An American Lion

Unbelievable.

Every single aspect of this story gets worse and worse. I don’t condone the idea of blaming this on the man’s religion. I do believe that this was a political statement, made possible by how we have politicized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as being “bad” and “unnecessary” wars to score political points and I think that the overwhelming conclusion here is that this was a blatant act of terrorism.

No matter how the media tries to spin this, and no matter what the government tries to say, Major Nidal Hasan should never have been in uniform. The killing of defenseless U.S. soldiers before his deployment was an act of political defiance. No one walks around with a loaded gun on Fort Hood, save for guards and for military policemen. The level of gun control practiced on a military installation is extremely high. Hasan smuggled his weapons onto post. There’s no negligence involved in that issue, at least, I don’t believe there is.

I don’t understand the media’s obsession with religion, when it should be about behavior. As I have said, the man’s surname, his nationality, and his religion mean nothing to me—he is a terrorist. He is using the killing of defenseless people to make a political point that he couldn’t have made by taking responsibility for his failure as an officer, his choices in life, and his lack of adaptability to military life. There’s plenty of evidence that Hasan’s behavior did not conform to the military and what was expected of him. Many devout Muslims serve in the military and have served in the military without engaging in this kind of bizaare behavior. Hasan had social interaction problems and an inability to fit in. There’s a chapter for failing to adapt to the military lifestyle, and Hasan could easily have pursued that. He could have pursued multiple options. What you will likely hear, and you will hear it soon, is that he had a chain of command in his medical unit that was either negligent or incompetent.

Hasan’s service in a medical unit, and the fact that he has never deployed, makes any claim of his having Post Traumatic Stress Disorder laughable. Did he get PTSD from having to drive back and forth to work through Silver Spring? I would also discount any taunting or harassment that he might claim. Officers in the military speak to each other in whatever way they are comfortable doing so, in private settings. There is professional decorum observed in front of subordinates. The idea that a few enlisted men could taunt Hasan for his religion smacks of insanity. No one talks to Majors that way.

Being assigned to a medical unit is, I am told, radically different from being in a line unit or a regular army support unit. Hasan likely never had to see what it was really like to be a private on Fort Hood, assigned to a manuever unit. He might have had a few duties here and there, and his medical unit probably had to do regular duty in the motor pool and maintain a much higher level of physical fitness than what he was used to at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. With his relatively high pay and rank, his life on Fort Hood was not spartan or desperate unless he chose to make it so. He had no family, was making over $63,000 a year in base pay, and with benefits was probably making close to $75,000 a year or more, and drove a Honda. The vast majority of the soldiers on Fort Hood are lucky if they make a third of that.

Don’t believe the media or the news reports when they say that Hasan was “trapped” and couldn’t get out of the military. Any officer can get out the military if they want to get out. Granted, the repercussions are fairly punitive, imprisonment or jail certainly not being one of them, but there’s no truth to the rumor that he was being forced to deploy. He was afraid of being punished for not wanting to deploy, and took the coward’s way out because he wanted to make it about politics rather than his own shortcomings as an officer.