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Fort Hood's Bleak World
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The base where a mental-health counselor went on a deadly rampage, a sprawling complex in an economically depressed corner of Texas, is a stark reminder of the emotional tolls of war.
Maybe the most amazing thing about the shootings at Fort Hood today is that nothing like this has ever happened here until now. Fort Hood is one of the largest bases in the U.S., with a population of more than 45,000. It is also the home of the division of the 4th Cavalry that captured Saddam Hussein. Just about anyone who has spent time in the area knows, that’s about as good as the news gets. The landscape of Fort Hood is only slightly more hospitable than that of Iraq—hot, dry, dusty and sparse, Texas as outsiders imagine it—and the neighboring town of Killeen is a sea of chain hotels and chain restaurants, which is actually an improvement over a few decades ago, before the area decided to become family-friendly, when tattoo parlors and pawn shops dominated. The place reflects all too well the state of today’s military, which means that the people you see on the streets, almost always dressed in fatigues, are young, poor, uneducated and, invariably, stressed to the max because they have served or will serve multiple tours in Iraq or Afghanistan. We don’t yet know the full details of what caused a military mental health counselor to open fire, killing 13 and wounding 30. But if most Americans can forget about the wars we are fighting on the other side of the world, the toll they have taken has been inescapable here, even before Thursday’s tragedy.
“We were expecting something like this to happen,” says Cynthia Thomas, director of Under the Hood, a military resisters’ café near the base. “With the multiple deployments, the lack of psychiatric care in huge numbers, this has been building.”
At Shoemaker High School, for instance, 80 percent of the students have at least one parent in the military. Rows of stars stand in for ceiling molding in the hallways, silver for parents serving, and gold for those who have given their lives. When I wrote about the place in 2006, the school was just forming support groups for the three students whose soldier/parents had died that year, and the counselors were desperately looking for people to take in kids who had two deployed parents and were living on their own. The widows of several soldiers were banding together to fight for military benefits that had been promised but were not forthcoming. The boys being shipped overseas, some just barely past their 18th birthdays, weren’t swaggering; they were grim. The disenchantment with military life was palpable almost everywhere you went.
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• Gail Sheehy on Fort Hood’s too-late plan to prevent post-combat stress from getting out of hand Despite the ubiquitous “We support our troops” signs, things have only gotten worse since the days we first learned that soldiers were being sent overseas on the cheap, without proper body armor. “There are so many people who are just so numb to it now,” says Barbara Critchfield, a former counselor at Shoemaker who now works at Live Oak Ridge Middle School nearby. “People are either hardened to it or really sensitive about it.” Those who are “sensitive” remain intensely—defensively—supportive of the war, while others have joined a growing antiwar movement that may have spoken to the alleged shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan. Killeen now has a military resisters’ café, called Under the Hood, where enervated soldiers can go for help. (A similar venue, the Oleo Strut coffeehouse, existed during the Vietnam years in Killeen. The place has never been as one-dimensional as it’s been portrayed.)
Cynthia Thomas, Under the Hood’s director, echoes Critchfield’s words: “We were expecting something like this to happen,” she says. “With the multiple deployments, the lack of psychiatric care in huge numbers, this has been building.” The military has never been known for embracing therapy—it wasn’t manly—and efforts to salve war wounds in Killeen were minimal at best, of the too little, too late variety. (One book for kids written by a local mental-health agency was called Night Catch, and was about a child whose father taught him to find him in Iraq by locating the north star.) The meaning of a PTSD-related shooting on post last year—one soldier killed another—was missed by the national media, but people in Fort Hood understood. “People need to know that there’s a lot of self-medicating going on with drugs and alcohol,” Thomas says. If they didn’t know before, we can assume that, over the next few days, they will.
Mimi Swartz is executive editor of Texas Monthly, and the author, with Sherron Watkins, of Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron. She has been a staff writer at Talk and the New Yorker.
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It's a bit of an error to say that nothing like this has happened before. True, this is the worst mass murder on an Army base, but what you forget is that Ft. Hood is more than just the army base. It is Killeen-Ft.Hood-Copperas Cove (even Temple and Waco). It was in Killeen that 24 people were murdered in the Luby's massacre--the largest mass murder in the us until the Oklahoma City bombing. These towns are tied so tightly together, that before they built all of those gates and added security, they blended into one another.
i can't believe you would choose this moment to write such a smug and better than thou article. and so you know mimi i'm a soldier currently at hood whose been deployed and i'm not poor, uneducated or young for that matter. i enjoy serving my country. my heart goes out to those that were either killed or wounded in today's tragedy
And they made a desert, and called it peace.
Our poor boys and girls in uniform can't even escape the horrors of war, even while in what what once considered the safest place on earth.
Such a tragedy and I do feel for the Muslim community who will suffer because of the insanity of one man.
However, earlier this week, another life was lost at the hands of extremist thinking, the poor beautiful young lady cut down at the prime of her life by her Father.
On the Fort Hood horror, it immediately brought to mind the repeated din of right wingers saying " fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here " Well, THEY are everywhere.
Not to mention the apparent motive being that this animal was lashing out because he was about to be shipped off to Iraq. If we weren't there ?
My deepest condolences to all of the families who have lost this day. The nations hearts are with you all.
Oh, for goodness sakes...give me a break. I've been living in Killeen for twenty years and work in the Killeen school system and have read this sensationalistic tripe from this author before.
Our kids are not war weary zombies, people are not walking around Wal-mart ready to pop off from some PTSD induced psychosis and the citizens of Killeen aren't living in state of permanent shock. Yes, we are part and parcel of the military, which is a life each soldier has CHOSEN. It's a hard life, but 99.9% of Killeenites who are, or were, in the military served honorably and, I hate to burst your bubble, with humor and grace. We don't have the draft any more, so if a soldier doesn't want to be here, he doesn't have to go join some protest group, he simply leaves when his time is up.
Hassan was a nutcase. He might have been a military nutcases but he was a nutcase that could have lived anywhere. He had never even served overseas, from what I've heard, so PTSD isn't part of his equation any more than it was Dylan and Klebold's (Columbine) or any other loose screw out there.
There's a definite unattractive whiff of Austin elitism here and I think you need to reexamine your own biases because it's obvious that you visited Killeen and you didn't like what you saw and that's not exactly unbiased reporting. Killeen is blue collar, but that doesn't make it as dreary and ignorant you seem to think.
This is a tragedy, but articles like this are Blame the Victim...you write like Killeen was just waiting for this to happen and we deserved what we got. This is a very misleading and, frankly, dishonest, article.
A person doesn't have to serve overseas to have PTSD. Just his work with people coming back could have caused PTSD.
As far as bias towards Killeen go, it's probably just as hard for you to see ours as it is for those of us outside the town to know yours. Even though I grew up in Texas, my first real notice of Killeen was the 1991 Luby's shooting. I just think Killeen has a sad reputation and between two shootings, it will for a long time.
Most people in Killeen are, like me, from OUT of Killeen. There are very few natives in proportion to the people who are transplants. That means we have a pretty good idea of what the "outside" world is like.
The shooter worked in a clinical setting for less than a year. He was mentally ill with issues that had nothing to do with military-caused PTSD. Sorry, being in the military and working with the military is not a symptom of mental illness.
I am not blaming the military for any pre-existing conditions this guy had. However, when your main business involves a chance of causing death, incurring injury, dying, or seeing death, rape, and destruction and a rate higher than most humans can ever imagine, than I think you have to accept that stress levels will be more than many people can handle.
Also, you said that this guy could have gotten out if he couldn't handle it, but from what I have read, he wanted out and couldn't get out. I think you are making this seem a lot easier to solve than perhaps it was for him. My brother was in the navy, and I know he couldn't just walk.
Oh, you also mention that you're mostly non-native there. That's not really my point. You live there, so your view is bound to be more defensive than the view of people who never have and probably never will. You have a life invested there. Most of us don't, so the place will look a lot different to us.
Hasan could have fled to Canada, asked for a mental health evaluation and fitness to serve and gotten a medical discharge, said he was an objector and spent his time in confinement until he got his dishonorable discharge, waited to leave honorably when his obligation was up or committed suicide. There were plenty of options for him to leave his situation that didn't involve killing 12 people and wounding 31.
Military members can always walk away; none are in chains. Walking away simply means that there are other consequences that they will endure.
As for having a life invested here, actually I don't. I'll be moving back to my hometown as soon as I can, but that doesn't mean that I think Killeen needs to be diss'd because people who don't like the military thinks the people who serve in it make the town "bleak".
What's the point of this rhetorical flourish? "The landscape of Fort Hood is only slightly more hospitable than that of Iraq-hot, dry, dusty and sparse..."
Iraq, sorry, is home to the Tigris and Euphrates, one of the origins of human civilization and life on our planet--whatever its current state--and cannot be reduced to "inhospitable" and "hot, dry, dusty and sparse."
I see this as another 911 attack if you look at the date,
yesterday was 11- 05- 09 do you see 911 backwords ??
Your an idiot.
This article is a perfect example of what happens when narrow-minded ideologues only converse with like-minded individuals. You get a story that is biased and untruthful. Moreover, regarding poor, uneducated... you only project your own ignorance. The military is a reflection of American society, some educated, some not. However, 99% are professionals and experts in their respective fields. The vast majority of us miss our families, but understand what we must do overseas. Please do not use broad strokes to describe the majority based on the disgruntled minority.
Using a tragedy to grind your political axe. Nice. You stay classy, Mimi Swartz.
Oh come on. This war, and the place the military has been placed in because of it, was a tragedy and a political problem before yesterday.
"The place reflects all too well the state of today's military, which means that the people you see on the streets, almost always dressed in fatigues, are young, poor, uneducated and, invariably, stressed to the max because they have served or will serve multiple tours in Iraq or Afghanistan."
What kind of garbage is this? Our military is mostly a bunch of poor stupid kids? Since I actually KNOW a lot of military folks, I find this statement pretty uneducated in its own right.
I had hoped the Tribune would employ actual journalists, but clearly this has not happened.
This screed is nothing more than a collection tired old cliches based on false stereotypes.
It is true that military members are often young, but they are NOT poor, and NOT "uneducated"!
Killeen is not 'economically depressed'. By every quantitative measure it is a prosperous community with low unemployment and a large middle class.
I'd provide the numbers, but that would be a waste, wouldn't it? The individual who wrote this drivel is clearly not the least bit interested in facts.
The shooter of course, was not 'poor' or 'uneduated'. The Army send him through medical school. He outranked 95% of all military members. There was only one thing unusual about the shooter compared to the rest of the military. The kid who wrote this left that out, of course.
He had never deployed anywhere, let alone 'multiple tours'.
I suggest that 'a military resisters' café§ is not the place to go for objective information about Fort Hood.
This article and this web site are jokes, sad sick jokes.
What a wretched and brainless piece. Shame on you.
Thank you.
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