A Year Later, Ft. Hood Survivors Won't Shrink Back to Terror

Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, paralyzed from the chest-down by three bullets that ended his Fort Hood shooting rampage, waits in a Texas jail for trial by court martial. And Anwar Al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric with whom Hasan had traded e-mails, was tried this week in absentia by Yemen for plotting to kill foreigners. The Obama administration has already issued a death warrant for Al-Awlaki, and the government might kill Hasan as well.

But the real story at Fort Hood was never terrorism. Yes, Hasan shouted Allah Akbar before he shot thirteen people to death people and wounded thirty-two more one year ago this Friday. That's a terrorist sort of thing to say. But for a lonely, socially maladjusted outcast, righteousness and piety can be a comfortable cloak under which to hide. Of course, one needn't be a hardened jihadi to commit an act of terror. Being duped, misguided or just pathetic can be reason enough — and Hasan was all those, as well as scared stupid by his impending deployment to Afghanistan. But whether or not Hasan was an Al-Awlaki puppet, the story at Fort Hood was Fort Hood itself — all war, all the time, a military post that has sent more soldiers to war in Afghanistan and Iraq than any other, and welcomed more home in flag-draped boxes.

Today, the most important living consequence of Hasan's attack has unfolded far away from him, his trial, and the room where terror struck. It is happening in Afghanistan, where, less than a month after the shootings, many of the men and women who survived that very room had landed for year-long deployments — deployments that are just now ending, but the psychological implications of which may last longer for the American military than the memory of any would-be jihad.

Hasan would have deployed there, too, with the 467th Medical Detachment, an Army Reserve combat stress-control team from Madison, Wisconsin. They had been trained to guide soldiers through the psychic maze of battle trauma, but they had lost nearly a quarter of their own comrades before even leaving America — three were killed and six wounded on November 5 of last year. I spent time with them this summer in Afghanistan, where they counseled troops who faced...

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/fort-hood-shooting-anniversary-3482706?src=rss

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