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.

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