Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Fort Chaffee burns down!
(More video)
OK. What's left of Fort Chaffee has burned down! Some 150 barracks!
Just found out!
Daddy used to get his Winstons from the PX there when my brothers-in-law were in town. I took advantage of some kinfolk PX privileges there, myself, for 8-tracks and such.
Fort Chaffee, when an active Army post, is the one that christened Moffatt, Okla., "little Juarez" and made the honkytonk haven off limits for military personnel.
Fort Chaffee is where just about Vietnamese in this wide swath of the country, or his or her mama or daddy, came through as refugees in '75. The city of Fort Smith, next door (pop. 80,000 or so) has a huge vietnamese community. Oklahoma City has a sizeable Asian District. Wichita Falls, Texas, where Dr. ER is from and where I toiled for 10-plus year, has a bunch of Vietnamese. They all came through Fort Chaffee.
In 1980, a 16-year-old ER applied for a job at Fort Chaffee when the Cuban boat-lift criminals were incarcerated there. "Cigarillos! Cigarillos!" they hollered, gripping the chain-link fence. Turned out I was glad not to get a job there, Mama was relieved, too.
This was even before the Cubans rioted, broke out, marched through the middle of Barling, Ark., and scared the absolute shit out of people on both sides of the Arkansas-Oklahoma border.
Dude. People where I lived, 20 miles west, got their guns out.
There was a great pic on the front page of the Fort Smith paper of a raging mob barreling town Arkansas Highway 22 -- the photog had to lie down in the street ahead of the hoard to get the shot, and he should've gotten a Pulitzer for it.
Mem'ries ...
--ER
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I went by there today, ER. Traffic jams on 22 most of the day -- folks taking pictures and just lookin at the smoldering history.
Wadn't even no rubble to speak of. The flames INCINERATED EVERYTHING, cept the chimneys and a little metal here and there.
My firefighter friends said it was a hellacious fire.
Wadn't even no rubble to speak of. The flames INCINERATED EVERYTHING, cept the chimneys and a little metal here and there.
My firefighter friends said it was a hellacious fire.
Once when I was sitting in a cafe in Poteau discussing the fact that some out buildings to one of our properties had burned down for apparently no reason, a local boy walking by my table looked down and said with a straight face, "Hardly nothin around here burns down that don't need to."
I got the message.
I got the message.
Somebod told me it was gonna cost $20,000 extra per to take down those barracks to deal with asbestos and lead. Convenient wind.
Oh, wrote about my first dead person in a news story out of Chaffee. Interning at the Fort Smith paper; a soldier rolled some kind of vehicle (I forget) during a training exercise and got squirshed.
Picture? Just something that spoke to me. Something I've wished I could do so many times. Something I feel like I've done before.
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