Vic Socotra

06 November 2009

When Doctors Kill

(Dr. Hasan and Hood)

It has been a good week as things go, though I had no idea how over the top it could go.

I drove up to Thurgood Marshall Field- BWI- to pick up some Jersey Lab guys who came down by train for a meeting with some government guys I cooked up.

But the drive. OMG. Everyone I saw seemed to be stressed out. To get to BWI, I had to leave the office while rush hour was still happening here- I had to go to the office because the all-day strategic planning meting the day before left me unprepared with phone numbers and maps, which all seemed to be in the right place on Tuesday, when I was in distant Fairfax for meetings, but now were not in my briefcase where I needed them.

I got the phone numbers, connected the train and the government and headed out to find myself still in the tail end of the rush hour, on the 14th Street Bridge trying to get across the District to Maryland.

The Bridge has been under construction all summer, and people have adapted to it in the most remarkable and unsociable ways. I have never seen people acting quite like it in their cars; not waiting to cut over, no blinkers, two cars in one lane- that sort of thing. Then with Congress in session, the snarl was bad right up to the exits that serve the staff lots around the capitol- I don't know if health care is making people more crazy than usual.

Past all of that, on Pennsylvania Ave, the density of traffic lightened but the lunacy increased. There is no direct connection between I-395 and I-295, of course; neighborhood activists stopped that long ago, so I was with the Squeegee Man and the Homeless panhandler at the left turn off Pennsylvania Ave for a couple cycles of the lights in the big blue police cruiser. They seemed resigned to things, but you never can tell.

In defiance of their despair, I left the window down and hung my elbow out. It was crisp and sunny. Who could stay stressed out on a day like this?

The drive across Anacostia up to the Washington-BW Parkway is always a crap-shoot. There are slow-moving commercial vehicles of ancient age and decrepitude, and construction zones, and hurtling Escalades driven by people who are working out some old grudge against society, and once into Maryland, dealing with a driving population who have apparently never been told to stay right to the right, or use blinkers to telegraph their vaguely-formed vehicular intentions.

Add a Parkway Leaf-Patrol convoy parked dead in the right traffic lane just beyond the Fort Meade turn-off at Rt. 32 and it turned into quite an exciting drive with many hand-gestures and colorful exclamations.

At the end of the meeting, the government guys said "Where do we send the money?" which is about as good a way to finish a briefing as you can get. The skies had turned dark and ominous to the west. I got the Jersey Boys back to their train and back across the District without much travail, except for the altercation between the green Camry and the Escalade at the impromptu construction area next to the new Stadium.

That would have made it just about the time that the shooting began at Fort Hood. Everything you hear is wrong, of course, and I know I should just stop thinking, just as I should have the first instant I heard JoeMaz tell me that the Commies had just shot down a Korean airliner, years ago, or that the Iranian had attempted to attack a Navy cruiser in the Gulf with one of their Tomcats disguised as a civilian airliner a few years later, or that persons unknown but probably mad Muslims had blown up the Federal Courthouse in Oklahoma City.

The bomber in the last case turned out to be a Baptist or something, but I remember what I thought when I first heard. We seem to be pretty proud that there have been no terror attacks on US soil since 9/11, but I am not so sure.

Remember that guy- Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad- who shot two recruiters at the Army-Navy Career Center in west Little Rock earlier this year?

I won’t go into the stages of incredulity we all felt as the afternoon progressed. Thirteen dead; multiple shooters, or one? Nearly thirty wounded. By the time I was finally back in my brown chair, watching the late news some of the story seemed straight. In this case, the lone deranged deceased gunman was revealed to not only be alive, but an American, an Army Major; actually from right here in Arlington. Weirder still, a licensed physician.

He went to local schools before going off to Virginia Tech; he was in ROTC, and got a commission and a medical education right on the campus at Bethesda Naval Hospital, my primary health care provider.

He was a psychiatrist, of all things, who was practicing at the post's Soldier Readiness Center, prior to his own impending deployment. The Readiness Center is where soldiers undergo medical screening before being deployed or after returning from overseas.

I have always been suspicious of shrinks on the general principle that they spend way too long thinking and living in the land of the delusional, but I think we are starting to deal with whole institutions- even whole nations- that are showing the signs of full blown Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

It occurred to me that the airport fire-bombers at Glasgow back in 2007 had included an engineer and a physician.

The engineer fried at the site, but the terrorist that lived was Dr. Bilal Abdulla, who worked with diabetic and obstetric outpatients at a drop-in clinic. The motive is what I recall most vividly about that business. I was coming back from Australia and had way too much time to sit, sheep-like, in airports watching the accounts of other ones being attacked.

Dr. Abdulla lived to be tried, had to say something about what he had done. It went something like this: "I am told I am a terrorist, but is your Government not a terrorist, is your army not a terrorist?

Of course, he was talking to Her Majesty’s government, but I am betting that we will hear something along those lines about us from Major Nadil Malik Hasan. I bet it will be attributed to an advance case of PTSD- which is to say, that the injuries of others, including soldiers and Palestinians, had created a mental state in which he suffered immeasurably.

It is a creative legal defense that I think can easily be extended to the whole country.

The latest version of the story this morning is that people had been uncomfortable with the good major for a long time. In talks he gave to give others some insight into his faith, he didn’t footnote his comments by saying that he didn’t agree that the holy Koran justified the outrageous and murderous acts that started the latest chapter in the relations between the great faiths. Instead, some say he actually seemed to believe them.

Of course, no one wants to be accused of being insensitive. That could be a career-ender in our multicultural and affirming culture. No one can admit that they notice what is as plain as the nose on our faces, you know?

I mean, other than the hatred and the gunfire and the cold-blooded murder, Major Hasan is an American as apple pie and schawarma.

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