Ft. Hood: What is the Cost of War?

Fort Hood massacre raises question: What is the cost of war?




Peg Mcentee
The Salt Lake Tribune
11/07/2009




Just a glimpse of that thin face, those intense blue eyes, is heart-rending: another man, barely out of childhood, dead in the war.

Not in Afghanistan or Iraq, but at Fort Hood, Texas, where an Army-trained psychiatrist opened fire, killing 13 soldiers and wounding 30 more who were taking care of the final details before going to the battlefield.

But the death of Aaron Thomas Nemelka, just 19, raises for me an inevitable question: When are we as American citizens going to stop paying the butcher's bill that comes to us all too often from Iraq and Afghanistan?

It's not just the more than 5,000 Americans killed in those wars -- now 53 of them Utahns -- but those who come home wounded in body, mind and spirit. Many fold themselves back into civilian life, but the memory of so many terrifying and ghastly events can never be erased. For some, there can never be healing.

Among the wounded in Thursday's massacre was Utahn Joey Foster, who was headed to Afghanistan and helped pull people to safety despite a bullet to the hip.

The alleged shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, was gunned down by a SWAT officer but survived. The fact that he is a devout Muslim has the Internet afire with the usual accusations that Islam is a violent faith that spawns murderous behavior. In my view, that's just as much a fallacy as saying any faith ineluctably leads to violence.

I spoke with the Rev. Carl Wright, the head chaplain at Hill Air Force Base,

who has twice been deployed to Iraq. In his view, it's not Hasan's faith but his experiences at the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center that might have brought on what Wright calls "compassion stress" -- also known as secondary stress disorder.

"The shooter would have had patient after patient, soldier after soldier, telling him gruesome stories," he said.

"When you're counseling with people, regardless of the helping profession, to a certain extent you feel what they feel," Wright said. "You vicariously experience ... not the identical experience, but pretty darn close, especially when you're a psychiatrist or psychologist."

Such professionals, he said, need to be in therapy themselves, constantly working on their own issues and on self-improvement. "It's an article of their Hippocratic oath; all healers know that they are themselves wounded people."

No one but Hasan can say what motivated him, but news reports say he was deeply troubled by the prospect of going to Afghanistan, that he opposed the wars but did not express anti-American views. His colleagues at Walter Reed thought him an indifferent therapist who once gave a fiery and inappropriate lecture on the Quran. The reports also say he was quiet and apparently had few friends, although a former president of the Muslim mosque in Killeen, Texas, where Hasan worshipped, called him a "very gentle person."

It's worth remembering that much the same was said about Sulejman Talovic, the Bosnian immigrant who killed five people at Salt Lake City's Trolley Square in 2007 and was killed himself. As a child, he and his family were caught up in the war in Bosnia, and it's been speculated that he, too, was a victim of post-traumatic stress.

In the dozen other mass shootings in the United States since 1991, none of the killers were Muslim: think of the two teenagers who in 1999 killed 13 classmates and a teacher and wounded 26 others before committing suicide at Columbine High School.

So we can acknowledge that we live in a time and world periodically stunned by violence. We must honor the courageous men and women who put themselves in harm's way to protect this nation.

But here's what worries me: even as the Iraq war winds down, President Barack Obama is debating whether to send tens of thousands more troops into Afghanistan.

We must ask, "To what end?" To try to change a corrupt government and contain the Taliban? To rout al-Qaida, even though its influence extends across the Middle East and in Africa? And despite the fact that Afghanis view coalition troops as an army of occupation in a nation that never has tolerated such forces since Alexander the Great?

And we must ask, "At what further cost?"


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Dear Ms Mcentee,



At what cost you ask, is it too much? I would suggest the cost should never be too high, if what you are fighting for is the right. If what you are doing is not occupying but preventing further war, preventing further deaths of Americans, preventing more cataclysmic events from unfolding - then no cost should be considered too high.


What cost is too high when placed against the life of your child, or even more importantly, your nation, and I would offer that our nation is more important than any one of us, for it must exist to protect each of our grandchildren, provide a home to those who flee war and persecution, it must continue or everything is lost.


It is too much Ms. Mcentee; only if you do not believe what we are doing is important for us, for the future of Afghanis, for the world. If it is not important, then one person wounded is too much, let alone killed.


You offer a question, and I would respond - why do you so oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why do you believe the people of Afghanistan so unworthy of freedom and opportunity - where women may go to school and learn, rather than shuttered away in a room, hidden under a veil else they be killed in the street or have acid thrown on them. Why are they so unworthy of our help? Why are the Arabs of Iraq so unworthy of freedom and opportunity? Why do you value the life of a non-Arab above that of an Arab, why do you believe THEY are less than WE, and WE should simply allow them to wallow in their pitiful shithole, while we close our ears to the evil perpetrated upon them. When is too much Ms. Mcentee - when do we step in.


Al qaida may well be stretched across the globe, but the head of that snake sits between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and we have a duty and a responsibility to send him to hell as soon as we can. When he is gone, al qaida will remain, but will never again be the same threat it is today. We will then systematically find and kill those who follow that doctrine of death, and give each of them the opportunity they so thrill to have - a chance to meet their maker, in hell.


How much is too much Ms. Mcentee? It depends upon how you view this conflict. Is it narrow and myopic where you see the loss of one American as a great tragedy - which it is; or do you see it in the macro - we are at war with an evil greater than the acts of one Islamicized fanatic in Texas. He did not act because he heard terrible things Ms Mcentee - if that is the case we have several hundred thousand men and women who will return to the US and kill. Most of them lack the training and skill sets to help them deal with the issues as the murderer in Texas had after years of medical and psychological training. All those hours listening to sick and wounded people at Walter Reed did not drive him back to Islam. Watching the wounded come in Ms Mcentee did not force him to shed his American clothing, give away all he owned, gather several weapons, load them, go to a military base and murder American soldiers as he yelled 'ALLAHU AKBAR' ...


That Ms. Mcentee is what we are fighting - wherever they might be, and unfortunately more of them are here, and we do so, to protect people like you and me can live in relative peace until one of these Islamic killers attacks a school bus or a mall.  We are fighting them to kill an ideology at its head - and while it will live on, it will not be as virulent - and will, in time, turn into that which it is, a death cult, easily killed off.  We are there Ms Mcentee to provide an opportunity to those people, the ones you do not believe deserve one - because we are that type of people, and we believe in choice and freedom for all people, not just for white Americans.













 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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