Review Fort Hood tragedy

The massacre at Fort Hood on Thursday that left 13 people dead and 30 others injured is both tragic and troubling.

How could it happen? It seems implausible that the suspect, an Army psychiatrist in uniform, could unleash two handguns, one a semi-automatic, at one of the largest U.S. Army posts in the world. Twelve of those killed in the shooting rampage were military personnel, some of them just days away from shipping out to Iraq or Afghanistan.

The war zone is supposed to be over there, not here, not at an Army base near Killeen, Texas.

But that was the reality Thursday afternoon when the suspected shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an officer trained to help soldiers in distress, apparently went berserk. Soldiers who witnessed the mayhem said that Maj. Hasan shouted "Allahu Akbar!" (Arabic for "God is great!") as he opened fire.

It is too soon to know exactly what may have motivated the shooting rampage, but not too soon to ask if warning signs were overlooked. Did authorities have concerns about Maj. Hasan and delay acting on them in an effort to be politically correct? That would be a travesty. But it also would be a travesty to brand the 39-year-old suspect, described as a devout Muslim, as a threat simply because of his religious beliefs.

It will take time to sort out the Fort Hood shooting rampage. But if the investigation proves that Maj. Hasan did indeed express anti-American sentiments on radical Web sites, as has been reported, or that he argued against his own pending deployment to Iraq, saying as a Muslim he could not support the U.S. effort, someone in a position of authority needs to own up to that.

Our military is already dealing with the strain of repeated deployments and post-combat stress. As the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Thursday, the Fort Hood community knows all too well how stress and pressure can take a tremendous human toll as soldiers deploy more quickly and more often to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Suicides and domestic violence have increased in the past year.

But it is even more troubling to think that a soldier trained to help others, taught how to ease their pre- and post-deployment anxieties, could be so distraught himself that he would turn his weapon on fellow soldiers.

A soldier's job is dangerous by nature, but these men and women should expect that their country is doing everything possible to keep them safe at home and abroad. That means providing an honest answer to how the tragedy at Fort Hood unfolded, then learning from it to prevent a repeat.