What do carnivorous plants and JFK have in common? The answer might surprise you.
With more than 55,000 soldiers and the headquarters for major commands like the U.S. Army Special Operations, U.S. Army Forces U.S. Army Reserve, Joint Special Operations and 18th Airborne Corps, Fort Liberty is the most populated U.S. military installation in the world.
While its soldiers have been involved in conflicts from World War II through the latest friction in the Middle East and Europe, here are five things you may not know about the post's storied history.
Venus fly trap
Fort Liberty is home to many endangered species. The protected status of the red-cockaded woodpecker once limited training here in the '90s.
Although the carnivorous Venus flytrap is not on the endangered species list, it is still monitored as a threatened species and illegal to poach, while Fort Liberty is one of the few areas in North Carolina where it grows in the wild.
In December 2023, Julie Moore, a retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist and current director of a flytrap conservation group, told Mother Jones that her ex-husband accidentally discovered flytraps on the Army post in the 1980s when studying the red-cockaded woodpeckers.
A February 2015 Paraglide article stated there are about 40 known unmarked locations where the insect-eating plants grow on post.
JFK time capsule
Army Special Forces credit former President John F. Kennedy with authorizing the green beret as part of their uniform.
Kennedy’s support is memorialized in the base of the 22-foot Special Warfare memorial statue known as “Bronze Bruce,” according to the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.
The statue cost $100,000 and included donations from actor John Wayne, who starred in the 1968 movie “The Green Berets”; songwriter Barry Saddler, who wrote “The Ballad of the Green Berets”; former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; and funds donated from Special Forces soldiers “all over the world.
The statue depicts a noncommissioned officer carrying an M-16 rifle, with one foot crushing a snake “symbolic of tyranny in the world and the threats and dangers that will instantly bring him to action.”
According to a 2014 Veritas Army special operation forces history article, then-Maj. Gen. Edward Flanagan Jr. Placed a bust of Kennedy, a copy of Kennedy’s speech authorizing the green beret and a book with Kennedy’s other speeches inside the base of the monument.
The base also contains a Special Forces uniform and green beret.
Celebrity connections
Fort Liberty has had several soldiers assigned to the post who were celebrities in their own right or related to celebrities.
Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman John Fogerty, who’s publicly expressed support for Vietnam-era veterans, served here in the 1960s, a September 2019 Army article states.
Fogerty said he was on active duty for six months and served in the Reserves from 1966-1968, going through basic training at then-Fort Bragg, before being stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky.
In a November 2019 interview with Military Times, Fogerty said he couldn’t remember if it was at Fort Bragg or Fort Knox, but one soldier came home from the post exchange with a record player and albums from the Doors, Eric Clapton, the Beatles and Jefferson Airplane.
“Even though I was on American soil, there’s still a feeling of being cut off from home, so I can only imagine how it felt being a soldier in Vietnam … I heard countless stories later when the war was over from guys my age telling me how the music gave voice to their feelings,” Fogerty said. “I remember hearing one guy talk about the song 'We Gotta Get out of This Place' by The Animals, and I could just imagine all those guys singing that at the top of their lungs."
According to an application to add country singer Patsy Cline’s home on the National Register of Historic Places, Cline moved to Fayetteville in 1957, when her new husband Charlie Dick was stationed at then-Fort Bragg.
The application states that she lived in Fayetteville until 1959, when her husband was discharged from the Army. Cline’s music career was revived when she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where she regularly appeared on the Grand Old Opry and also worked on several films for the Army, according to the application.
Michael Strahan connection
Actress Julianna Moore was born at then-Fort Bragg, and rapper J. Cole is known to have a connection to the military post, along with Tiger Woods and several professional athletes.
At least one former NFL defensive end turned TV host also has a connection.
According to People magazine, Strahan’s father enlisted in the Army in 1955, and later became a major and served with the local 82nd Airborne Division.
In a video interview with People, Strahan said his family lived at then-Fort Bragg and moved to Germany when he was 9.
A 2014 ABC News article states that the elder Strahan was also a boxer at then-Fort Bragg, while the younger Strahan first started playing football with a Pop Warner youth team on post.
5 unique things that are only found at Fort Bragg
Fort Bragg Playhouse
According to a February 1995 Fayetteville Observer article, Fort Bragg once had a playhouse, which closed in December 1994 and later became a tax center for soldiers.
The playhouse, at the corner of Knox and then-Randolph streets, closed because of military budget cuts, once hosted plays like “Bye, Bye Birdie” and “The Fantasticks,” gaining national recognition.
A story in the May 14, 1919, issue of The Fayetteville Observer notes that 2,000 attended a performance of “musical numbers, readings and vaudeville stunts'' at the “handsome new Liberty Theatre.”
By 1942, the building that would become the Fort Bragg Playhouse was constructed as a movie theater, although live performances were sometimes staged there.
In the 1950s, a group called the Bragg Players formed and convinced the military brass to use the movie house, then called Theatre 7, for its shows.
The playhouse was modernized in 1957 and renamed the Fort Bragg Playhouse in 1959.
Pat Reese, a Fayetteville Observer reporter and actor, was the first director of the Fort Bragg Playhouse in the 1960s and told the newspaper in 1995 that after the height of the Cold War, talent that came through the playhouse included soldier James Sikking, who was later on the TV show “Hill Street Blues.”
After Reese resigned as the volunteer director in 1963, several paid directors came to the playhouse in the 1960s, while the theater converted from showing films to a playhouse in 1968.
By 1974, Lee Yopp contracted with the post to direct some productions.. Yopp had been director of the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania, where Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller performed, and taught Christopher Reeve and Tony Danza.
Yopp’s first production at Fort Bragg was “Inherit the Wind,” for which he brought in stage and film star John Carradine.
According to the 1995 article, other stars to perform included Mercedes McCambridge, who performed in “The Glass Menagerie,” and Peter Breck, who performed the same year in the play “The Rainmaker.”
Others included Broderick Crawford, Dana Andrews, Pat Paulsen, Gary Berghoff and Noel Harrison. New York Jets former quarterback Joe Namath came twice in 1982 for “Guys and Dolls'' and again in 1984 for “Cactus Flower.” In 1978, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Josh Logan directed “Cherry,” a musical based on William Inge’s “Bus Stop.”
In 1976, the playhouse won six awards at the All-Army Festival of the Performing Arts, 15 awards in 1980 in the U.S. Army Forces Command's music and theater competition and 18 awards the following year.
Yopp remained the playhouse’s director until 1993, and the last production was the children’s musical “Aladdin.”
Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at [email protected] or 910-486-3528.
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: 5 things you didn’t know about Fort Liberty
