10 Suicides a Month at Ft. Hood -- War Stress Is Taking Soldiers to the Brink

The shooting tragedy at Fort Hood on Friday points to a much larger problem of combat
stress and overdeployment in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By Dahr Jamail, Asia Times via AlterNet. Posted November 10, 2009.

Editor's Note: This Tuesday, President Obama will attend a memorial service for the
shootings at Ft. Hood last Friday. He would do well to consider that the war policies
he's continuing, extending the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, are the underlying
cause of acts of madness and desperation by soldiers at Ft. Hood. As Dahr Jamail
illustrates in the article below, the military post is averaging 10 suicides a month so
far this year.

PHOENIX, Arizona - While investigators probe for a motive behind the mass shooting
at the Fort Hood military base in Texas last Thursday, in which an army psychiatrist
killed 13 people, military personnel at the base are in shock as the incident "brings
the war home".

"We're all in shock," said Specialist Michael Kern, an active-duty veteran of the Iraq
war, told Inter Press Service (IPS) by telephone. Kern, who is based at Fort Hood,
served in Iraq from March 2007 to March 2008. "Every single person that I've talked to
is in shock," Kern added.

"I'm surprised this hits so close to home, but at the same time, I knew something
like this was going to happen given what else is happening - the war is coming home,
and something needs to be done. Innocent civilians are being wounded and killed here
at home by soldiers, and this is completely unacceptable," he said.

The gunman, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, entered a Soldier Readiness Center (SRC), where
troops get medical evaluations and complete paperwork just prior to being deployed to
Iraq or Afghanistan, and opened fire with two non-military issued handguns.

Hasan killed 13 people, 12 of them soldiers, and wounded over 30 others, before being
shot four times by a civilian police officer. Hasan is now in stable condition in a
local hospital, where he is in the custody of military authorities.

Colonel John Rossi, a spokesman at Fort Hood, told reporters that Hasan was "stable
and in one of our civilian hospitals". Rossi added, "He's on a ventilator."

Hasan, 39, joined the army just out of high school. He had counseled wounded war
veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, and was transferred to Fort Hood in April. He had
recently received orders to deploy to Afghanistan.

His cousin, Nader Hasan, has said in media interviews that Hasan was very reluctant
to be deployed overseas and had agitated not to be sent. "We've known over the last
five years that was probably his worst nightmare," he said.

Responding to the allegations in the media that the attack was based on his Muslim
faith, Kern told IPS that he did not know of anyone on the base who felt this was the
case.

"We all wear the same uniform here, it's all green. I've seen the news, but most folks
here assume it's just a soldier that snapped," Kern explained. "I have not talked to
anyone who thinks what he did has anything to do with him being a Muslim. There are
thousands of Muslims serving with dignity in the US military, in all four branches."

Fort Hood, located in central Texas, is one of the largest US military bases in the
world. It contains up to 50,000 soldiers, and is one of the most heavily deployed to
both occupations.

Tragically, Fort Hood has also born much of the brunt from its heavy involvement in the
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Fort Hood soldiers have accounted for more
suicides than any other army post since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This year
alone, the base is averaging over 10 suicides each month - at least 75 have been
recorded through July of this year alone.

In a strikingly similar incident on May 11, 2009, a US soldier gunned down five fellow
soldiers at a stress-counseling center at a US base in Baghdad.

Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told
reporters at a news conference at the Pentagon at the time that the shootings had
occurred in a place where "individuals were seeking help".

Mullen added, "It does speak to me, though, about the need for us to redouble our
efforts, the concern in terms of dealing with the stress ... It also speaks to the
issue of multiple deployments."

Commenting on the incident in nearly parallel terms, US Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates said that the Pentagon needs to redouble its efforts to relieve stress caused by
repeated deployments in war zones that is further exacerbated by limited time at home
in between deployments.

The condition described by Mullen and Gates is what veteran health experts often refer
to as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

While soldiers returning home are routinely involved in shootings, suicide and other
forms of self-destructive violent behaviors as a direct result of their experiences in
Iraq, we have yet to see an event of this magnitude on a base in the US.

To many, the shocking story of a soldier killing five of his comrades did not come as
a surprise considering that the military has, for years now, been sending troops with
untreated PTSD back into the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to an Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis, reported in the Denver
Post in August 2008, more than "43,000 service members - two-thirds of them in the army
or army reserve - were classified as non-deployable for medical reasons three months
before they deployed" to Iraq.

In April 2008, the Rand Corporation released a stunning report revealing that, "Nearly
20% of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000
in all -- report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet
only slightly more than half have sought treatment."

President Barack Obama, speaking during an event at the Department of the Interior in
Washington, said that the mass shooting at Fort Hood was a "horrific outburst of
violence". He added: "It is horrifying that they [US soldiers] should come under fire
at an army base on American soil."

Victor Agosto, an Iraq war veteran who was discharged from the military after publicly
refusing to deploy to Afghanistan, has had first-hand experience with the SRC at Fort
Hood, where he too was based.

"I knew there would be a confrontation when I was there, because the only reason to do
that process is to deploy," Agosto, speaking to IPS near Fort Hood, explained.

Agosto was court-martialed for refusing an order to go to the SRC to prepare to deploy
to Afghanistan.

"I was court-martialed for refusing the order to SRC in that very same building. I
didn't enter the building, but I didn't go in because I was refusing the process,"
Agosto continued. "It's a pretty important place in my life, so it's interesting to
me that this happened there."