the chain to give his "I have returned" speech. Lacking the propulsion system necessary to operate with the fast carriers around Okinawa, Killen was kept in the south with the cruiser fleet. She steamed into Brunei Bay, Borneo, on 10 June with the assault forces, and supported the troops with prelanding bombardment. She resumed exercises on 15 June before arriving off Balikpapan, Borneo, on 27 June for fire support missions. After silencing enemy shore batteries on Borneo, Killen prepared for the final phase of the Pacific war as she arrived Manila on 14 July. She cleared that port 2 weeks later, and joined the North Pacific Force in the Aleutian Islands. Upon the cessation of hostilities the destroyer was assigned to the occupation forces in the Japanese islands. Departing Adak on 31 August, Killen took up station at Ominato in northern Honshū, and supported the occupation forces until 14 November, when she sailed to Puget Sound. From there she proceeded to San Diego, arriving on 2 April, and decommissioning on 9 July 1946. Target ship The veteran destroyer served as a target ship during the atom bomb tests in 1958 (Operation Hardtack I, shots WAHOO and UMBRELLA), and in 1962 engaged in high explosive tests in the Chesapeake Bay to assess the structural effects of the ship's nuclear exposures. Killen was struck from the Navy List and sent to the US Naval Station at Roosevelt Roads, P.R. in January 1963 to be used as a target ship for missile and gunnery practice off the nearby Puerto Rican island of Vieques where she was eventually sunk/scuttled in a shallow bay in 1975 and still lies today. Studies and site visits made in 1999 by a Puerto Rican marine archaeologist and the University of Georgia discovered nearly two hundred steel barrels of unknown origin and contents among the wreckage of the Killen. Based on government descriptions of the nuclear tests in the Pacific, some scientists and Vieques environmental activists have been concerned that nuclear-fallout cleaning materials were likely stored inside those barrels and improperly disposed, possibly entering the local environment prior to sinking or exposing contaminants to the animals and habitat of Bahia Salina del Sur in Vieques after sinking. In 2003–2004, a Virginia-based company called Underwater Ordnance Recovery (UOR), in cooperation with the University of Georgia, was contracted by the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico's Justice Department to again study the ex-Killen