My heart goes out to everyone at Ft. Hood. I grew up in an enlisted man’s family and lived on Army bases in Kansas, Germany, and California. I know how strong and tight base housing communities can be, especially when there is a war on. When tragedy struck a family, it traumatized us all, and our grief knew no limits of race, religion, or gender.
Almost before the dead were counted, right wingers started stirring up Islamophobia and attacking the “political correctness” of accepting Muslims in the U.S. military. They are, of course, not interested in an accurate diagnosis of what went wrong, but in using this tragedy to advance their own hate-filled agenda. Unfortunately for them, not enough straight, white Christian male citizens are volunteering for the military, so our military needs the people these bigots hold in contempt: the racial, ethnic, and religious minorities who enlist because they want to defend their country, as well as people who seek a stable income, an education, and even sometimes, a warm bed and a roof over their heads.
An accurate diagnosis of what went wrong might help us avoid future tragedies and give better support to the diverse women and men in the military who defend the country.
Nidal Hassan, according to those who knew him, enlisted to serve his country and did so for over a decade. Then, apparently depressed about having to deploy in a war he opposed, he snapped and slaughtered those he swore to serve and care for. We are left guessing why his supervisors missed his early distress, and why his clear signals of anguish were not enough for someone to have intervened. What he did is inexcusable and horrible; he will face the consequences. He had other choices he did not make, but, if we are to understand how to prevent future acts, it helps to try to understand how he came to conceive and execute such a massacre.
Those who teach clergy the skills of pastoral care warn them about the trauma of listening to accounts of unimaginable horror. Counselors have to accompany people through their worst nightmares and into the inky corners of a person’s most horrifying motives and deeds. Therapists are supposed to have back-up counseling help to make sure they are not overwhelmed by what they hear. Their supervisors monitor them and recommend a break or therapy if they seem to be sliding into PTSD.
Early in my career, I worked with a team that counseled high school students. Most of their problems were routine and not so hard to solve. Sometimes, though, one of them would tell us about horrifying violence in their families: repeated rape, brutalizing beatings, burns, broken bones, or other unspeakable acts of torture. California laws required us to report the abuse to the authorities. However, unless we thought their lives were at risk and they needed immediate removal, the backlog on case investigations meant we had to help them figure out how to hang on at home until they had an alternative. These kids never left me unchanged; I would feel a rage at their parents like a hot coal in my solar plexus. I also profoundly respected their ability to survive.
I don’t think I could have listened all day to such stories, which is probably more like what a military psychiatrist has to do in a war. What must Hassan have felt, listening hour after hour to people traumatized by a war against people like his own family, against people of his own faith? What accumulation of frustration, outrage, horror, and helplessness drove him to his lethal act?
Hassan thought the Iraq War was wrong. He was in good company. Religious objections to the war went well beyond the pacifist Quakers and Mennonites. Most religious people belong to traditions of just war, and many of their leaders objected. Augustine was the main architect of this idea for Christians, but he thought even just war was a lesser evil. Christians who fought in a just war or who killed in self-defense had to do penance because shedding human blood, even of an enemy, was a sin. Penance was therapy for a sick soul, and nothing harmed a soul more than having to kill someone, which is why war must be a last resort. It harms, deeply, those asked to fight, and it has to be worth the cost to them, their families, and their societies.
During the Civil War, when the federal government issued the nation’s first draft, it also formally recognized conscientious objectors for religious reasons. Until 1971, only members of certain religious pacifist groups could qualify for conscientious objector status. Gillette v. United States broadened the CO criteria to include non-religious “deeply held beliefs.” However, pacifist religions are few, and the just war religious folks in the armed forces are just out of luck.
U.S. military regulations for conscientious objectors require objection to “war in any form.” However, the Nuremberg Principles determined that following orders was not an adequate defense for prosecuting in an immoral war. Lt. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to refuse to deploy to Iraq, actually enlisted after college to fight, until he studied the war in depth and determined it was illegal. He decided he would be a war criminal if he went and ordered troops to fight. The Army refused his request to serve in Afghanistan instead.
If soldiers refuse to deploy in a war they believe is unjust or illegal, they face sanctions, prison, and dishonorable discharges. Many have gone to jail rather than fight in Iraq or Afghanistan, deserted, or killed themselves. Watada avoided jail because of double jeopardy, sat at a desk job for a couple of years in legal limbo, and was allowed to leave the military in September with a less than honorable discharge.
Conscientious Objection regulations protect religious freedom and freedom of conscience for only a tiny minority of those in military service. Given that the majority of members of every major religious group, except the Mormons and Evangelicals, oppose the Iraq War, current CO regulations do not protect the religious freedom of the majority of Americans.
When the U.S. government decides to launch a war that violates the international agreements it has signed and orders the women and men of the military to prosecute an unjust and illegal war, soldiers must have the right of conscience in war. According to the documentary “Sir, No Sir,” soldiers denied this option in Vietnam started fragging their officers, rather than carry out orders, and pilots began to refuse to fly missions. Long before McNamara’s pathetic and paltry mea culpa, troops on the ground understood the immorality and futility of that war. Desperate and trapped, some turned to killing their own.
We need to allow soldiers to object to a particular war. If anyone was a candidate for such status, it was Nidal Hassan. If he’d had it, we might have been spared the massacre at Ft. Hood and all its anguish and sorrow.
I would refer you to the Bill Moyers Journal program that aired on November 6. It a profound message about what war does to soldiers.
Thanks! I was not able to watch that episode so will download it. Soldiers of Conscience is a great documentary about Iraq.
My father was a WW II vet who did two tours in Vietnam, so I have some personal experience of the impact of war on vets and families of vets.
I’m always struck by how language gets used to guide violence and define victimhood after a tragedy like the one at Fort Hood. Initial descriptions referred to Hasan as “a gunman”. Soon Senator Lieberman was calling for an investigation of Hasan’s links to al-Qaeda. It made me think about how quickly we can repudiate one of our own–an American soldier, and also, ironically, a psychiatrist. What makes his religious faith explain his violence, any more than his rank, profession, age, or sex?
And even more sadly, one gets the feeling that the families of American soldiers have had to keep up a Disneyland fairytale that all is honky dory so that the rest of us are not forced to face or absorb the costs of these wars, illegal wars which have been forced down the throat of thousands of American families.
Hasan may have had a nervous breakdown and gone postal. He will no doubt be put on trial and held accountable for the death of 14 American soldiers. But who is accountable for the death and trauma suffered by thousands of American soldiers, and countless thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians? There’s still no accountability for the WMD lies for which so many Americans and others have given up life and limb in Iraq. Where is the real rage?
People go nuts each day. Just as I do not discriminate against those of the Muslim faith – I ask you not to make excuses for military conselors. This man is a nut, just as there are white male nuts that do horrible things. But please do not classify this man in a group – any group. This man should have taken a plane to Belize, found the nearest cabana and ordered a pina colada. He had the funds to do so but he didnt. Instead he murdered. He is a murderer. I do not look at him as a counselor, a muslim, an arab. I look at him as a nutjob murderer…and so should you.
Oh, thank you. Thank you for pointing out that the tragedies are so many. They include the destruction of the 13 families who lost a member and the 30+ more who must deal with an injured one, the waste of the telegraphing of Hasan’s acts that went unnoticed or unheeded, and the tragedy of not listening to those who are putting everything on the line. And thanks to Amir, for pointing out ‘how quickly we can repudiate one of our own–an American soldier’. Thanks for this piece, Rita.
If Nidal Hassan was callous enough to take his money and run, abandoning his commitments to the military and his family, he would not have enlisted to serve his country in the first place, and he certainly would not have done the long and difficult training to become a psychiatrist and been one for so long. Most moral people get into trouble because of intense inner conflicts they cannot resolve, not because they are cold blooded murderers. Pulitzer prize winning writer Richard Rhodes’ Why They Kill is an insightful, fascinating study of one sociologist’s struggle to understand his own criminal family and how people become violent–they are not all alike but they are pushed into violence in stages. Understanding this can help us make interventions to reverse the process in many people.
Pumla Gobodo Madikizela, whom I worked with, is a social psychologist at the U of Capetown and was a member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She does a fascinating analysis of Eugene de Kock, the Eichmann of South Africa, nicknamed \prime evil\ by the press. In her book, A Human Being Died that Night, she seeks to understand how a man who created Vlakplass, the assassination training camp, and who was in prison for 150 consecutive life sentences for murder, could feel regret. He asked to apologize to every family he had harmed, and his knowledge of other’s crimes made him crucial to the ability of the TRC to know if people were telling the truth about what they did when they applied for amnesty. He also turned people in so they had to confess. While her own family was deeply harmed by apartheid, she came to feel an ambivalent compassion for de Kock and could see him as a human being.
So, thanks Amir and Reba, for insisting Hassan is a human being, worth trying to understand, if not to save or excuse him, at least to understand how a human being could do what he did.
thank you rita.
Thanks Rita. There is so much division, so much strife among all of us. To make Nidal Hassan one more person for us to marginalize, turn against, hate, demand a pound of his flesh, will not help anyone. Obviously his crime is despicable but we must all take responsibility for allowing the level of violence that is now accepted in our society. Let us be about building bridges and not about creating more reasons to be against others.
Thank you for your insight into the man instead of the smokescreen he himself put up of religious indignation.
Nidal Hassan’s motivation was simply fear, a fear that was exacerbated by the accounts of his patients.
I believe he could not face his cowardice and used the Muslim faith as his way out; then used the shooting spree to feel heroic rather than cowardly.
I further believe that the military would like to paint him as a terrorist to smoke-screen their unresponsiveness to his pleas.
Suzanne,
I wish it were so easy to separate religion from feelings and behavior. People can do the very same thing, like protest a war, for different reasons. And most people have mixed motives for what they do. I agree Hassan was definitely motivated by fear, but probably also rage against the hatred of Muslims he experienced, humiliation at feeling powerless to change anything, grief for all he heard from soldiers, love for his family here and in the Middle East, and probably even more things he can’t articulate.
A Canadian Muslim committed to denouncing jihadi Muslims insists Hassan is a terrorist. (http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Hasan+jihadi+islamist/2205239/story.html)
Fatah may be right, but I don’t think Hassan started out that way. It appears he didn’t get serious about being religious until he was beginning to fall apart and his parents died. Now, they are saying he might have been psychologically unstable all along (for ex. he supposedly fainted at the sight of blood and picked a medical specialty in psychiatry to avoid exposure to blood).
If people take their religion seriously, they are usually motivated by it. For most religious people, what they personally believe is less important than what they do for their families, communities, and the poor. Christianity and Islam are a little odd among the world’s religions in emphasizing individual belief, esp since people’s ideas shift and grow over time, which is important to becoming smarter and wiser. I’ve found the more rigid and intense people’s faith, the less they are teachable, no matter how smart they are–this is true of atheists like Hitchens and Harris, who fiercely hate their own odd idea of religion. Harris even advocates preemptive nuking of Muslim states–sounds like another kind of terrorism to me