Most Americans have this whole Fort Hood massacre all wrong. Maj. Nidal M. Hassan was not a terrorist. And he wasn’t a mass murderer. And he may not even have been a coward.
Maj. Hassan was an enemy combatant.
And until we come to grips with that reality, as well as the fact that we are still a nation at war, the United States will continue to suffer such needless and unnecessary losses.
Since so many Americans have been under-educated by our government-run public schools, let’s refer to a system of education which most of us can readily relate to in order to better understand what’s really going on here: Hollywood movies.
In The Patriot starring Mel Gibson, we learned that under-trained and under-armed American militia hid behind trees in the woods and waited for the British troops to ride up. They would then open fire without warning, attempting to take out the officers first in order to instill chaos among the remaining soldiers, thereby making it easier to pick them off and wipe them out.
In that sense, American militiamen were the colonial version of IEDs (improvised explosive devices).
A rather unsettling thought, is it not?
For their part, the British thought such tactics by the militia were as cowardly and ungentlemanly as we do now about Taliban roadside attacks on U.S. military convoys in Afghanistan. But both the militia and the Taliban used/use what little military tactics in war they had/have at their disposal against a superior enemy military force. As they say, all’s fair.
And what red-blooded American can ever forget the 1967 World War II classic The Dirty Dozen starring Lee Marvin? And who did we root for in that story, the Americans or the Germans? And what was the plot of that movie again? Oh, yeah: “A U.S. Army Major is assigned a dozen convicted murderers to train and lead them into a mass assassination mission…”
Gulp.
This is why I say Hassan wasn’t a terrorist. He didn’t attack a subway train or a nightclub or a shopping mall populated by civilians. No, he attacked enemy soldiers on an enemy military base. And he used what he had at his disposal