Jack of Harts

McAlester Army Ammunition Base did not officially join Texas during the Second Great Depression. Firstly, they were in Oklahoma, and no good Okie wanted to be part of Texas. Secondly, they were the United States Army’s ammunition base, and their word was their bond. Though they would not release their weapons for use against Texas. That would have violated their oath to protect their fellow Americans. And they did release their weapons when Texas required more munitions to use against the Mexican drug cartels. Their targets were not American at the time, so McAlester felt no guilt at all opening up the armories for that goal. And McAlester did indeed open all of them up. Weapons that had not seen use since the Korean War was young shipped out next to cutting edge systems dreamed up, tested, and fabricated at McAlester itself. They proved devastating in the extreme.

The McAlester Army Ammunition Base in McAlester, Oklahoma was the largest base of its type when the Second Great Depression came upon us all. It had built, stored, decommissioned, refurbished, disposed of, or otherwise dealt with heavy conventional ordinance ranging from 20mm shells to the Massive Ordinance Air Blast (also known as the Mother Of All Bombs) for over a century. They researched new weapons, trained people on existing weapons, and were generally one of the greatest practitioners of conventional destructive methods in the Western Hemisphere. McAlester was not the only base of its type, but it was certainly the single most important of its time. It is therefore not possible to overestimate how much the United States Army depended on McAlester to perform their primary mission of defending the nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Luke Spacebase became a central part of the United States Space Force’s return to space in the latter half of the Twenty First Century, and earned its now-official nickname during the first flight of an experimental space fighter. One of its operators asked for a report when communications were reestablished after boost stage. He transmitted as “Skywalker Base” and the pilot quickly responded, “Red Five, standing by.” Star Wars fans around the world celebrated the fact that they had beaten Star Trek to space when the exchange was inevitably leaked onto the networks. They were not entirely accurate on that point, but it was still considered a public relations win, and Luke Spacebase leadership chose to embrace the unplanned, by them, nickname. Though only after a grilling after-action counseling session with the operator and pilot in question about using unauthorized identification codes during high-profile missions.