Fort Hood killings evoke bad memory

KILLEEN, Texas | The town that has for years been newsworthy for its violence is again in crisis.

Thursday’s massacre of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, the nation’s largest active-duty military installation, has brought crisis clinics, candlelight vigils and questions on the ability of the military to police its own.

For decades, Killeen, the de facto civilian arm of the U.S. Army base, has been subject to the vacillating and fickle arm of military budget cuts and call-ups.

It is watching a replay of the spotlight shone on it in 1991, when a man entered a cafeteria and fatally shot 22 diners.

“Eighteen years ago, we had the largest mass murder in U.S. history,” lamented Corbett Lawler, who was principal of Killeen High School in 1991, when George Hennard rammed his pickup truck through the front of a Luby’s Cafeteria and began shooting.

“Now, we have one of the largest military mass murders in the U.S.”

On Saturday, knit-capped kids rode their bikes, and shoppers at the Killeen Mall sat in stalled traffic, all under a glowing autumn sun, giving the effect that nothing earth-shaking really happened just 48 hours earlier.

“But people will suffer the effects of what happened at Hood for years,” said Mr. Lawler, whose school district lost four employees in the Luby’s killings. “I know people who worked with me who were never the same.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Saturday hinted as much to reporters outside Scott & White Memorial Hospital in nearby Temple, Texas, where 10 of the 30-plus injured in Thursday’s shootings are recovering.

“It’s been almost two days now since this tragic event occurred, and I don’t think anything has happened to dull any of our feelings emotionally about the incident,” Mr. Perry said.

The Killeen Community Center, sitting on a major intersection, offered passers-by “counseling services here or call 211.” Blood drives, including one scheduled Sunday at the Killeen Mall, have popped up at high schools, diners and banks within a 100-mile radius of Fort Hood.

And financial support efforts for the families of the fallen have been launched by a number of groups, including Fisher House, United Service Organizations and the Central Texas-Fort Hood chapter of the Association of the U.S. Army.

The civilian-led police force at Fort Hood is almost back to normal.

“At least I think we’ll be all right now,” said Capt. David Ross, chief of the 180-member Fort Hood Police Department. His department was the first to respond when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan purportedly opened fire on a gathering of soldiers and civilians preparing to deploy to Afghanistan later this year.

Capt. Ross is also a Killeen convert. He was stationed at Mount Hood in 2005, where he served as a lieutenant colonel before transferring a couple of years ago.

It’s a common move among servicemen and women from elsewhere. The weather, the open spaces, the services all beckon to a person seeking a placid but active post-military life. And never mind the occasional bursts of violence.

“Fort Hood has its share of issues, but it really is a safe place in terms of major crimes,” Capt. Ross said. “Especially when you think of the cities around us.”

Austin, 67 miles south, has battled a property-crime epidemic for years. Houston, 200 miles to the southeast, suffers from a prolific murder rate.

Killeen’s population has increased steadily over the years, from 45,000 in 1991, when the Luby’s shootings occurred, to about 114,000 today. In addition, Fort Hood has nearly 55,000 active troops and an additional 100,000 military family members in the region, which includes Temple, Belton and Copperas Cove.

Soldier arrests make the news with some regularity here - some for severe and violent crimes that are foreign to a lot of towns of a similar size.

In 1987, a Fort Hood soldier was convicted of the murder and dismemberment of his pregnant wife. In 1989, another soldier was sentenced to death for the murder of two cabdrivers. And so the crimes flow, violence endemic to the transitory status of a military town. Add to that the Luby’s killings and last week’s killings, and it’s easy to see the area as one more military area hobbled by crime.

But the area suited Dave Washko as soon as he landed here in 1980, fresh from a hitch in Germany. The Army machinist and New Jersey native had endured a tour in Vietnam, traveled the world and was looking for a place to call home.

Today, he sits in the American Legion Post 223 here and sips Coors from a tall brown bottle, expounding the merits of his adopted hometown, despite its seediness.

Mr. Washko was 23 when he came here. He looked around Fort Hood and liked what he saw: “I liked the weather, I liked the people and I liked no taxes.”

The Legion post has a perpetual plastic banner - “Welcome Home Troops” - hanging on the wall.

Mr. Washko, retired now at 62 after 20 years at the U.S. Postal Service, is a realist when it comes to Thursday’s shootings.

“This is the military. There will be violence sometimes,” he said. “We have the largest base in the country. That means we will have something like this happen. But look how rare it is. This is a good area with good people.”