Fort Novosel

Formerly Fort Rucker, renamed Fort Novosel after a Medal of Honor recipient that nobody can pronounce on the first try — 'Noh-voh-SELL' — and your mail will be addressed wrong for the first six months. If it has a rotor, someone here is learning to break it with confidence and a warrant officer is learning to fix it while muttering about flight school students. The U.S. Army Aviation Center produces every rotary-wing pilot in the Army, which means the skies over the Wiregrass region are full of helicopters being flown by people who got their license yesterday and are terrified in a way that's supposed to be educational. Daleville, Alabama is what happens when a town's entire economy is based on helicopter students buying energy drinks, Tornado energy shots, and one last meal before a checkride. The Wiregrass region is hot, flat, and the Dothan Peanut Festival is unironically the social event of the season — and if you just laughed, you haven't been here long enough to understand that this is as good as it gets. Enterprise, Alabama has a monument to a boll weevil, which is an actual statue of an insect that destroyed their crops and forced them to diversify. That monument tells you everything you need to know about this region: adaptable, self-aware, and weirdly proud of the thing that almost destroyed them. Sound familiar, Army?