Killeen turns Army’s reluctant residents into proud neighbors
DVIDS
7th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment
Story by Sgt. Ken Scar
March 17, 2014
KILLEEN, Texas - The Army assigns thousands of soldiers to Fort Hood every year, and chances are many of them are not exactly delighted about it. Army towns don’t always have the best reputations among soldiers.
The complaints are similar for every city next to a major military base: the traffic is terrible, crime is high, it’s in the middle of nowhere, it’s over-priced, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, and so on.
Surprisingly – or maybe not surprisingly – a considerable number of soldiers over the last half-century have grown fond of Killeen during their Army-mandated time here, and decided to make Killen their permanent home. So many, in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a single city block that didn’t have at least one veteran living on it.
“Killeen has the highest percentage of veterans than any city in the United States,” said Killeen Mayor Dan Corbin, who was transplanted here by the Army himself in 1971. “The population in Killeen increased by 47 percent between 2000 and 2010. The assigned strength on Fort Hood did not increase in that time, but the population did because people like living here.”
Corbin’s initial assignment to Fort Hood came as a bit of a shock.
“I was a lieutenant in Vietnam and I asked to be assigned any place east of the Mississippi river, because I wanted to make sure they had a wide enough area that I could get what I wanted,” he said with a short laugh.
“Someone who failed geography sent me to Fort Hood.”
Staff Sgt. Jim Barbour was ordered to Fort Hood in 1974. He was a hardened combat veteran and Purple Heart recipient with more than 3,000 flight hours as a door gunner in Vietnam for the 68th Assault Helicopter Company, 145th Combat Aviation Battalion. He had moved on to being a Russian language linguist for the Army Security Agency in Japan, and was none too thrilled about his new duty station.
“I hated Fort Hood. Everything was either in your building or five miles down the road,” said Barbour from the living room of the home he’s lived in for 38 years, which sits just three blocks away from one of Fort Hood’s main gates.
The city has grown exponentially during his time here, he explained. Now there are four grocery stores, dozens of restaurants, a large mall, and just about anything else he needs within a few minutes’ drive.
“When I moved to this town it was 30,000 people,” he said. “Now it’s 130,000. That’s change. I came from Chicago, and Killeen is more like a city now. It happens so slow you don’t even really notice it.”
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