Since he survived the shootings, Major Hasan will now have his forty years to relieve the massacre and try to make some sense of it. War just isn’t worth it and this shooting proves it.
(PATAGONIA, Argentina) - Making sense of the Fort Hood shootings will be a difficult process for Americans. While some may swiftly consign this tragedy to the context of a black and white struggle between Islam and Christianity or Arab vs. American, others will look for more complex and more personal explanations.
How Americans and our military interpret and respond to this event will determine whether we have more or fewer tragedies like this in the future.
Thus, I would like to offer a personal and more complex explanation of what happened yesterday, an explanation that rings true for me.
When I read of the circumstances surrounding Maj. Hasan’s recent life, I broke into a cold sweat. His nightmare was my nightmare. I had been down the same road as he forty years earlier.
Like Major Hasan, I had been trained by our military to work with returning combat veterans suffering from PTSD. In my case, it was the Philadelphia Naval Hospital in the wake of the Tet Offensive and stressed-out Marines were arriving in droves every day.
I was the admissions corpsman on ward T-15, the first place a medically evacuated psychatric casualty came to in the US. My job was to listen to their stories and then file a report for the doctor who would care for them in our hospital. It didn’t take long for this job to wear me down.
Day after day, I listened to horrific stories. One Marine had shot his best friend in the back of his head and couldn’t get his buddy’s blood off his uniform. Another had “blown away” an innocent mother and child and had transformed himself into a german shepherd to avoid the responsibility for his action.
Six to ten times a day, I heard stories full of gore told by men unable to bear the burden of what they had done and seen. Even the glassy-eyed catatonics with no stories could not conceal the horror that they brought into my interview room.
The only way I could continue in this job was to disassociate, to refuse to believe that these stories were real or that any of it could happen to me. Then, one day in August of 1968, my armor was stripped away.
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Making Sense of the Tragedy at Fort HoodSalem-News.com