Fort Hood Tragedy

By Ross Beurmann

I would first like to offer my condolences to the family members of deceased and wishes for a speedy recovery to those injured in the horrific incident that occurred Thursday at Fort Hood Texas.  My heart and thoughts go out to all of you as you put the pieces together in the aftermath of such a brutal event.  A true warrior is ready to give their life for their country but would never expect to get it taken in the peace and sanctity of a US based installation by the hands of one of their own.

I am writing this entry to shed some light on the Fort Hood shootings from my perspective as well as to show my interview with FOX 5 regarding PTSD and pre and post deployment screenings for Mental Health issues.

I was frightened and angry to learn of such a travesty happening at my last duty station during my service in the US Army.  I was also in complete disbelief.  I kept thinking, how did this assailant gain entry to the post with weapons.  I had only briefly heard about the shooting on the radio on my way home from work.  I finally got in touch with family to find out that the alleged shooter was in fact a member of the US Army.  Immediately I hung up with my family member and called SFC Samuel Dancer, my old platoon sergeant to see if he was OK.  He didn’t answer, and I clutched onto a slice of hope that he was OK and just busy making sure all of his soldiers were OK.  Thankfully I got a Voicemail from him later that evening, everyone was OK from his unit, physically, but I am sure that they were having difficulties dealing with such a heart stopping tragic incident.

I am not going to write about what I think happened, if I think this was stress related, or an act of terror… I will wait for the officials investigating to inform me with evidence on what exactly happened down in Killeen Texas.  I will, however, say that in the wake of every tragedy there is a silver lining.  The FOX interview is evidence of that silver lining, people are going to start talking prevention of PTSD as opposed to treatment.  People will start realizing that a pro-active approach to making our military and military families more resilient to all aspects of military service is needed instead of continuing a reactionary approach.  This awful occurrence can bring forward the discussion of topics that need to be talked about and most importantly acted upon.  I respect Sen. Lieberman’s willingness to invest time and resources into figuring out if this was a terrorist attack, but I feel like that important time and energy should also be spent trying to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.  Force Protection and increasing security is a band-aid knee jerk reaction to a problem that is more serious than a random violent act by one person.  There are people suffering from PTSD and thousands more that may suffer from PTSD in the future, and there may be a way that technology and hard work can eliminate this problem from our military.

The military needs to come together in this time and rally it’s collective resources to put together a program that will work across all branches of the military to de-stigmatize mental health, get warrior’s and former warriors with PTSD treatment, and ultimately put together a product that will prevent our brave men and women in uniform from suffering from this type of tragedy in the future.

I believe that social media outlets should be a part of this solution but it is also necessary to use other tools that will need to be thoroughly researched and evaluated.  This will also need to be accomplished as soon as possible.   I know that with the efficiency and dedication of the people currently working on the resiliency projects in the Army and Air National Guard will help get the job done, but I also know that a joint effort will more quickly enable solution to this issue.

Lastly, my interview. Please forgive me as I was very nervous during this interview but I think the points speak for themselves and are uniformly the position with all of the contributors on this site.