First Lieutenant Harley Halbert Pope did not get to see the field that bears his name. On January 7, 1919, the Curtiss JN-4 Jenny he was flying came down in the Cape Fear River and he drowned. The Army was building a field artillery post nearby - Camp Bragg, named for the Confederate general Braxton Bragg - and the new aviation landing strip needed a name. The War Department settled on Pope. The field that opened later that year became one of the oldest installations in what would become the Air Force, and a century later it still sends paratroopers into the sky out of Fort Bragg's drop zones.
The first eight years at Pope were a slow march of observation balloons and biplanes - photographing terrain for mapping, spotting for the artillery batteries at Camp Bragg, watching for forest fires, hauling mail. In December 1927 the field hosted tactics experiments that would matter enormously fifteen years later, in the development of doctrine for airborne assault. The 1930s brought the first major expansion. By 1935, on the day the Army Air Corps practiced large-scale East Coast operations, Pope hosted 535 aircraft at once. Paved runways arrived in 1940. The parking ramps stayed dirt until after the next war.
World War II changed Pope's character permanently. As Fort Bragg became the home of paratrooper training, Pope became the field that took those paratroopers up. Air and ground crews learned the rhythm of mass jumps, aerial resupply, troop carrier formation flying. The field stayed busy through Korea, when it trained Forward Air Controllers; through Vietnam, when its C-130s hauled the wounded and the dead between Southeast Asia and home; through the Congo hostage rescues that won the 464th Troop Carrier Wing the Mackay Trophy in 1964; through the 1965 deployment to the Dominican Republic. Pope did not headline these chapters. It made them possible.
In 1992 Pope became the home of the new 23rd Wing - a composite outfit blending the airlift C-130s of the 317th with the A-10 Warthogs of the 75th Fighter Squadron and, later, the F-16s and then more A-10s of the 74th Fighter Squadron. The 74th carried the Flying Tigers lineage forward from the AVG volunteer pilots who fought over China in 1942. From Pope, the Tigers flew Operation Provide Relief into Somalia, Operation Tiger Rescue out of Yemen, the airlift portion of Uphold Democracy over Haiti, and Operation Vigilant Warrior into the Persian Gulf - the first composite-wing deployment in Air Force history. They were also there on March 23, 1994, when an F-16 and a C-130 from the wing collided and the fighter's wreckage rolled into the Green Ramp.
The 2005 Base Realignment process started a long handover. A-10s moved to Moody, Georgia. C-130s went to Little Rock. The 23rd Fighter Group rejoined the 23rd Wing in 2006; the last three A-10s left for Moody in December 2007. The Air Force Reserve's 440th Airlift Wing moved in from Wisconsin in 2007 - the first active-associate wing in Air Force history - but congressional opposition could not save it, and the last 440th C-130 departed on June 29, 2016. On March 1, 2011, Pope Air Force Base was absorbed into Fort Bragg, becoming Pope Field once more. The Army garrison runs the airfield. The Air Force keeps a tenant footprint.
What remains at Pope is less visible than the C-130 wing it lost but in some ways more strategic. The 43rd Air Mobility Operations Group still handles the en-route work that gets 82nd Airborne paratroopers from this ramp to drop zones anywhere on earth, often inside 18 hours of the alert. The 18th Air Support Operations Group trains tactical air controllers. The Air Force's most secretive units cluster in the Special Operations corner - the 24th Special Operations Wing, the 21st and 24th Special Tactics Squadrons, the 427th Special Operations Squadron flying various short-takeoff aircraft, and the Combat Control School that produces the pararescuemen and combat controllers who jump first into the dark places. Hangars 4 and 5, on the National Register since 1991, watch over all of it.
Pope Field (KPOB) sits at 35.171N, 79.014W on the northwest edge of the Fort Bragg installation, 12 miles northwest of downtown Fayetteville in Spring Lake. The east-west runway runs roughly 7,500 ft at 218 ft MSL. Pope is restricted military airspace; civil transients must coordinate. Nearest civil fields: Fayetteville Regional (KFAY) about 12 nm southeast, Raleigh Executive (KTTA) about 30 nm north, Raleigh-Durham (KRDU) about 50 nm north. The Sandhills landscape - longleaf pine, drop zones cut out of the trees, the meander of the Cape Fear River where Lt. Pope's Jenny went down - is best appreciated at 2,500 to 4,000 ft AGL.