Larger Than Rhode Island: The Scale of Fort Hood
Near Killeen, Texas
Among the things that made Fort Hood unusual in the Cold War Army was its sheer physical scale. Two hundred fourteen thousand acres, more than three hundred square miles. A soldier stationed there could spend a full year without seeing more than a fraction of the installation.
The ranges where armor trained were far enough from the cantonment that they operated as a separate world, dust and tank treads and artillery impact zones stretching across terrain that looked very much like what it had been before the Army arrived: dry Central Texas scrub, cedar and mesquite, limestone outcrops, the occasional creek lined with cottonwood. The base generated its own internal economy at a scale that dwarfed Killeen's civilian sector. Commissaries, post exchanges, hospitals, schools, churches, movie theaters, bowling alleys, sports facilities.
The civilian city outside the gates existed largely to serve the population inside, providing what the Army did not: off-post housing, the bars and restaurants that soldiers preferred to institutional dining, the pawnshops and car lots and the other commercial infrastructure of a transient population. The First Cavalry, the Fourth Infantry, III Corps: units with histories stretching back to the Civil War, the Indian Wars, the First World War. They carried those histories with them to the Texas flatlands, performed them in ceremony and commemoration, and then drove their tanks out to the ranges and fired live rounds at targets calibrated to Soviet armor specifications.
The past and the present coexisted on the base the way they do in most American places: imperfectly, and side by side.
