[Richard]

Guys,

I asked a friend who was pretty much involved in the move at that time. You would have thought that a move to Bliss would have made much more sense because of the B-500 ops going on out there at the time. Even we in the 7th used to use that area for our desert training--basing out of Oro Grande and training between there and Cloudcroft in NM...which has a LOT of desert before you ever reach the mountains of the Lincoln National Forest area.

Anyway, according to my friend, everyone thought the move was coming to Fort Bliss...but they obviously didn’t have the vision and foresight of the CSA (GEN Wickham).

Several staff studies were done for the CSA and they all came back with the western US as the location to move 5th SFG. On each one, he told them that was the wrong answer. When one finally came in that said Campbell, he took it.

The rest of the story is that the CSA had supposedly promised the communities of Clarksville/Hopkinsville a “brigade-sized unit” and there were houses going up all over the place in preparation for it. However, when the 1500 or so 5th SFG ffolkes showed up versus a typical brigade of nearly three times that number, the most common question in the community was “where is everybody else?” They had gotten an O6-level unit as promised--but not the numbers of troops in an Infantry brigade, which is what the communities were expecting. It was quite a let-down for them.

Anyway, that’s the story as I heard it and has been generally passed down through the ages of ARSFC…

Richard

PS-Old Coe Lake DZ near White Sands was not a soft landing, either.