That's what it's all about. We can fixate on all the evil and bad things, but I think we should at least acknowledge that there are many more Kim Munley's in this nation than there are Nidal Hasans.
Good post, Leo. Thanks.
My first reaction to hearing the words "from Fort Hood" was "Oh, crap, that's my nephew's base." My next reaction on learning it happened
AT Fort Hood was "Whew, thank goodness my nephew's safe in Iraq."
Lots of questions to be answered and hopefully they will be eventually. This guy was recently promoted from Captain to Major. Why?
Pretty straightforward. The armed forces are short on personnel. The selection rate from O-3 to O-4 is so high that it practically takes a DUI or a felony conviction (not merely a grand jury indictment) to fail selection. Medical specialists like psychiatrists or surgeons are all but guaranteed rubber-stamp promotion to O-5.
At one point ~10 years ago the submarine force actually had a selection rate from O-3 to O-4 of 107%. The promotion boards were dipping into the guys who'd been passed over before or who were still a year away from eligibility. Eventually BUPERS had to literally order the board members to stop deeping the O-3s to O-4 before they ran out of O-3s to fill the O-3 billets. And in the case of the passed-over O-3s, scooping them up for O-4 a year later was not always the best decision.
When I retired in 2002, submarine O-4 shore-duty billets were 30% short of officers. The solution? Gap all their reliefs for four months. Problem solved!
The DoD promotion guidelines say that O-1s aren't supposed to be promoted to O-2s until they've been commissioned for at least two years. My nephew, an Army Ranger, was adding O-2 to his e-mail signature at the 16-month point. I happen to think that he deserves it, but I suspect that he was also just one of a very large crowd of platoon leaders who were bumped up a bit early.
Keep in mind that we lack perspective. In WWII the average American time-in-rank to O-4 was merely six years (as opposed to today's 9-10). German submarine officers were in command at age 23. The source of today's military attrition is a bit different but the stresses and the results are the same.
He recently was also given a poor annual review by his superiors. Then why the promotion?
Because "poor" can still be "good enough", particularly when added to "hopes for improvement". Especially when the business is so busy.
If the FBI had him on a watch list (which I didn't know) why was this guy still in the military?
Due process, especially if he would have been able to claim that he was being subjected to profiling or paranoid harassment. I guess he'd have to move from "watch" to "warning" before abrupt action was considered justifiable.
Why was he being preparing for deployment? I don't understand all this.
If a marginal performer is struggling to do a job, then one way to make them step up to the challenge is to give them a more challenging job... of course with proper support & supervision. Perform or fail, either way the situation is resolved on their own merits.
Besides there's a perception that the screwups get too many good deals, including not having to do their share of deployments. Whatever flags or problems this guy was demonstrating at Fort Hood, if there even were any, they weren't considered deployment-limiting.
I can understand what his co-workers and "the authorities" were dealing with, and I take this a bit personally. I can completely comprehend how everyone around him felt betrayed and how his chain of command was caught by surprise. Even those professionals probably had no significant warning of how quickly things went bad in his thought processes and of what was about to occur.
I spent nearly five years at a training command where we extensively screened instructors in high-risk courses looking for psychological problems. (The idea was to not put a psychopath in charge of keeping the students alive, or someone who was so stressed out and distracted by their personal issues that they didn't notice a bad situation developing.) One Friday afternoon I had a short "Have a good weekend" conversation with a Navy diver who'd just reported aboard a month ago. He was a star performer: quickly promoted to E-6, a leader at his last sea-duty command, their Sailor of the Year with a rare Navy Commendation Medal, a shoo-in for the next year's Chief Petty Officer selection board. He was at the school to train submariners on Navy diving techniques, a course with significant mental stress and physical risk. We felt pretty darn lucky to have cherry-picked him from some other fast-track duty.
I'd interviewed the guy and been impressed. I'd gotten to know him around the command and been even more impressed. He was officer material, but so good that he'd be a much better asset to the community as a chief petty officer/master diver rather than wasting an officer's commission on him. He had no medical issues (and divers don't get away with hiding that). He'd been signed off by the local Navy psychiatrist, an experienced officer who'd done some work at our command and whose opinions I trusted. The guy was good to go. We joked about our weekend plans and he headed home.
Friday night he tailed his spouse as she drove to the apartment of a man with whom she'd been carrying on a long-term affair while our sailor was deployed. (His last command had been aware of this, and had informed us, but the sailor had told us that he and his spouse were reconciling and working things out on shore duty. It was going well. Thumbs up!) Saturday afternoon, he loaded his two preschool children in his pickup truck. (The youngest was not biologically his child, which we later determined he was aware of and had accepted as part of "saving the marriage".) He drove back to the apartment of the younger child's biological father and entered it, finding his own spouse still there. Our sailor used his personal 9mm automatic, which he had legally obtained & licensed, to shoot the man several times and make him a quadriplegic. (From the subsequent investigation it's thought that this was what the sailor had intended to do, rather than killing him.) He then dragged his spouse out to the parking lot where he shot her in the head in front of the kids, killing her. Next he drove back to his base house, phoning his brother en route to ask him to listen to the radio and pick up his kids later that day.
When he got home he barricaded himself until the SWAT team arrived, sent his kids out, and killed himself with his gun.
While I was at that same command I had two submariners, both literally Sailor of the Year material, one an E-6 and the other a chief petty officer, who committed suicide as a result of similar personally stressful situations. "At least" they didn't kill anyone else in the process.
Once? Bad luck. Twice? It's a problem-- investigate the process and do a bunch of stuff to fix it. Three times? It's not the people and it might not even be the system-- we need better tools to detect these symptoms and correct these problems before it's too late to catch up.