Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

He was a trained medical professional, so most likely enlisted as an officer, in all likeliness as a captain. This means his chance of seeing active service was pretty slim, he may have imagined he would see out his commission on a US base.

Also he was a base psychiatrist, what he signed up for, and the reality of war are entirely different, and he was in the unique position of having to hear everything bad about war, all those stories you read about and think "I couldn't cope with that" he had to listen to day in and day out, it's entirely possible that upon hearing he was being deployed he came to the realisation that he would be experiencing first hand the horrors of what he's been helping people deal with for years, and that caused him to break.

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

Or he didn't want to fight his own religion. when I say own religion I mean own people. and when I say own people I mean whatever you know it means.

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

His own people - do you mean Americans? (as he was born and raised in Virginia, and then joined the US Army after High School).

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

perhaps he meant he was unhappy at the thought of shooting fellow muslims .

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

Why is it, people take this out of context, He was a trained American officer, prepared to go to WAR, that is what you train for, whatever his religion, faith, he join the armed forces to defend YOUR country, or look after the vulnerable, YOU don't get scared at the last minute, then go round AND shoot and KILL your countrymen or women do you.

EVEN his family have said, they find it despicable, what he did, :mad:

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

i don't think this debate needs an armchair general .

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

Playing Devil's Advocate, it may have improved his ability to help traumatised veterans, to be able understand first hand what they had experienced. Perhaps, I might be being naive; I don't know.

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

The Americans he shot dead and injured. if he didn't want to go he could have done a few things. such as shooting himself and not the countries soldiers he joined.

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

You mean his own country's army?

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

Yes.

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

Actually to be more precise he didn't want to be deployed to Iraq.;)

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

Which people didn't he want to fight? You said he didn't want to fight his own people, but he was American, which makes Americans his own people. :confused:

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

Hope he gets executed,pronto.DON'T SIT THERE TRYING TO UNDERSTAND, THE **** NEEDS TO BE EXECUTED, SIMPLE REALLY.

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

He didn't get scared at the last minute, he apparently spent ages trying to keep himself from being deployed, including trying to get medical dismissals.

You'll find a huge amount of medical enlists do so thinking they will never see active service and will live out their commissions in a base in a nice safe country just treating those that return from warzones.

I'd say that after hearing some horror stories the last thing on your mind will be "wow, I really think if I experienced this first hand, I'll be able to help people more!" rational thinking will have gone out the window and been replaced by "oh god I really don't want to have to experience that".

He did do a few things, reports are saying he had been trying to get out of deployment for a while, but the US army is extremely short on psychiatrists and they are a vital part of troop services at the FOBs so they wouldn't let him resign his commission. I'd say he couldn't face up to the reality of deployment, snapped and lashed out at the very people who wouldn't let him get out of his deployment.

His choice of targets speaks volumes, there are plenty of places on an army base he could have found huge groups of people to take down, but he chose the readiness centre, the place you go to finalise your deployment that has the power to keep you on base or force you to deploy. Obviously he saw those people as the ones that were forcing him to deploy, and therefore the enemy.

I'm not saying there's any justification in what he did, just that it's not as simple as "I don't want to deploy... lets shoot some people!", there are a ton of steps inbetween that will have caused him to be broken enough to even consider doing something like this. People are all too quick to try to rationalise things, but these were not the actions of a rational person.

Yeah, lets just execute him now.

Or how about first we try to understand, so as procedures can be put in place to ensure that no one ends up doing this again, and THEN we execute him (or otherwise incarcerate him).

You cannot prevent tragedies like this without first realising why they occur, and you can't do that when the guy that did it is lying on a slab infront of you.

Re: 'Thirteen shot dead' at US army base
 

His parents were Palestinian. he was raised a Muslim. "very serious about his religion.� Major Hasan had wanted to marry an equally religious woman"
“He wanted a woman who prayed five times a day and wears a hijab."

He wanted to leave the army some years ago.
was that after 9/11/2001?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/us/06suspect.html