Barksdale Air Force Base
Near Shreveport, Louisiana
Just south of the highway as you pass through Bossier City, more than twenty-two thousand acres belong to Barksdale Air Force Base, home of the Second Bomb Wing, the oldest bomb wing in the United States Air Force, and one of the most strategically significant airfields in the country.
The base was named in nineteen thirty-three for Second Lieutenant Eugene Hoy Barksdale, a World War One aviator who died in a plane crash in nineteen twenty-six during a speed record attempt. What grew from that dedication is today the nerve center of Air Force Global Strike Command, the organization responsible for America's nuclear bomber force.
The planes here are B-fifty-twos, the famous Stratofortress. The aircraft has been in continuous service since the nineteen fifties, and the versions at Barksdale can carry conventional precision-guided munitions as well as nuclear gravity bombs. When you hear that a B-fifty-two has flown a mission somewhere in the world, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Pacific, it very likely took off from a base like this one.
Barksdale carries one particular moment in American history that most people don't know about. On the morning of September eleventh, two thousand one, while hijacked airliners were striking New York and Washington, the base happened to be running its annual nuclear readiness exercise, Global Guardian. Aircraft were already on alert, crews were already staged. Into that atmosphere, Air Force One landed at Barksdale carrying President George W. Bush, diverted here by the Secret Service as the nation tried to understand what was happening. At one in the afternoon, Bush addressed the nation for the first time from the conference room of Eighth Air Force Headquarters. The podium he spoke from is on display today in the Barksdale Global Power Museum.
In a single morning, a base that had spent decades preparing for the worst found itself at the center of the worst day.
