OPINION
We Kept Nidal Hasan Alive. Now Our Leaders Want to Make Him a Martyr.
By Robert W. Burns III, Editor and Publisher
Nidal Hasan was a patient on my floor in the surgical trauma ICU at Brooke Army Medical Center.
I wasn’t there when he arrived. I had just left for my deployment to Mosul, Iraq. But the nurses and doctors who cared for him were my peers and my friends, and I know exactly what that required of them, because every one of us had done some version of it before.
Before anyone tells me what strength looks like, understand what that work demands.
I have cared for a drunk driver who wiped out an entire family and landed in our ICU himself. I have cared for gang members who shot up a block while children were stepping off a school bus, then ended up on our unit with bullets of their own. I have kept alive people who murdered their own families and failed at taking their own lives. And in Iraq, I saved the lives of the very enemy fighters who had just tried to kill us and miraculously survived our response.
Every one of those patients got our best. Not because we felt anything for them, but because of who we were. You set aside anger, grief, prejudice and every personal feeling you have, because a life in front of you is a life in front of you. That’s the oath. That’s the duty.
So when Hasan came through those doors, my colleagues did what we had always done. They preserved the life of a man who murdered thirteen people and would have killed them too, given the chance. He killed those men and women in one of the very same buildings many Soldier’s like myself have been in when I was stationed at Fort Hood.
He is alive today because they did their jobs. That was not sentiment. It was a hard, tangible expression of the values this country claims to stand for. Our principles had to mean something even when the person benefiting from them had violated everything we believed in.
Now the Pentagon plans to livestream his execution by firing squad on Dec. 3, and our leaders apparently believe turning his death into a public spectacle will demonstrate American strength.
I think it demonstrates how little they understand the enemy they claim to be fighting.
Hasan walked into Fort Hood expecting to die. He believed his death would be rewarded. At his trial, he called no witnesses and offered no defense, and his own court-appointed lawyers worried he was seeking execution. He failed at martyrdom once. Now we’re about to hand it to him, in high definition, for every extremist with an internet connection to replay, manipulate and celebrate.
We supply the footage. They supply the meaning.
Long after the politicians finish congratulating themselves, that video will still exist. Their moment of bravado becomes somebody else’s recruiting material for decades. And this failure to think past the immediate display of power reaches far beyond one execution.
We count the enemies we kill. We rarely count the enemies we create.
Look at the school in Minab, Iran, where Amnesty International’s investigation attributed the strike that killed more than 100 children and their teachers to U.S. forces. You cannot bury people’s children beneath the rubble of their classrooms and expect a speech about American intentions to decide how they remember you.
No denial brings those children home. No claim of good intentions makes their parents forget whose weapons killed them.
If those were our children, we would remember for the rest of our lives. We would demand accountability. Many of us would want vengeance. We would tell their stories to the next generation. We know this because we did exactly that after September 11.
Why do we imagine other people love their children less, grieve less deeply, or remember less clearly?
We have developed a horrifying talent for creating more terrorists than we will ever stop. We inflict suffering, evade responsibility, and then act as though the anger that follows came out of nowhere.
Think back to the first time you saw one of those al Qaeda videos of an American being beheaded. Remember the sickness in your stomach. Remember the rage. Remember thinking that only savages would film a killing and send it out for the world to watch. Now ask yourself what the rest of the world will see when the camera is ours.
Terrorist organizations stage executions for the cameras. Authoritarian regimes make death a public spectacle to feed fear and rage. Watching our own leaders reach for those same tools should force us to confront how much of ourselves we are surrendering in the name of defeating them.
The line separating us from the people we condemn has to live in our conduct. A flag cannot hold it for us. Neither can a uniform, a title, or a declaration that we are the good guys.
On that ICU floor, on a bloody street in Mosul, and in trauma bays across this country, people like my colleagues hold that line every day under circumstances most will never face. They keep monsters alive because their duty and their humanity are bigger than their hatred of what those monsters have done.
Execute him if that’s the sentence. But do it the way a confident nation does: quietly, lawfully, and without giving him the stage he always wanted. Let him be forgotten.
I expect our leaders to show at least as much discipline as the nurses who had to care for him.
They keep telling us they are defending what makes America different. Every day, they make that difference harder to see.
Robert W. Burns III is the editor and publisher of The Space Coast Rocket, an Army veteran and a retired trauma nurse. The views expressed in this column are his own.
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