Well it’s happened once again. It’s a highly unfortunate fact of life that the thoughtless and stupid actions of one person can negatively stigmatize an entire group, but that is exactly what has happened…again. The shooting at Fort Hood has once again cast a negative light on veterans and brought mental health issues into the public eye. Some of the headlines I have seen have blamed the Army for the incident, or said that it should have been a foreseeable event but wasn’t dealt with. I have criticized certain parts of the Army’s handling of mental health issues, but I think it’s extremely irresponsible for anyone to jump to conclusions and assume that just because he was a veteran who went to Iraq that that is the cause of his irrational actions.

It’s really frustrating to see news stories or hear people talk about post-traumatic stress disorder or whatever other mental health disorder can be associated with veterans and then discuss the issue as though all veterans are walking time bombs waiting to go off. Post-traumatic stress disorder is not an issue that’s specific to veterans though it’s often associated with veterans because it is a fairly common result of engaging in combat and everything that goes along with it. So in order for someone to be so deranged that they resort to randomly opening fire on innocent people then they must have had some pretty horrendous experiences that left them damaged beyond repair, or at least one would think. This guy was a veteran and he was deployed to Iraq in 2011 where he spent a total of four months. During his deployment he spent all of his time on a FOB. He never left the base and was never exposed to direct or indirect combat of any sort.

I can’t say that his deployment didn’t have some lasting effects on him since everybody responds differently to different situations, but I should point out that life on a base in Iraq is probably just about as dangerous as life in downtown Minneapolis. So what was it that was so traumatic in this guy’s life that post-traumatic stress disorder could be blamed as the cause of this tragedy if he didn’t endure any combat related trauma? He was denied permission to take leave to go home. He joined the Army to fight for his country and then when he was told that he wasn’t going to be allowed go home for a week he decided that the best response to this was to go get a gun and start shooting people at random. This isn’t the result of an individual who joined the Army as a stable person and was damaged; this was a mentally deranged and immature ‘person’ who was destined to be a miserable failure long before he made the decision to join the Army.

I’m not ashamed or embarrassed to say that I have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. It was an unexpected consequence of my decision to join the Army, and it has certainly presented some difficulties in my life that I wasn’t ever expecting to face. I know that many other veterans have to face their own unique set of difficulties yet none of us would ever consider such a cowardly path. The real tragedy here is that this piece of s*** felt it necessary to take other people down with him when he ended his own miserable existence, and that will forever be associated with all veterans.