The shooting began around 1:30 p.m., Lt. Gen. Bob Cone said at a news conference. He said all the casualties took place at the base's Soldier Readiness Center, where soldiers who are about to be deployed or who are returning undergo medical screening.[...]
A graduation ceremony for soldiers who finished college courses while deployed was going on in an auditorium at the Readiness Center at the time of the shooting, said Sgt. Rebekah Lampam, a Fort Hood spokeswoman.
Greg Schanepp, U.S. Rep. John Carter's regional director in Texas, was representing Carter at the graduation, said John Stone, a spokesman for Carter, whose district includes the Army post.
Schanepp was at the ceremony when a soldier who had been shot in the back came running toward him and alerted him of the shooting, Stone said. The soldier told Schanepp not to go in the direction of the shooter, he said. Stone said he believes Schanepp was in the theater.
[...]
About a mile from Fort Hood's east gate, Cynthia Thomas, director of Under the Hood Cafe, a local coffee shop and nonprofit military support center, has been calling soldiers and friends on the post to make sure they're OK.
"It's chaotic," Thomas said, as a SWAT team just drove by. "They're just saying that they're under attack they don't know what's going on. ... The phones are jammed. Everybody is calling family members and friends. Soldiers are running around with M-16s."
We don’t know yet what the story was on the three soldiers (one a Major) who did the shooting, but we may be lucky that this hadn’t already happened.Fort Hood is the largest military base in America, has lost more soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan than any other military facility, and after eight years of constant deployments had more than its fair share of highly-stressed soldiers and dependents even before [the] shootings.[...]
Pual Dirksmeyer, a chaplain of the 1st Cavalry Division, spoke of the "emotional carnage" - the broken marriages, the mental afflictions of returning soldiers, the frayed nerves of the families left behind, the occasional suicides, desertions and instances of soldiers suddenly running amock.
[...]
Major Ben Phillips, a psychologist, estimated that 15 to 30 per cent of returning soldiers had psychological problems, mostly post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injuries. He said the soldiers' vulnerability to psychological disorders increased with each deployement, and equivocated when asked if they were being sent back into action before they were fully recovered.
Wives told of their husbands checking beneath their cars for bombs before leaving for KMart, accelerating under bridges or swerving past old tyres on the road as if they were still in Baghdad. One 32-year-old soldier recalled panicking in a crowded mall one day and laying a man out because "it made me feel I was back in the markets of Tikrit".
And I’m sure there is some serious pow-wowing going on right now about how to present what did happen. The major’s name? ABC and CNN are reporting it’s Major Malik Nadal Hasan. (I thought we were fighting them over there so we didn’t have to fight them here? I know, bad form.)
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