Apocalypse at Home

The psychiatric officer was responsible for healing and programming soldiers to follow orders and fight the unending wars of the third millennium, but no one ever thought that he too, the doctor, would end up killing his future patients, would need healing. Thousands of soldiers come back from the wars fought “to export democracy” only to lose for good, like him, their souls and their minds.

His soldiers were ready and prepared to die in Iraq or Afghanistan, like their 5,281 brothers who have already come back in the steel varnished coffins, but they were not ready to be shot dead at home, in one of the strongest forts, Fort Hood, Texas. There they felt invulnerable and invincible in their armored tanks under the flag of the cavalry, the noblest of the armies. They felt safe in the hands of the one who should have molded and shrunk them, to use the American slang associated with psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. If we do not really know anything about the cause of this apocalypse at home now, besides his rank and medical specialization; if we do not know anything about the officer who opened fire against his own soldiers at the moment of their promotion, on the eve of their departure to the front, besides his Arabic name that immediately stirs creepy thoughts – Major Nidal Malik Hasan – or about his two arrested accomplices, then the question that American commanders have been asking themselves for the past eight years comes back insistently: How long can you stretch out the elastic of a formidable, very well trained, armed, motivated, but ultimately human army? Are the psychiatrist, the military chaplain, the speeches, the marches, the words uttered by every president, and last night by Barack Obama, too, enough to deceive you that the elastic of the mind will never get torn?

It has been nine years in Afghanistan and six in Iraq (longer than any other American war, besides Vietnam – a horrible record no one wants to reach) that men and women have been thrust into battles with no light at the end of the tunnel, in spite of the usual promises of returning home for Christmas made by all generals and governments, never specifying which Christmas, of course. The psychiatrist who led this mutiny – reminiscent of the mutinies of French soldiers on the Marne in the cruelest hours of the Great War – was about to go to Iraq. For him, the elastic of his mind was stretched too far. We do not know whether this happened because of his Arab heritage – it looks like he was born in Jordan – in the face of the slaughters of Arabs and Muslims in the name of their liberation, or because of the human fear of jumping on a mine, or of being captured and tortured and having his throat cut by Muslim terrorists resolved to punish the horror of his betrayal of the Islamic community.

His past, his possible ideological affinities with fighters and anti-Christian terrorists and the hypothesis that cancerous cells infiltrated the body of U.S. Army (in which Fort Hood is one of the most significant fortresses, with almost 50,000 soldiers, panzer M1A1, armored transports and the flags of the most glorious division of in American military history, the First Division – which on its own, in 1950, delayed the invasion of North Koreans and saved at least half of that peninsula) are being investigated. Directors of war movies love to portray this division as the bravest, the craziest and the boldest, fighting under the symbol of the black horse head on a yellow background.

But this time, no one could save those most known for saving others. No general, no colonel, no soldier or colleague realized that something was wrong with the mind of that Jordanian-American psychiatrist, an officer and a gentleman serving under the flag of the nation that had adopted him. No one inside of the sanctuary of the American armed forces saw his emerging craziness or a glimmer of his plot. This in itself is horrible, like Obama said. In the confusion of the night someone even doubted that the school of medicine and psychiatry where he graduated, in Bethesda, a suburb of Washington, existed, when in actuality, it is part of the Navy hospital. This is the material used for investigations, inspections and polemics. What remains of this apocalypse is the fact that this is the seventh accident since the invasion of Iraq where American soldiers have killed other American soldiers, with now over 40 dead. All quiet on the Western Front, General.