Another Fort Hood Training Flight, Two More Soldiers Dead

Two soldiers climbed into an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter at Fort Hood on Wednesday afternoon for what the Army calls a “routine training flight.” Neither one came back. The helicopter went down in a field south of Salado, Texas, around 1:30 p.m., and Cliff Coleman, the Bell County sheriff’s spokesman who got to the scene, put it plainly: “You could tell it was a violent crash.”

The wreckage sparked a wildfire that Coleman said was “getting out of control very quickly.” Nearby homes had to be evacuated. The fire burned across a large stretch of land before crews could get a handle on it. The helicopter didn’t hit any houses or people on the ground, which is the one piece of good news in a story that has almost none.

Both soldiers were pronounced dead at the scene. Their names are being withheld until next of kin are notified, which is standard and right. They were flown to Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center. Brig. Gen. Ethan Diven, the acting commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division, issued the statement you always get in these situations: “Our thoughts are with the crew and their families as we await further information.” Gov. Greg Abbott posted on X asking for prayers. And that will be more or less the last you hear about it.

United States. Defense Mapping Agency. Hydrographic/Topographic Center (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

Here is what sticks in my craw. The Apache has been flying since 1984. Some of these airframes are older than the pilots sitting in them. The Army calls it “the most advanced aerial fighting vehicle in the world,” and maybe it was, 40 years ago. We spend more on our military than the next ten nations combined, and we can’t keep a helicopter in the sky over central Texas on a Wednesday afternoon. The Pentagon gets a trillion-dollar budget and a training flight ends in a fireball in a farmer’s field. Ask yourself who benefits from that arrangement. Not the two people in the cockpit, that’s for sure.

And it is not like this is a one-off. The AP, almost in passing, noted that four soldiers died in a Black Hawk crash at Fort Hood during a training exercise in November 2015. Nine more Fort Hood soldiers died in 2016 when a rain-swollen creek swept their vehicle into the water. That base has 214,968 acres of what the Army calls “ideal training ground.” Funny how that ideal training ground keeps killing the people training on it.

Now the investigation. Fort Hood’s own criminal investigation division is leading the inquiry. The same base that lost the helicopter is investigating why it crashed. The Army investigating the Army. I’m sure that will be thorough and completely independent and nobody will have any reason to question the findings.

Charles Rosemond (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

No cause has been announced. A military official told the Associated Press, on condition of anonymity because the situation is “developing,” that it was a routine training flight. Routine. That word is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Two people are dead and the fire is still burning and the only thing routine about it is how fast the official machinery kicks into gear to manage the story.

Two soldiers died flying a 40-year-old helicopter over Texas scrubland on a Wednesday. The Pentagon will issue its statement. The governor will say his prayers. The investigation will quietly conclude that something went wrong and nobody in particular was at fault. And in a few months, another training flight will go down somewhere else, and we will do this all over again. Because nobody with stars on their shoulders ever seems to pay a price for the cost of doing business as usual. Only the people in the cockpit do.