The Iron Fist: Cold War Armor at Fort Hood
Near Killeen, Texas
The Cold War gave Fort Hood its permanent identity. In nineteen forty-six the Second Armored Division returned from Europe, took up residence on the base, and began the slow work of becoming America's armored fist on standby. In nineteen fifty-four, III Corps arrived from California, establishing Fort Hood as the command center for the heaviest concentration of combat power in the United States Army.
The logic of deterrence required exactly this kind of mass and visibility. Fort Hood's M-forty-eight and M-sixty tanks, later the M-one Abrams, were rehearsing for a war everyone hoped would never come: the armored breakout through the Fulda Gap, the NATO defense of West Germany. Units cycled to Grafenwoehr in Bavaria, practiced the REFORGER exercises across German farm fields year after year, and came back to the Texas flatlands to train again.
By nineteen eighty, the Second Armored Division and the First Cavalry Division together stationed more tanks on Fort Hood's ranges than most nations possessed in their entire arsenals. The Iron Horse is what they called the First Cavalry. The division had fought at Ia Drang in Vietnam as the First Air Cavalry, the airmobile experiment that rewrote infantry doctrine.
It returned to Fort Hood in nineteen seventy-one carrying the highest casualty count of any American division in that war, five thousand four hundred forty-four killed, twenty-six thousand five hundred ninety-two wounded. Back on Texas soil it rebuilt as a heavy armored force, traded helicopters for tanks, and waited for the next conflict. What the post could not do was remain isolated from the American crisis over race.
The questions that the wider country was arguing would arrive inside the gates too.
