The uniform commercial code: the troop buildup and new Army commands at Fort Bragg are creating an economic windfall for communities around it.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: COVER STORY

The night is hot, the beer cold, the neon bright. Rick's Lounge, which anchors Hay Street--"Combat Alley"--in downtown Fayetteville, is packed. Was it last week they had the naked woman with the python? There's a topless dancer tonight. But wasn't she the one out there on the street in hot pants just now? The weathered cognoscenti laugh. Easy mistake. They're identical twins. For $20, either will tell a guy anything he wants to hear, truth notwithstanding.

"Damned leg!" In the shank of the evening, someone bellows the lowest insult a paratrooper can hurl here. Anybody--regular infantryman, traveling salesman, hayseed out on the town--without the guts to jump out of an airplane with an M16 and 90 pounds of combat gear is a "straight leg." Paratroopers are taught to bend their knees before hitting the ground. Fists fly, and bodies spill outside. Somebody swings a longneck, blood and beer mix on the sidewalk, and the MPs and local cops storm in.

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Forty-odd years later and 10 miles north of downtown, beyond a broad gash in the earth where they're constructing a $270 million link of the Interstate 295 bypass, a massive building is getting its finishing polish. Graceful curves camouflage its bulk. At 700,000 square feet, this is the largest construction project under way in North Carolina. It's costing $290 million, part of a five-year, $2.8 billion military buildup at Fort Bragg. "Lots of folks refer to this as Pentagon South," says Jim Hinnant, a former Army lieutenant colonel, 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper and helicopter pilot.

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This is the headquarters of the arriving U.S. Army Forces Command and its subordinate Army Reserve Command, the nation's largest military command, responsible for 750,000 active-duty and reserve troops worldwide. Hinnant, an Army spokesman, brakes his weathered Ford pickup at a siding off the freshly paved road near the building. "This is the 'kiss and ride' drop-off," he explains, part of the logistical miracle it will take to deliver and retrieve nearly 2,800 civilians and soldiers each workday, including three dozen generals, the most under one roof except the Pentagon's.

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Change is the order of the day here, and not just behind Fort Bragg's razor wire and gatehouses. Ten miles to the northeast, in the piney woods toward Sanford, nail guns chatter like a firing range. At Richmond Park, one of scores of housing developments springing up in Cumberland, Harnett and surrounding counties, military families are moving into models like the $254,900, four-bedroom, 2,800-square-foot Newport. At the entrance, bulldozers lumber about, widening once leisurely two-lane N.C. 87, now jammed bumper-to-bumper.

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This is the federal Base Realignment and Closure Act of 2005 on the move, in double time. Nationwide, branches of the military are shifting and consolidating bases for economy and efficiency, but nowhere else is it being done on North Carolina's scale. In four years, Cumberland and surrounding counties will see an explosion of more than 40,000 service members, their families, and owners and employees of hundreds of defense contractors and other civilian enterprises. North Carolina's gain is Georgia's loss, as BRAC closes Fort McPherson, hemmed in by suburban Atlanta, and moves the 6,000 military and civilian jobs of its two huge commands, along with others, to Fort Bragg.

Once embarrassed by the military presence, Fayetteville is now as proud of the Army as Charlotte is of Bank of America Corp. "In 2009, we were Michelle Obama's first visit outside of Washington," says three-term mayor Tony Chavonne, who grew up here in a military family. "She came to thank our community for its support of the military. And last year, Time magazine named us the most military-friendly community in the country." Many trace the change in sentiment to 9/11, but it dates back to the birth of the volunteer Army in the 1970s, which brought a family friendliness unknown to servicemen who had been told: "If the Army wanted you to have a wife, it would have issued you one." No attachments, no longing for home, no undue grief to deal with if ... Anyway, there was always home away from home--Rick's and its dozens of rivals along Bragg Boulevard, the nine-mile strip of bars, streetwalkers and pawnshops that stretched from base to...