Making the post more open and accessible to the local communities is important to Lynch.

“We’re your Army,” Lynch said.

He spent a part of Monday afternoon meeting with Temple Mayor Bill Jones and City Manager David Blackburn.

In fact, it was one of a number of meetings that Lynch requested with municipal leaders as a way of building effective relationships.

“It’s all about information sharing,” Lynch said Monday during a meeting at the Temple Daily Telegram.

Lynch said his goal is to host a quarterly regional leaders information forum that will include civic leaders from both counties.

Jones called the meeting with Lynch a very open dialog, which included discussions about resurrecting the adopt-a-unit program with area businesses, and the adopt-a-school program with the Temple school district.

“He said that was very important to him,” Jones said.

Next month, Lynch will unveil his road map for Fort Hood and what he’d like to accomplish as III Corps commander over the next three years.

At this time, much of that is being created by his staff, but he’s gotten a lot of good ideas from some of the civic leadership.

“I found that all I needed to do was get out and talk with the leaders myself,” Lynch said. “This whole month is a search for information.”

Last month, Lynch hosted a meeting with Central Texas media and promised then to make Fort Hood more accessible to media.

While access to the post is important to Lynch, so is the Army family.

“We’ve always said that you enlist the soldier, but you re-enlist the family,” Lynch said. “The soldiers know what they are doing is important. They’re proud of what they are doing and the families feel like they are being taken care of.”

Goals to keep soldiers on active duty have been met at III Corps, Lynch said, but if you don’t stay abreast of those goals the soldier and their families suffer.

“That’s why I am the ‘family-first general,’” he said. “You can’t just say family first, you have to do family first.”

As part of his family first mandate, Lynch says that inside his headquarters nobody works on weekends and every soldier should be home for supper by 6 p.m.

“The only thing you can’t do, once you deploy, is spend time with your family,” Lynch said.

Of course, nothing is as important as the mission of the Army itself.

Lynch, who commanded the 3rd Infantry Division during last year’s surge, said the key to winning the war, as it is being won, is through reconciliation.

In Iraq, one of the ways of doing that came from a group known as the Sons of Iraq - Iraqis who Lynch said were paid $8 a day to assist coalition and Iraqi security forces.

“These folks who were shooting at us yesterday, today became our friends,” he said. “We worked to meet their needs by building schools and government centers, improving their water access, and that kept them on the right side of the fence. Today they are our friends, but tomorrow, they could be insurgents again.”