CNN Newsroom: Gov. Andy Beshear (D) Kentucky Talks About The Black Hawk Crash That Killed Service Members
Interview
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Well, in Kentucky, we love Fort Campbell and its troops. They are a part of us, team Kentucky, who we are, part of our community. And today, for Campbell, the 101st Airborne and the Commonwealth of Kentucky are all morning nine children of God that chose to serve our great country and today are lost. Their families will be grieving the children of God that are irreplaceable.
I know that the facility and the general in charge are taking it very seriously and also very hard. And we think of our military in the army as being tough and they are, but they also love their fellow service members as brothers and as sisters and I have full confidence that they want more than anyone else to get to the bottom of what happened to make sure it won't happen again. And I have full confidence in their abilities to continue to carry out their missions as needed.
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Well, we never want an accident like this to happen, whether it is in our military or in civilian aircraft. The specialized unit has been traveling to Fort Knox - to Fort Campbell. We'll be reviewing what happened. There is something akin to a black box that is on each of these helicopters.
And I think before we jump to any conclusion about the aircraft itself, that they get that information so that we don't start running in a direction that may have not been a causal factor here.
But again, I trust the leadership at Fort Campbell. In fact, I got on a helicopter right after that briefing to survey the scene. I'm a dad of two young kids. I would not have done that if I didn't believe that they follow the best practices and I wanted to make sure I showed my support for every single person on that base.
They've got big deployments to Europe right now, a very dangerous place. And so while we need to figure out what happened, we need to make sure it doesn't happen again. We need to make sure we are also supporting those especially right now with everything going on around the world. And when they're hurting, we need to be there for them, behind them, making sure they know how much we care about them and love them.
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Well, certainly the specialized team that comes in has a lot more experience than I do, having never flown a helicopter. I look at this from a place of compassion. We lost nine individuals and those are nine individuals who gave their life in service for this country.
So I think we have to figure out the why. I believe that everyone from leadership on the base to leadership in Washington, D.C. wants to see that happen and then to make sure that the next group is safer in whatever training exercise or in any combat exercise that they are in.
Now, we do need to continue training provided that it's safe though, because when you look at how important these jobs are, whether it's evacuating individuals in conflict or whether it's transporting people to where we would need them to keep us safe, it is critical that we have the best trained military out there, but we - these are people's sons and daughters, these are husbands or wives, it's really important that we honor those that we've lost that we find a way, find the reason and address it. But again, that we make sure that that base today knows that we're with them.
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Thank you.
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