting the Pratt Museum is highly recommended. Enter the Fort through Gate 4 and have your ID ready. Closed Sundays.

Meanwhile, black helicopters can also be seen buzzing across the state, and especially in and out of the Blue Grass Army Depot in Madison County, often to a helipad very close to the road. The photo above is a black helicopter zipping across the sky above Brodhead, KY.