Suspect in Hood shootings remains in coma

Suspect in Hood shootings remains in coma

By Brett J. Blackledge and Mike Baker - The Associated Press
Posted : Friday Nov 6, 2009 19:00:58 EST

FORT HOOD, Texas — As if going off to war, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan cleaned out his apartment and called another to thank him for his friendship — common courtesies and routines of the departing soldier. Instead, authorities say, he went on the killing spree that left 13 people — 12 service members and one civilian — at Fort Hood, Texas, dead.

Investigators examined Hasan’s computer, his home and his garbage Friday to learn what motivated the suspect, who lay in a coma, shot four times in the frantic bloodletting that also wounded 30. Hospital officials said some of the wounded had extremely serious injuries and might not survive.

The 39-year-old Army psychiatrist emerged as a study in contradictions: a polite man who stewed with discontent, a counselor who needed to be counseled himself, a professional healer now suspected of cutting down the fellow soldiers he was sworn to help.
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Suspect in Hood shootings remains in coma

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Soldiers say carnage could have been worse

By Allen G. Breed and Jeff Carlton - The Associated Press
Posted : Friday Nov 6, 2009 19:52:11 EST

FORT HOOD, Texas — Pfc. Marquest Smith, on his way to Afghanistan in January, was completing routine paperwork about a bee-sting allergy when the sounds erupted.

A loud, popping noise. Moans. The sudden, urgent shout of “Gun!” Smith poked his head over the cubicle’s partition and saw an extraordinary sight: An Army officer with two guns, firing into the crowded room.

The 21-year-old Fort Worth native quickly grabbed the civilian worker who’d been helping with his paperwork and forced her under the desk. He lay low for several minutes, waiting for the shooter to run out of ammunition and wishing he, too, had a gun.

After the shooter stopped to reload, Smith made a run for it. Pushing two other soldiers in front of him, he made it out of the Soldier Readiness Processing center — only to plunge into the building twice more to help the wounded.
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Soldiers say carnage could have been worse

War of words heats up over vets bill blockage

War of words heats up over vets bill blockage

By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Nov 6, 2009 14:26:56 EST

The chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee remains hopeful that a roadblock holding up consideration of an omnibus veterans’ health care bill can be cleared early next week.

Speaking Friday on the Senate floor about a procedural hold that is blocking passage of S. 1963, the Veterans’ Caregiver and Omnibus Health Benefits Act, Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, said “it would be truly disgraceful” if the bill didn’t clear the Senate by Veterans’ Day.

Akaka said the bill represents a bipartisan collection of veterans’ committee proposals packaged into one bill so it could quickly pass. Consideration of the measure is being blocked by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who doesn’t want the measure brought up unless he is given an opportunity to offer amendments.

“This single senator is denying veterans many benefits and services,” Akaka said, including a new caregiver assistant program at families of the “most seriously wounded veterans.”

Akaka said the veterans’ committee “continues to hear about family members who quit their jobs, go through their savings and lose their health insurance as they stayed home to care for their wounded family members.”
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War of words heats up over vets bill blockage

God, the Army, and PTSD

The problem is not that they are Christian. It is more they forget about one is when they see the worst man can do to man. They wonder how the loving God they knew would allow all of it to go on. They wonder if their faith was in a real God or not. They question what they lived their lives believing in and this, this is the worst part of faith when they live through the evil.

God, the Army, and PTSD
Is religion an obstacle to treatment?

Tara McKelvey

When Roger Benimoff arrived at the psychiatric building of the Coatesville, Pennsylvania veterans’ hospital, he was greeted by a message carved into a nearby tree stump: “Welcome Home.” It was a reminder that things had not turned out as he had expected.

In Faith Under Fire, a memoir about Benimoff’s life as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Benimoff and co-author Eve Conant describe his return from Iraq to his family in Colorado and subsequent assignment to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He retreated deep into himself, spending hours on the computer and racking up ten thousand dollars in debt on eBay. Above all, he was angry and jittery, scared even of his young sons, and barely able to make it through the day. He was eventually admitted to Coatesville’s “Psych Ward.” For a while the lock-down facility was his home. He wondered where God was in all of this, and was not alone in that bewilderment and pain.

In a 2004 study of approximately 1,400 Vietnam veterans, almost 90 percent Christian, researchers at Yale found that nearly one-third said the war had shaken their faith in God and that their religion no longer provided comfort for them. The Yale study found that these soldiers were more likely than others to seek mental health treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) when they came home. It was not that these veterans had unusually high confidence in government or especially good information about services at VA hospitals. Instead, they had fallen into a spiritual abyss and were desperate to find a way out. The trauma of war seems to be especially acute for men and women whose faith in a benevolent God is challenged by the carnage they have witnessed.
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http://bostonreview.net/BR34.6/mckelvey.php

Military’s stance on burn pits assailed

Military’s stance on burn pits assailed

By Rick Maze - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Nov 6, 2009 13:01:40 EST

The Air Force bioenvironmental officer who was among the first to warn about the potential effects of open-air burn pits on U.S. troops deployed in the war zones said Friday that he does not believe the findings of a 2008 Army report that discounted the possibility of long-range health risks from exposure to the smoke, fumes and ash.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Darrin Curtis, a biomedical sciences officer who was deployed to Joint Base Balad, Iraq, in 2006 and 2007, told a Senate panel looking into military contracting issues that he believes the Army lacked the necessary data to conclude, as it did in a report from its Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine, that long-term health effects from breaking smoke from burn pits is unlikely.

A new joint study by the Defense Department and Veterans Affairs Department is underway that focuses on comparing the health of 30,000 combat veterans who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and 30,000 veterans who never deployed to see whether there are signs of ill effects from exposure to burn pits. This is similar to post-Vietnam and post-Gulf War studies that took years to complete.

“Although I have no hard data, I believe that the burn pits may be responsible for long-term health problems in many individuals,” Curtis said. “I think we are going to look at a lot of sick people.”
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http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/11/military_burnpits_curtis_110609w/

Slain Fort Hood soldier's family 'completely blindsided'

Slain Fort Hood soldier's family 'completely blindsided'
By Ann O'Neill, CNN
November 6, 2009 2:13 p.m. EST

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
First known Fort Hood fatality is Pfc. Michael Pearson of Bolingbrook, Illinois
Brother says he finds it hard to accept that shooter was fellow soldier
Pearson was set to deploy overseas in January, brother says
Watch a CNN special investigation at Saturday 8 p.m. ET on CNN TV
The CNN Special Investigation Unit drills down on the causes and the impact of the Fort Hood shootings, at 8 p.m. ET Saturday on CNN TV.

(CNN) -- U.S. Army Pfc. Michael Pearson wasn't much with words, his older brother said through tears, but when he picked up a guitar he let his music speak for him.

"He was a genius as far as we were concerned," Kristopher Craig told CNN affiliate WGN-TV in Chicago, Illinois, late Thursday, reeling from the news that his 21-year-old "little kid brother" was among the 12 soldiers and one civilian killed in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas.

Pearson grew up in Bolingbrook, Illinois, with two brothers and a sister. "He was really living his life playing guitar," Craig said. "When he picked up a guitar, we all understood that he was expressing himself."
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http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/06/fort.hood.pearson/index.html