Honoring the fallen

It’s a sad irony that Major Nidal Hassan should go postal at the soldier readiness center at Fort Hood, Tex., and murder 13 and wound 29 more just a few days before Veterans Day.

Our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines signed up for the risks involved in combat and combat support: separation from loved ones; sand and rocks (or tropical jungles); the constant adrenaline surge that comes from being on the alert 24/7; fake food; rudimentary sanitary facilities; exotic insects, arachnids and reptiles. And of course, snipers, suicide bombers and IEDs.

(That’s why they call it going into harm’s way, and these men and women, from all backgrounds, go in harm’s way because that’s their job.)

They did not sign up for one of their own strapping on two unregistered (non-military) handguns and opening fire on them (they were unarmed) on an Army post as they were preparing to deploy to hostile territory.

That President Obama had to go to the memorial service for the 13 less than two weeks after honoring 18 soldiers killed in Afghanistan at Dover AFB (a Commander-in-Chief duty that was declined by Obama's predecessor—the CiC who started these wars in 2003 and shortly thereafter declared "Mission Accomplished!") says to me that it’s all starting to look like hostile territory.

We’re hearing a lot of stuff about Hassan—that he’s had leanings toward radical Islamist fervor, that he showed signs of instability and activities that someone should have noticed and acted upon (well, apparently people did notice, but action was not taken), that he did not want to deploy to Afghanistan (which would have been the first in-country experience of his Army career), that he objected to Muslims going to areas where they might be obliged to kill other Muslims.

Well, those last two just set my teeth on edge.

When you take the king’s shilling you don’t have the right to choose your deployment; you go where they send you and do the job you’re trained to do. My war was Vietnam, and let me just say that a vast percentage of grunts over there—if offered a choice—would never have landed at Ton Su Nhut, much less spent 13 months in country. But there they were, picking leeches off their limbs, running LRRPs and taking mortar rounds from the VC over there and  guff from people over here.

That, of course, was a draftee military and this is volunteer. But all the more reason to do your duty as laid out for you by the chain of command. You volunteered, for God’s sake, you had a pretty good notion that the job was dangerous when you took it.

It saddens me deeply that 13 soldiers who should at least have lived until deployment were mowed down in the madness of the readiness center last Thursday.

I have a friend, a bell ringer in the UK. Sunday her troupe rang muffled bells (some centuries old) for Remembrance Sunday. And today she’ll ring again for the Armistice Day commemoration. I hope her band will include the dead of Fort Hood in their thoughts.