Font ResizeJust a glimpse of that thin face, those intense blue eyes, is heart-rending: another man, barely out of childhood, dead in the war.
Not in Afghanistan or Iraq, but at Fort Hood, Texas, where an Army-trained psychiatrist opened fire, killing 13 soldiers and wounding 30 more who were taking care of the final details before going to the battlefield.
But the death of Aaron Thomas Nemelka, just 19, raises for me an inevitable question: When are we as American citizens going to stop paying the butcher's bill that comes to us all too often from Iraq and Afghanistan?
It's not just the more than 5,000 Americans killed in those wars -- now 53 of them Utahns -- but those who come home wounded in body, mind and spirit. Many fold themselves back into civilian life, but the memory of so many terrifying and ghastly events can never be erased. For some, there can never be healing.
Among the wounded in Thursday's massacre was Utahn Joey Foster, who was headed to Afghanistan and helped pull people to safety despite a bullet to the hip.
The alleged shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, was gunned down by a SWAT officer but survived. The fact that he is a devout Muslim has the Internet afire with the usual accusations that Islam is a violent faith that spawns murderous behavior. In my view, that's just as much a fallacy as saying any faith ineluctably leads to violence.
I spoke with the Rev. Carl Wright, the head chaplain at Hill Air Force Base,
"The shooter would have had patient after patient, soldier after soldier, telling him gruesome stories," he said.
"When you're counseling with people, regardless of the helping profession, to a certain extent you feel what they feel," Wright said. "You vicariously experience ... not the identical experience, but pretty darn close, especially when you're a psychiatrist or psychologist."
Such professionals, he said, need to be in therapy themselves, constantly working on their own issues and on self-improvement. "It's an article of their Hippocratic oath; all healers know that they are themselves wounded people."
No one but Hasan can say what motivated him, but news reports say he was deeply troubled by the prospect of going to Afghanistan, that he opposed the wars but did not express anti-American views. His colleagues at Walter Reed thought him an indifferent therapist who once gave a fiery and inappropriate lecture on the Quran. The reports also say he was quiet and apparently had few friends, although a former president of the Muslim mosque in Killeen, Texas, where Hasan worshipped, called him a "very gentle person."
It's worth remembering that much the same was said about Sulejman Talovic, the Bosnian immigrant who killed five people at Salt Lake City's Trolley Square in 2007 and was killed himself. As a child, he and his family were caught up in the war in Bosnia, and it's been speculated that he, too, was a victim of post-traumatic stress.
In the dozen other mass shootings in the United States since 1991, none of the killers were Muslim: think of the two teenagers who in 1999 killed 13 classmates and a teacher and wounded 26 others before committing suicide at Columbine High School.
So we can acknowledge that we live in a time and world periodically stunned by violence. We must honor the courageous men and women who put themselves in harm's way to protect this nation.
But here's what worries me: even as the Iraq war winds down, President Barack Obama is debating whether to send tens of thousands more troops into Afghanistan.
We must ask, "To what end?" To try to change a corrupt government and contain the Taliban? To rout al-Qaida, even though its influence extends across the Middle East and in Africa? And despite the fact that Afghanis view coalition troops as an army of occupation in a nation that never has tolerated such forces since Alexander the Great?
And we must ask, "At what further cost?"
