In 40 years of service to the U.S. Army as a soldier and civilian, Bob Hall spent 30 of that in the testing field.  In that time he remembers one thing:  it was fun.

Hall retired in late June as technical director of the U.S. Army Operational Test Command at West Fort Hood and is set to be inducted into its hall of fame on Sept. 24.  He will be the 29th inductee since the command began the honor in 1994.

"I'm absolutely humbled at being selected," Hall said of being chosen for the hall of fame.

"I'm humbled beyond belief.  I never expected it."

Though Hall's days are now filled with golf and grandchildren, he speaks about testing with such enthusiasm that one would think it were his first week on the job.

Hall likes that he got to look into the future and deal on a daily basis with cutting-edge technology and capabilities.

"It's fun to be involved in those kinds of things," he said.

In his career, Hall has had a hand in designing, testing or upgrading equipment that is common on today's battlefield, including the initial version of the Bradley fighting vehicle, DRAGON and TOW missile systems, the M-16 rifle, the M1 tank series and the Apache Longbow helicopter.

Hall called his 30 years in testing a "very, very interesting, challenging and fulfilling time period."

"The process is just fun," he said.

Hall graduated from Arkansas State University in 1968 with a degree in mathematics.  It was there he met Carroll, who was an elementary education major.  They married on Aug. 31, 1968, and went on to have two children:  Elizabeth and Christopher.

Elizabeth is married to a former seaman and they live in Copperas Cove.  Christopher is a staff sergeant in the Army and is currently in Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, N.C.  Bob and Carroll have four grandchildren.

Upon graduation from Arkansas State, Hall was commissioned as an infantry officer and went on to serve with the 3rd Armored Division and 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam.

Hall then expected to get what he called a "normal assignment," but instead was named a military Operations Research System Analyst at Fort Benning, Ga., where he did post-graduate work in math and statistics.  He was later assigned to the U.S. Army Infantry Board, where he began his testing career.

He was selected in part because of his math background.  Officials needed someone to bring an analytical side to the board, he said.

"It was just a fluke because I had the math background," Hall said.

He found testing a "challenging and interesting" field and never looked back.

Hall arrived at West Fort Hood's Operational Test Command in 1980 while still an active-duty soldier.  He soon retired and remained there as a civilian employee until late June.  He was named acting technical director in July 2005 and assumed the duties of technical director a year later.  He was also appointed as a member of the Senior Executive Service--the only one at Fort Hood--at that time.

Members of the service serve in the key positions just below the top Presidential appointees, according to information from the Army.  Members are the link between appointees and the federal work force.

During his appointment ceremony in 2006, then-Operational Test command commander, Maj. Gen. James Myles, said Hall was the "complete package."

"(The command) is about truth, and by showing honesty, courage and selflessness, (the command) dominates the truth every day," Myles said.  "Bob Hall is the truth; there is no one more honest, courageous, selfless, possessive of high standards nor more technically competent in the testing domain."

It is a great job, Hall said last week of his time at Fort Hood.

"It is really great."

Among Hall's most challenging projects was combined arms nuclear and chemical testing in the mid-1980s.  He was part testing how large operations would function in a nuclear and chemical environments.  This included adopting a sophistical set of test protocols that involved putting soldiers in prototype gear for up to 12 hours at a time and having them perform typical duties, Hall said.

The challenges of operating in this heavy-duty gear combined with rigorous safety standards made for some "very, very unusual test planning," Hall said.