News of the day

 
It is difficult for me to articulate, or even to fully contain, the building fury I feel as I follow the news coverage of the mass shooting at Fort Hood. My current location is nine hours ahead of Texas, so the whole thing began only just before I went to bed last night; it was all over the news when I came in this morning, a mature story before I was even aware of it. It’s unavoidable, then, that my reactions will belatedly trail the events by a significant margin.

To begin with, it seems to me that it would be far too easy and convenient to attribute Hasan’s actions to his ethnicity and religion … and inexcusably lazy and unrealistic to dismiss those things as potential motivations. The man is cited as saying that he didn’t look forward to the prospect of finding himself in conflict with fellow Muslims, which hints that he bought into the notion that we’re engaged in a war against Islam, instead of against hateful, violent and intolerant people who regularly kill more Muslims than we do. At the same time, this incident does not at all have the characteristics of an act of jihad; rather, it looks very much like the kind of vicious, despicable suicide-by-cop — preceded and precipitated by mass murder — demonstrated by the even more vile Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech. (That Hasan is likewise a Virginia Tech graduate is a jarring but not pertinent coincidence.)

Next is the continuing focus on the stress Hasan was facing as he approached an undesirable deployment to Iraq (or to Afghanistan, the reports continue to vary). The stress he was facing. At the risk of being politically incorrect — which, come to think of it, doesn’t bother me at all — I have to wonder, just how big a pussy WAS this guy? People are trying to kill me here (at a distance, by rockets, but they’re still trying), and I have easy duty … and back in the States, a psychiatrist was burdened by unbearable stress because he’d spent so much time listening to returning combat veterans coping with varying degrees of PTSD? Cry me a fucking river.

On top of all that, however, is that I don’t care why he did it. I don’t care. I don’t care that he was religious, or conflicted, or stressed, or didn’t believe in what he was about to be sent to do. Things got tougher for him than he could handle, and he responded by going out to kill as many of his fellow soldiers as possible. The same people who would have saluted him (and some of them may have done so) on his way to the killing ground, the same people who would have looked to him for support in dealing with the things he was too much a coward to face. He’s not a person anymore. He threw that away when he decided to become a murderer. There’s a word for people like him: EVIL. It’s not the only word — treacherous, contemptible and walking filth come to mind — but it sums up the essential nature of what used to be mistaken for a man.

I’ve spent more than my share of time in Soldier Readiness Centers, being processed to and from deployment. It’s a long process, it’s boring, and it’s made marginally better by the professionalism and courtesy of the people running the program. You don’t expect to face imminent death there, and for damn sure you don’t expect it from one of your own.

I’m sorry he was shot. Better if he had been torn to pieces.