Government & Politics

101st Airborne (Air Assault) Celebrates 70th Anniversary

WKMS | By Todd Hatton,

Published August 13, 2012 at 10:00 AM CDT

Thousands of active, veteran and retired soldiers and their families gather at Fort Campbell this week to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the 101st Airborne Division, even as some of its soldiers leave for Afghanistan. The elite airborne-air assault division was created August 16, 1942 as the Army searched for a new type of division that could be quicker, more aggressive and able to parachute behind enemy lines. The 101st would go on to redefine war strategies from World War II to Vietnam to the Middle East. The weeklong event at Fort Campbell includes games, a concert, an air show and memorials to fallen soldiers.

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Todd Hatton

Todd Hatton hails from Paducah, Kentucky, where he got into radio under the auspices of the late, great John Stewart of WKYX while a student at Paducah Community College. He also worked at WKMS in the reel-to-reel tape days of the early 1990s before running off first to San Francisco, then Orlando in search of something to do when he grew up. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Murray State University. He vigorously resists adulthood and watches his wife, Angela Hatton, save the world one plastic bottle at a time.

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Dave Shinall

Dave is a retired Army tank platoon sergeant. During Desert Storm, he helped overrun a Republican Guard bunker complex in Iraq's Euphrates Valley. In the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, he commanded a mountaintop UN Preventive Deployment Force observation post on the Macedonian frontier with Serbia. In Bavaria, he served as news director at the American Forces Network radio station in Wurzburg, on special duty assignment from December 1981 to March 1984. He's a 2003 magna cum laude graduate of Western Kentucky University.

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