Before it was an Army airfield, Campbell was an Air Force base with a very particular job. Construction of Clarksville Base began in 1947 next to the airfield, and, in Fort Campbell’s own words, it was “the second nuclear weapons storage facility to begin active operations in the United States.” It was one of six National Storage Sites run jointly by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, as the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 required.

At its peak, the garrison says, about one-third of the American nuclear arsenal was kept there, and the Soviet Union placed it on its list of the first ten targets to destroy in a nuclear war; neither claim is independently documented in the sources checked. Campbell Air Force Base existed from 1947 to 1959, the site worked as a storage and then a modification facility until operations ended in 1965, and the Army took control in 1969. Fort Campbell now preserves it as a Cold War historic site.

The 101st Airborne Division was reactivated at Fort Campbell on 21 September 1956. Its 1st Brigade went to Vietnam in July 1965 and the whole division came home on 6 April 1972. In Vietnam it had learned to move by helicopter, and in April 1974 the jump status of its 3rd Brigade was ended as the division became airmobile.

Its aviation was born in the war. On 1 July 1968, at Camp Eagle in Vietnam, the 160th Aviation Group was constituted; it was renamed the 101st Aviation Group in June 1969 and the Aviation Brigade in August 1986. Today the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade has four flying battalions and a support battalion, and a second brigade, the 159th, served the division until it was deactivated in 2015. Wikipedia credits the 101st with the longest air assault in history in Desert Storm in 1991, a record it broke itself in Iraq in 2003.

At 2:38 a.m. Baghdad time on 17 January 1991, Task Force Normandy — eight Army AH-64 Apaches led by four Air Force MH-53 Pave Low helicopters — destroyed Iraqi radar sites near the Saudi border that could have warned Baghdad of the air attack that followed. The Apaches came from the 101st under Lt. Col. Richard “Dick” Cody, and the raid is counted as the first shots of the Persian Gulf War.

The brigade went back to Iraq in 2003 and 2005 and deployed to Afghanistan in 2002, 2007, 2010, 2012 and 2015.

The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment exists because of a failure. After Operation Eagle Claw, the attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran, failed in 1980, the Army looked to the 101st Aviation Group at Fort Campbell for pilots for a second attempt. Task Force 158 was formed from them; when it was made permanent it became Task Force 160, and on 16 October 1981 the 160th Aviation Battalion. Its motto is “Night Stalkers Don’t Quit.”

The regiment has flown in Grenada in 1983, in the Persian Gulf in 1987–1988 (Operation Prime Chance), in Mogadishu in 1993, on the 2011 Abbottabad raid with helicopters modified for stealth, and, according to Wikipedia, in Caracas and over Iran in 2026. Its headquarters and the 1st and 2nd Battalions are at Fort Campbell, the 3rd at Hunter Army Airfield and the 4th at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. New soldiers go through a selection and training course known as Green Platoon.

The regiment’s most recent publicised raid began from far beyond Kentucky. On 3 January 2026, according to Wikipedia, MH-47G Chinooks and MH-60M Direct Action Penetrators of the 160th carried Delta Force into Caracas for the operation that captured Nicolás Maduro; one helicopter was damaged by ground fire and seven American soldiers were wounded, but no aircraft was lost, and a Chinook pilot received the Medal of Honor. Venezuelan and Cuban casualty figures given by Wikipedia vary widely and are not repeated here. Regiment-wide, Wikipedia counts 71 MH-47Gs, 72 MH-60L/Ms and 47 Little Birds, as well as 12 MQ-1C drones.