The 101st Airborne Division—the "Screaming Eagles"—is a U.S. Army modular light infantry division trained for air assault operations. During World War II, it was renowned for its role in Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944, in Normandy, France, Operation Market Garden, the liberation of Holland and action during the Battle of the Bulge around the city of Bastogne, Belgium. During the Vietnam War, the 101st Airborne Division fought in several major campaigns and battles including the fight for Hamburger Hill in May 1969.

Upon its arrival in Vietnam in 1965 (1st Brigade, followed by the 2nd and 3rd Brigades in 1968), the division was an airborne unit. In mid-1968 it was reorganized and redesignated as an airmobile division, then in 1974 as an air assault division. Both of these titles reflect the fact that the division went from airplanes as the primary method of delivering troops into combat, to the use of helicopters as the way the division entered battle. Many current members of the 101st are graduates of the U.S. Army Air Assault School and wear the Air Assault Badge. Division headquarters is at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. In recent years, the division has served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The division is one of the most highly decorated units in the U.S. Army and has been featured prominently in military fiction since its first deployment.

Joanna Newsom (born January 18, 1982) is an American harpist, pianist and singer-songwriter from Nevada City, California.

Newsom grew up in the small town of Nevada City, California. As a child, Newsom was not allowed to watch television or listen to the radio because she was raised by doctors who were "kind of idealists when it came to hoping they could protect us from bad influences, like violent movies, or stupid stuff". She was exposed to music from a young age. Her father played the guitar and her mother was a classically trained pianist who played the hammered dulcimer, the autoharp and conga drums. Newsom attended a Waldorf school where she studied theater and learned to memorize and recite long poems. This skill helps her to remember lyrics while on tour.

At the age of five, Newsom asked her parents if she could play the harp. Her parents eventually agreed to sign her up for harp lessons, but the local harp teacher did not want to take on such a young student and suggested she learn to play the piano first. Starting at the age of four, she began playing the piano and later the harp, which she "loved from the first lesson onward." From her instructor, Joanna learned composition and improvisation. She learned to play on smaller Celtic harps until her parents bought her a full-size pedal harp in the seventh grade. During her teens, she and the instrument became inseparable, and she describes her relationship with the harp as similar to "an artificial limb or a wheelchair. It’s almost part of me, but more to the point, it serves a purpose, and if it wasn’t there I would wonder what was supposed to fit in its place."