Demystifying Hasan in Three Parts
1. Is it unheard of for soldiers in an army to kill their fellow fighters?
In 2005, American soldiers killed Captain Phillip Esposito and 1st Lieutenant Louis Allen by placing a Claymore mine on Esposito’s office window at Forward Operating Base Danger in Tikrit, Iraq.
The euphemism “friendly fire” — can there be a such thing as friendly gunfire? — refers to when soldiers in the “fog of war” mistakenly or negligently kill their fellow fighters or allies. The most prominent example is the 2004 death of Pat Tillman, a former NFL star. That is death was by friendly fire was initially covered up by the military.
Some friendly fire killings are considered more derelict than others. From wikipedia:
In the Tarnak Farm incident of April 18, 2002, four Canadian soldiers were killed and eight others injured when U.S. Air National Guard Major Harry Schmidt, dropped a laser-guided 227-kilogram (500 lb) bomb from his F-16 jet fighter on the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry conducting a night firing exercise near Kandahar. Schmidt was charged with negligent manslaughter, aggravated assault, and dereliction of duty. He was found guilty of the latter charge, was fined nearly $5,700 in pay and was reprimanded. During testimony Schmidt blamed the incident on his use of “go pills” (authorized mild stimulants), combined with the ‘fog of war’.
The point of relating these is that there is a history of military personnel killing people on the same side. There is a clear range of intentionality, from the most purposeful to the accidental. Such “fratricide” has a long history within the US military.
Both intentional and accidental killings are usually motivated by self-preservation. Fragging is often directed against unpopular commanders and especially those who put their soldiers in danger’s way unnecessarily. Friendly fire in the “fog of war,” as with Pat Tillman, is motivated by a will to self-preservation.
2. This bring us the case of Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 and wounding over 30 American soldiers before they could deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. Is it much more shocking than these acts?
Before he himself can explain the Fort Hood murder spree, two major narratives and one lesser one has emerged. One version is that Hasan has been trying desperately to get out of military service and wanted to avoid deployment to Afghanistan (or is it Iraq?) at all costs. Some speculate what he heard from treating veterans impacted him. This is supported by the fact that he retained an attorney and sought to buy out the remainder of his contract with the military, which was an obligation due to their funding his education. This was rejected by the military, and he was to be deployed to a place he deeply resented.
The other story is that he became a Muslim extremist who was driven in opposition to US foreign policy — not that those two are equivalent by any means since there are people of all religious faiths and non-faiths who deeply oppose America’s imperialism. But, I digress. This story is bolstered by accounts from former classmates who claim he was against the wars. There is a quote from a chatroom conversation in which a Nidal Hasan shows sympathy towards suicide bombers, and compares them to a soldier to sacrifices his life by jumping on a grenade. And it recently is being alleged he yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he fired. Some, mainly Fox News pundits and their ilk, argue the cause is “jihadism.”
The other, less prominent story-line, is that he was angered by anti-Arab and anti-Muslim harassment he received from his fellow soldiers.
A look at the facts — including the fact that he’s been in the military for two decades, having joined right out of high school — seems to suggest the first story is the best. Also, reports that he mainly targeted particular individuals — while spilling the blood of “collateral damage” — give clue to his motives. If he were driven by religious zeal and faith, there would be no individualized targeting. Thus, this is something like fragging. In light of his legal efforts to leave the military, this attack should be seen as in line with the rich tradition of military fratricide for the sake of self-preservation.
What am I suggesting? I am not saying Hasan is therefore guilt-free or that his victims deserved to die, but that his actions, besides being the biggest such base shooting in history, fits within a long-established history of fratricide in military history. It is not a function of his identity.
And though I think that no one should serve in wars of occupation and oppression, American Arabs and Muslims have served in the military through these wars to such an extent that the Fort Hood killings are clearly extremely marginal. As Chapman points out, if religion was the motive, “incidents like this would be common, not rare.”
This analysis so far does raise an immediate objection. What about the fatalistic nature of his attack? A self-preservation explanation does not account for the fact that he knew he was going to die. Perhaps he feared the trauma and cognitive dissonance of serving in Afghanistan more than he feared death. And it is possible that his religiosity made him accept this fate — which is very different than saying religion or his identity motivated him.
Or, there could be another explanation, he himself was driven to insanity by what he feared about going to Afghanistan.
Unlike the growing number of soldiers taking suicide as the way out, perhaps being “othered” by his fellow soldiers even after two decades in the service pushed him to direct his anger outward through violence. As one columnist suggested, he “was an isolated, angry misfit with grievances and guns.”
3. I myself place this shooting spree within the context of the general sentiment of war fatigue, which gives it a sort of significance that friendly fire does not have, but that fragging might. The state of the wars is that few see them as right. They are seen as problems the country must extricate itself from; yet it cannot seem to pull it off because not everyone is on board. There are other intertial forces: national pride; vested interests in war; ideological warriors who are still fighting a straw-man ghost; and incompetent planted leaders.
Everyone sees Afghanistan as a ridiculously doomed adventure; some of us saw that it was mistaken from the start. Though I accept the United States had just cause to retaliate against the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 attack, they did not have the right to level countries and collectively punish populations in doing so.
I sympathize with those who lost loved ones on all sides and want to see them as martyrs. However, I cannot help but see that what’s at stake — the government of a landlocked and backwards country wracked by decades of civil war — has simply meant that all the killing has amounted to a waste of lives. As cruel and barbarian as the Taliban is, the Afghans will need to sort this out over the long haul. The only legitimate and grounded change will come from below.
Iraq was a war started on false pretenses, and has produced some good — though at a cost of one million Iraqi lives is far from worth it.
Americans long ago felt they exercised the post-9/11 psychic need for vengeance and their military acted out against targets, taking down innocent bystanders in the process. Was Major Hasan acting that much differently? Was he not acting out of what he felt were just motives, his own grievances and attempts to leave the military, and out of a similarly skewed sense of self-preservation? He, like Americans after 9/11, were driven by a fear of danger of the unknown, and uncertainty of their safety and sanity.
It is too bad that quagmires, by definition, are easier to enter than to leave. The entrance into Iraq and Afghanistan now seemsrash and destructive, terms one would have to use to discuss the Fort Hood shooting.
The difference is Hasan was stopped. The American military-industry complex is on auto-pilot, crunching lives and spitting them out along the way.
Hasan’s spree cannot be divorced from this context, at the very least seen in parallel. It cannot be treated as some mono-causal act based only in his religion, ethnic identity, insanity, or grievances. To some extent, our times are insane, and this is the more urgent problem to which we need attend. We must condemn murderous logic, whether acted on by a lone gunman or as the basis for state policy.
My analysis does not trivialize the lost lives and injuries sustained. In fact, I imbue them with a level of meaning and significance the media have not; their mourning is a false one, an routinized one. They will soon shift their attention to the newest hot story. Their insincerity is marked by their lack of concern for underlying causes; they express this by false, ad-driven outrage; just as Obama’s ironic use of the word “horrific” projects that he is against horror. When the captain of two military occupations condemns senseless violence, it is loaded with insincerity.
My mourning is not just for Fort Hood’s victims, but for the victims of the military they serve, and their fallen compatriots forced to fight wars of elite-level choice. To isolate their victimhood and suffering is to bring about more in other places.
This shooting was a sign of the times, about a war less and less people think is worth the sacrifice. Under my reading here, the underlying policy frameworks should be changed, or else more lives will inevitably go to waste.
Unlike the major Arab-American and Muslim organizations, I do not just condemn the killing spree, but I condemn the whole culture and industry of institutionalized violence Fort Hood is but one piece of. Major Hasan was part of that and acted under a similarly deadly logic of the righteousness of self-preservation.
