KILLEEN DAILY HERALD | SUNDAY, MARCH 23, 2025
W O M E N ’ S H I ST O RY M O N T H B O N U S PAG E S
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Copperas Cove veteran serving her community as a teacher BY JOHN CLARK HERALD CORRESPONDENT
COPPERAS COVE – Texas native Pam Knutson served nearly six years in the U.S. Army before getting out to stay home and raise kids. When her youngsters got a little older, she started considering new career opportunities, decided to become a school teacher, and has been happily in the classroom for 11 years now. “Once I joined the Army, I thought it was going to be my forever job – I really liked it – but family changed that,” Knutson said. “I joined just to get out of being poor, having a steady job where I could support my son, but being in the Army was the best job ever. “I worked in personnel, and I just liked helping people. When I got out, I looked into doing x-ray (and) MRI kind of stuff, ultrasounds, but the school was so hard to get into. They only took 200 students at a time and they kept saying, ‘Try again next year.’ “I was in my late 30s, and I was, like, ‘Look, I ain’t got time to be trying again all the time.’ So I looked around and talked with (husband) Wayne. I thought by teaching, I could still help people. They just weren’t adults.” Pam was born in Seguin (Suh-geen), about 125 miles south of Killeen-Fort Cavazos near San Antonio, where she graduated high school in 1987 and enrolled at Texas A&M University in College Station. She had plans to pursue a career in agriculture, changed majors several times, and then got some bad news from administration after about a year-and-a-half. “I was a good student until I got to college, where I proceeded to flunk out,”
she said. “I didn’t apply myself to my studies like I should have.” After heading north to Wyoming for a while to live with a cousin, Pam came back to College Station, worked for a cleaning company, attended classes at Blinn Junior College, worked at a John Deere dealership, then moved back home. “I moved back to Seguin and was working at the John Deere dealership there, where I had worked in high school,” she said. “I met my first husband, who was in the Air Force, (and) we married, had a kid, and then we split up. That’s when I joined the Army in 1999. “Chalk it up to a midlife crisis and a dead-end job. A friend who was a mechanic in the Air Force talked me into it. He re-upped, but into the Army instead of the Air Force. When he came back from AIT, he said, ‘You should do this. It’ll be great. You’ll travel and see the world.’ So I talked to the recruiter and the next thing I knew, I was signed up. My parents thought I was crazy. They thought my son was going to be a serial killer because he wouldn’t have roots after moving all around the world, but it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.” After basic training and AIT, the Army sent Pam to Wiesbaden, Germany, where she eventually met husband, Wayne, who retired as a master sergeant after 21 years’ service. They were marCOURTESY PHOTO ried in 2002, and then Wayne got dePam Knutson, a U.S. Army veteran and Copperas Cove school teacher, met husband, Wayne, who is ployed to the Middle East, leaving Pam also a teacher, when both were stationed with the military in Germany. to take care of what by then had become a combined family of three kids. here by myself with three kids, pulling “I think one night I paid $300 for “I was an E-5 (sergeant), with the 15th staff duty three times a week somepeople to watch my kids while I had Personnel Battalion,” she said. “I loved times. You have to stay there all night it, but Wayne got deployed and I was and it was difficult finding babysitters. PLEASE SEE TEACHER, 3