There was a coward at Fort Hood on Thursday 5 November, and it was not one of the wounded soldiers who gave life-saving care to their comrades, or the young private who ran into the midst of the massacre and rushed the wounded to the aid station, or the young Department of the Army police officer who with her side-arm put an end to the shooting.  The only coward on the scene that day was the man whose name does not deserve to be spoken and which will not be written here, who broke not merely his oath but a sacred code of humanity in a vain and perverse attempt to cleanse diseased soul.

This is a worm and an insect who is also, as fate might have it, a man.  He was too afraid to pursue anything he actually believed in, so he took easy money from the Army to push him through medical school.  He was too afraid to look anyone in the eye and tell them what he really felt, so he slithered along for years, brooding and stewing and venting egotistical tirades about what he thought was wrong with US policy.  Finally he was too afraid to live and face the consequences of his actions, so he sent himself on a suicide mission; but thanks to the effectiveness of the military medical system that he abused his deathwish was not granted and now he will be made to actually, perhaps for his first time ever, face up to something.

Much is already being made of the religion this man claimed to profess and his views on Jihad and the “war on terror”.  We must remember: right and wrong knows no religion.  I have served with Muslims who were passionately committed to the military and completely at peace with their consciences.  Right and wrong knows no religion.  Many soldiers and officers of all stripes have personal objections to what has happened in the “war on terror”, and this does not make them wrong.  Do you remember that one officer who objected to US policy so strongly he chose to fight a long and difficult legal battle rather than deploy with his unit?  Some might call him misguided; some might call him an ass; but he was not a coward.

The man who opened fire at Fort Hood is another story.  We may never know the real roots of his pathological fear of serving overseas, but it seems to me that he was running away from the one thing which could have brought him redemption.  He was not going to war as a fighter, but as a healer.  As a psychiatrist he was trained to soothe the unseen scars of souls torn up by the horror of war.  If he were a truly committed religious man or a truly committed doctor, what more could he want?

What is clear is that this man was a crappy doctor who as far as we have heard did not stay committed to one single thing in his entire life.  He was grievously deceived by the delusion that a lifetime of mediocrity, deception, and passive cowardice could be erased by one final act of violent cowardice.  He was wrong.