In Afghanistan, we hope to be known by the good we do. So, we build schools and clinics. The Taliban blows up the schools and clinics, kills teachers, students and others without blinking an eye. Villagers ask our troops to please stay away, they ask the Taliban the same; both ignore these requests. And battles rage on.

This makes me wonder, can’t we just stop now?

Police Sergeant Kim Munley narrowly escaped death on Nov. 5th when she confronted the Ft. Hood shooter—his shots through her legs severed her femoral artery. She and another police officer succeeded in stopping him with four shots.

Munley responded to the gunfire within three minutes; how many would be dead if she had not been on site?

Civilian press stories seem intent on painting the Ft. Hood shooter as a domestic terrorist, like two other small civilian groups who have wanted to kill US soldiers on American soil. While there may be similarities of religion, I do not think being Muslim a terrorist makes. I feel Maj. Hasan needs to be prosecuted as an Army officer who broke his oaths and took the lives of his fellow soldiers.

He is not a terrorist, he is a coward and murderer. And that Quisling Senator Lieberman can just stop wrapping himself in the flag to declare Hasan a terrorist to make himself sound patriotic.

And Maj. Hasan is awake, off the ventilator and able to talk. So at last, he may be able to tell his questioners what guided his gun on that terrible day. I am particularly curious to know why he specifically targeted so many of his fellow mental health care providers, like a local man from our area. Five of the dead were surely his own co-workers.

I don’t discount the idea that he suffered a sort of “contact trauma” from his job, but that does not justify or make me feel sympathetic to his murderous rampage.

And I feel particularly old today. Berlin celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was a child living in Germany when the Wall was built. I served in the Army in Berlin when it was a city divided by that gray, winding death zone. And now, it has been gone longer than most marriages survive?

It brings a tear to my wrinkled eye, I tell you.