By Eddie Zawaski
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.
When I got my orders to be shipped out to Vietnam, I went into a complete panic. It was one thing to go into a war zone blind, not knowing what to expect, but it was an absolute nightmare when you already knew all the worst of it.
This was the point of the sword that both Major Hasan and I had been placed upon. Both he and I had been placed in positions of supreme responsibility on account of our intelligence and steady good judgement, but when the horror of the war became immediate and immanent, intelligence and judgement vanished. Panic set in.
I didn't know what to do as, I am sure, Major Hasan didn't know either. The real horrors that we had been living and working with so long tumbled over us and screamed at us to do something and do it fast.
Since we had been putting so much effort into disassociating, remaining objective about our PTSD victims and their circumstances, we hadn't given a glimmer of a thought to what we would do when faced with the possibility that we, too, would get in line for horrors of our own. Under such conditions, only the most irrational solutions seem possible. The use of force seemed the only way out.
In my case, the force I used was on myself; I attempted suicide. I had seen so many others pass through my station on their way to a lifetime of reliving war's deepest agony that I thought it better to take the quickest detour to a peaceful end. I did not want a life of veterans hospitals and tranquilizers. It was a stupid decision made by a man incapable of thinking clearly. I have no idea what Major Hasan could have been thinking.
Perhaps he sought to save the soldiers he killed from the horrors of war by dispatching them swiftly and unexpectedly at home. Whatever he may have thought, I'm sure he was certain that he would not survive his deeds, that he, too, was attempting suicide. Any explanation for what he did, no matter how crazy, has to be correct because what was done was done in a panic. When you are nuts, anything goes. When you are going to die, die now.
Both Major Hasan and I survived our moments of extreme panic. He will recover from his wounds, stand trial, be convicted and will have a lifetime to think about the consequences of his deeds.
I have been thinking about mine for forty years. While some may make conclusions about what happened based on Major Hasan's name, religion or origins, I choose to make my own conclusion based on my eerily similar experience during an earlier war. Here's how I see it.
War is the culprit in this tragedy, war and the people who declare it and wage it. It is easy for the Osama bin Ladens and George Bushes of this world to declare wars and prosecute them for they are the sons of wealth and privilege who will never suffer the consequences of the conflicts they seek.
Take away the war and everything is different. I end up going straight through college without being drafted and Major Hasan has a nice career as an army psychiatrist. Osama bin Laden and George Bush get lost in history. No matter what justification there may be for war, any war, the consequence of the horrors of combat are so deep and so lasting that all of us, even the best of us, are ruined by it.
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.
-- (Salem-News.com)
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