Tennessee National Guard

A Tennessee National Guard transport plane crashed and burned while attempting to land Tuesday, killing three crew members and injuring two others, authorities said. The C-130 aircraft, on a training mission with a crew of five from the 118th Tactical Airlift Command in Nashville, crashed at Campbell Army Air Field, officials said.

The Tennessee National Guard on Thursday bowed to parent protests and canceled patriotism rallies led by camouflaged soldiers who fired blanks in high school auditoriums filled with unsuspecting students. "People were complaining their kids were not made aware beforehand. They objected to the shock value," guard spokesman Maj. Hooper Penuel said of the displays at four area schools Wednesday.

The Tennessee National Guard on Thursday bowed to parent protests and canceled patriotism rallies led by camouflaged soldiers who fired blanks in high school auditoriums filled with unsuspecting students. "People were complaining their kids were not made aware beforehand. They objected to the shock value," guard spokesman Maj. Hooper Penuel said of the displays at four area schools Wednesday.

A Tennessee National Guard transport plane crashed and burned while attempting to land Tuesday, killing three crew members and injuring two others, authorities said. The C-130 aircraft, on a training mission with a crew of five from the 118th Tactical Airlift Command in Nashville, crashed at Campbell Army Air Field, officials said.

A late winter forest fire that broke out Sunday near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was still raging northwest of the Tennessee park Monday, damaging or destroying 65 structures, most of them rental cabins. "We're still working the fire," Perrin Anderson, an information officer for Sevier County, Tenn., told the Los Angeles Times on Monday.  He said the fire was contained, but not yet controlled. The normal forest fire season in eastern Tennessee is spring and summer, when dry conditions are most prevalent, Anderson said.  But even in late winter, he said, there is some undergrowth and forest debris that can burn if ignited.

More than 200,000 audiocassettes valued at more than $1 million were on their way Wednesday to Saudi Arabia aboard a Tennessee Air National Guard cargo plane, a gift from Nashville's music industry to American troops. Every major country and Christian label donated thousands of cassettes in a project dubbed Operation Desert Song. Included were 50,000 cassettes donated by country music's current hot new singer, Garth Brooks, who was on hand for the cargo loading.

A patriotism program that featured mock attacks on high schools by uniformed National Guardsmen firing blanks was canceled today after a mock raid here drew protests from angry parents. Maj. Gen. Carl Wallace, adjutant general of the Tennessee National Guard, made the decision after meeting with top staff members at his Nashville office, said Maj. Hooper Penuel, a guard spokesman. "We got complaints that the kids were not made aware beforehand and that the shock value was too much," Penuel said.

When Spc. Thomas Wilson, a scout with the Tennessee National Guard, stood up in Kuwait this week and confronted Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld over the Pentagon's failure to properly equip his unit for their impending service in Iraq, he reaffirmed the indispensable role free speech plays in every American's relationship to their government.

Anxious troops awaiting deployment to Iraq peppered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with questions Wednesday during his brief visit to their camp in the Kuwaiti desert, demanding to know why U.S. forces were still being sent with insufficient protection against deadly insurgents.

On his 100-acre tomato farm just south of Birmingham, Ala., Horace Hicks walked the furrowed fields and kicked at the parched earth, sending up clouds of yellow dust. "That's what you call dry," Hicks, 52, said dispiritedly. "I just irrigated it yesterday, and it's like powder again. Even the weeds ain't growing."

The birds were singing and, for once, the sun was shining brightly. Were it not for the periodic thunder and concussion of Iraqi artillery shells being blown up by coalition forces a few miles away, it would have been a perfect day to bring the kids here to Entertainment City, Islam's answer to Disneyland. But there were no gleeful children here Tuesday to ride the Oasis Express roller coaster or the African Boat Ride. There will be no children today. There will be none tomorrow.

April 4, 1968, is a day I have relived and revisited hundreds of times. I was living in Memphis then, with my wife, Dorothy, and three sons. I was also pastor of Centenary Methodist Church and chairman of the strategy committee for the sanitation workers' strike.