ANDERSON — A gunman who killed 13 people on a Texas Army base on Thursday likely was spurred on by factors more than stress over his upcoming deployment, local veterans said Friday.

When Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan went on a shooting spree in the Soldier Readiness Center at Fort Hood, he might have been acting out for reasons that didn’t involve his deployment, said Scott Reske, a retired Marine who served in Iraq, among other missions.

“I think we’re going to find out there’s a lot more to this guy than just a soldier deployed,” said Reske, who also serves as one of Madison County’s representatives in the Indiana General Assembly. “I think we’re going to find out that he was mentally ill or that he had some malicious motive. I think there’s going to be more to it than just stress.”

Most soldiers deployed to combat zones can handle the stress because they have been well trained for a certain mission, Reske said.

“The U.S. military does a good job of training everybody, and that eliminates a lot of anxiety,” he said.

Vietnam-era veteran Harold Barkdull agreed that most soldiers’ pre-deployment stress is mitigated by the training and intense preparations they undergo.

“Usually the bulk of the vets that are being deployed are gung ho,” said Barkdull, who started Stepping Stones, an Anderson shelter for veterans. “They’re schooled, trained and everything else to serve our country to the best of their ability, and they take pride in trying to achieve in that endeavor.”

Barkdull said Hasan’s shooting spree was surprising considering the camaraderie that most soldiers experience with each other.

“For somebody that you feel is supposed to be covering your back to actually turn on you and your comrades is mind-boggling,” he said. “The main thing is soliders don’t fight for themselves, they fight for their comrades. I think the main atmosphere there was camaraderie, and that is the main component you have in the military. To me, it’s unexplainable why some people snap at different things.”

That same camaraderie is what Barkdull said would help those at Fort Hood heal after Thursday’s shooting.

“The main healing from Fort Hood will come from within,” he said. “They’re all family. That’s that trust level they have for each other.”

Authorities on Friday were looking into Hasan’s motives, noting that he is a practicing Muslim and a former co-worker said Hasan had expressed some anger about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the morning of the shooting, a man identified by a store owner as Hasan was seen wearing traditional Middle Eastern clothing in video surveillance footage from a convenience store, and Hasan had given copies of the Quran to his neighbors.

Soldiers at the scene of the shooting report Hasan had shouted “Allahu Akbar!” — Arabic for “God is great!” — before he started shooting.

Anderson resident Don McAllister, who interviews veterans for the National Veteran’s Historical Archive, said Hasan should not have been discriminated against in the Army because he was a Muslim, but McAllister believes the shooter had religious motives.

“In this case, I don’t believe it was PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder, suffered by many soldiers who return from war),” McAllister said. “He had a plan in his mind.

“He was more Timothy McVeigh than he was al-Qaida.”

PTSD affects soldiers more when they return from war than right before they are deployed, McAllister said.

“I really see more of that when people come back from a situation and they’re not properly assimilated back in again,” he said.

Reske said he had experienced some lingering mental effects from his tour in Iraq.

“I think anybody who’s been deployed and has been in combat is going to come back and have something,” he said. “Maybe hyper-vigilance, you’re easily startled, you go into that adrenaline mode real easily. Anybody that’s had any combat experience is going to come back and have that.

“I know I was very hyper-vigilant. I went from sleep to instant hyper alertness.”

Barkdull said he was inspired to start Stepping Stones when a friend of his suffered from PTSD without being diagnosed.

“I saw the change in him,” Barkdull said. “I felt I was so fortunate that I did not have to be confronted with some of the things other soldiers were. There’s some people who come into Stepping Stones that I see that I think, ‘Man, this is a time bomb waiting to go off.’”

Soldiers who are most likely to suffer from stress or PTSD are those who serve three or four tours in combat zones, Barkdull said.

“They’ve already felt that they was very lucky in going through what they’d seen,” he said. “They have that feeling that once they’ve served that tour in combat, everything takes on a different perspective.”

PTSD will come out later in life for some veterans, as other traumatic events trigger responses to memories that might have been suppressed, Barkdull said.

“There’s so many things that a soldier goes through that people don’t realize,” he said. “There’s things like that that are with people for life.”

Although it was only to be Hasan’s first overseas deployment, he might have been suffering from other stressors associated with preparing to leave home and enter a combat zone, Reske said.

“You have dual concerns going on at the same time,” he said. “One is will everything be OK back home as far as your family, and then of course you’re going into a combat zone, so there’s natural anxiety about that. What most guys do is make sure everything’s OK back home before they deploy, and the military’s very good about doing that so once you get in a war zone you’re not distracted and you can focus on your mission.”

To help the Stepping Stones residents, a liaison from the Marion VA Hospital comes in once a week, Barkdull said.

“There’s things that happen to veterans every day of the week that John Q. Public don’t know about, and they don’t get treatment,” he said. “In the healing process, the main thing is camaraderie. They feel like it’s alright to shed a tear.”

Reske said the military had been learning how to deal with soldiers’ mental issues and stressors since Vietnam.

“I think we’re learning,” he said. “We learned a lot in Vietnam. We do take care of our guys, both physically and psychologically.”



Contact Aleasha Sandley: 640-4805, aleasha.sandley@heraldbulletin.com.