”A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.”
Posted on 11/05/2010 6:55:06 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
FORT HOOD — Like everyone in the first moments of the mass shooting here one year ago today, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Christopher Royal was stunned beyond belief.
Many of those sitting in rows of fold-out chairs at Station 13 were war veterans, but only a few like Royal fought back as the shooting ensued. They went into survival mode as the gunman methodically fired into the crowd.
Talking with a counselor near the crowded waiting area of the post deployment center, Royal heard gunfire and told a shaken worker it was an exercise.
“Shortly after that, two soldiers, one male and one female, ran into the same cubicle that I was sitting in,” Royal testified during an evidentiary hearing for Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people and wounding dozens more. “They asked me to help them at that time. Things were going so fast.
“I saw two soldiers low crawling, bleeding from their chest,” he said, adding that he, too, got on all fours. “I tried to calm myself down.”
Some in this room had survived bitter fights in Iraq and Afghanistan but, wounded and pinned down, tried to avoid drawing attention. Royal, a 20-year combat medic, was one of a handful who confronted Hasan, 40, before two Department of the Army police officers exchanged fire with him.
Testimony from 56 prosecution witnesses in a recent evidentiary hearing underscored the surreal nature of that day.
No one imagined this kind of battle. The shooting was on home ground, Fort Hood, where car accidents were considered the greatest threat to veterans returning from war.
What made the episode even more bizarre was that the man accused of the shooting in the deployment center was one of them — a fellow soldier, an officer and physician. Many hid behind chairs, desks and dividers. Spc. Megan Martin played dead. Others did as well.
“I laid as still as I possibly could because he was shooting at everything that moved,” Martin recalled.
As the troops and civilian workers took cover or tried not to draw attention, physician's assistant Michael Cahill emerged from a cubicle carrying a chair high over his head.
“Maj. Hasan at that time turned his weapon on Doc Cahill,” said Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, a combat medic who would be blinded in one eye in the attack.
Cahill was shot dead.
A veteran of the California National Guard and the Navy, Army Reserve Capt. John Gaffaney went back on duty after 9-11 and was a psychiatric nurse headed for Iraq. It was his second day on Fort Hood.
“Capt. Gaffaney got up and charged the shooter, but he wasn't fast enough and he got shot at close range,” Martin said.
Army Reserve Spc. Logan Burnett, who is posted to Fort Sam Houston, said he saw an empty magazine hit the floor. Thinking this was his moment to act, he reached for a chair.
“I tried to throw it toward the shooter,” he said.
Shot in the hip, Burnett fell and crawled to a cubicle.
At the Article 32 hearing, which will resume Nov. 15, Sgt. 1st Class Maria Guerra, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the center's medical processing department, said she “was thinking whether I could rush him, or not rush him. I was too far.”
Maj. Steven Richter, the officer in charge of the center, said he also thought of charging the gunman after he began firing outside the building. But he never got close enough.
Richter said the gunman trained the red laser of his 5.7 mm handgun on him just before civilian police officer Kimberly Munley fired.
Richter ducked behind a car, and the gunman turned and shot Munley. Seconds later, Sgt. Mark Todd shot Hasan four times, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down and in a wheelchair.
Royal's transformation from hunted to hunter began when he got out of a four-point stance in the cubicle and made his move.
His timing was lousy.
“As I got up on my feet, he reloaded his weapon. He cleared the magazine from his weapon, stuck his hand into his right cargo pocket and jammed another clip,” Royal recalled. “I knew that I had to get out of the building. Because of the training I have been fortunate to have ... I knew I had to get out of that building.”
He escaped without incident, but stopped halfway into the parking lot and made a snap decision. Royal eyed the door he'd just escaped from. If the gunman opened it, he would be there and pounce.
Out of nowhere, Royal said the badly wounded Lunsford, a towering figure at 6 feet, 9 inches who was shot five times, knocked open the door and ran to the parking lot. The gunman emerged, took aim and fired. Lunsford went down.
A minute later, Royal got Lunsford's attention.
“I told him to just lay there and basically play like you're dead, and the shooter I think at that time went into the building,” Royal said. “I tried to make my way to the corner of the building to leave some kind of element of surprise, and as I'm going to the building, he comes adjacent to the other side and sees me again and he starts firing at me.”
On the defensive, Royal scrambled to a sport utility vehicle and hugged a rear tire. The gunman fired at him relentlessly, slugs ripping through the SUV.
“I felt something jump me in the back, but I wasn't sure what it was,” Royal said.
It was a bullet.
I recall even on “guard duty” domestically in the 60’s, we had firearms but NO AMMO...go figure.
Early reports said that an armed GI looking for the shooter was mistaken for the shooter and shot dead. Was there any truth to friendly fire?
And, of course, by the time Flight 93 was hijacked, the passengers were prepared to handle the situation. And passengers did not put up with the Christmas bomber, either or Richard Reid. It’s only natural that unsuspecting people (even soldiers) would go into the flight rather than the fight mode when taken unaware.
Well our government did nothing to stop him either. He should never been in our military in the first place but multiculturalism and Marxism rules our government.
There were lots of inaccuracies in the first hour or so after the shooting. As far as I know, no one was shot by friendly fire.
:)
The strict control of weapons on army bases goes back many decades, long before it became a political issue. In fact, I doubt there was ever a time when soldiers were allowed to routinely carry weapons when not required by their specific duties.
This probably goes all the way back to when soldiers and sailors were recruited quite literally from the dregs of society and if armed were quite likely to use those arms on their officers.
So it's just not a recent liberal thing.
”A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.”
Actually, no, he was not "one of them". He was a muslim whose values and worldview are completely in opposition to the beliefs of Americans and Christians.
I guess if you are an athiest writer in New York this is a complicated concept to parse. For those of us in flyover country it is not.
The headline writer should be fired. The “reporters” should be fired. Either give us the facts, all the facts, or don’t write the article. After reading through the comments here, and reading the article itself, it becomes apparent that this “news”paper and its writers/editors need to attend a different journalism school. WHERE IS THE TRUTH?
(please don’t respond....I’m just ranting!)
This headline seems to infer that the GIs should have been expected to stop him, even though they were not armed. Sort of like, “....it’s not his fault; no one stopped him...”.
“The strict control of weapons on army bases goes back many decades,...” ..... “So it’s just not a recent liberal thing.”
You think LIBERALISM is a recent thing?
RE: I read that US Soldiers are disarmed, unless they are literally engaged at the front. Is this true?
That was my experience. What makes this more meaningful is that I worked with Mike Cahill at Ft. Harrison, Mt
Fine. You come up with some sort of evidence that strict control of access to weaponry by the military is connected to liberal concerns and I’ll be happy to agree with you.
I’ve seen quite a number of comments on this subject by active or retired military personnel, and none of them believed the policy was part of a “guns are bad” liberal worldview. The policy may be misguided, but it isn’t a liberal policy in its origin.
Historically, officers were armed at all times. In fact, their sword or pistol (sidearm) was the primary indicator of their status as gentlemen and officers. Giving it up to the enemy was the physical token of surrender.
Rankers, as members of the lowest social orders, were issued arms (or sometimes ammo) only when conflict was imminent.
Noncoms might or might not go armed.
This was probably less true of US armies than of the old European armies, but still largely the case.
On the old sailing ships, one of the primary concerns of the officers was to keep all smalll arms under control as a way of preventing mutiny, usually in locked cabinets in officers’ country or even in the captain’s cabin. This prevention was also the original purpose of having Marines on board. They were there to stomp all over mutiny by the impressed sailors and they carried small arms as part of their duties.
When a boarding action was imminent, in either direction, then and only then were small arms handed out to sailors.
I caught that, too.
Although if the instinctive response of everybody was to immediately charge the shooter, he wouldn't be able to take many down.
I realize that's pretty unreasonable to expect, and I'm pretty sure I'd hide under a desk myself if unarmed. Possibly if armed, though I hope not.
So have they been trained to aim/throw the empty firearms at target? How is the marksmanship at that, baseball pitchers might have better luck.
Yes, it’s true.
They were unarmed lambs to the slaughter.
This headline infuriates me. It paints our guys are cowards when that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
I really want to know what the author would’ve done in their shoes. Let’s put him in a room with a shooting psycho, make sure that the only defense he has is harsh language and see how heroic he is.
I think the idea was just incorporated into the new award the zero administration just came up with, what I call the failure to fire medal, for excercising restraint in the face of danger.
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