Word: soldier
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Killeen is a soldier's town. Many choose to remain here after retirement - the climate is benign, the cost of living relatively low and the social network familiar. The Islamic Community Center of Greater Killeen, a mosque founded by several Army veterans, is the place where civilians and soldiers gather for prayer every Friday. The congregation is diverse, and includes both serving and retired military and civilian families, some with roots in Pakistan, Africa and the Middle East, others native-born Americans. Now the small, red brick mosque on South Fort Hood Street is notorious as the place where Hasan...
...great pains to ensure the bodies of unknowns remained unidentified, even going so far as to destroy relevant documents about where bodies were discovered and with what, if any, personal effects. But with the advent of DNA testing in the 1980s and '90s, the tradition of burying an unknown soldier has begun to decline. Most soldiers around the world are now required to supply blood samples upon joining the military to ensure their bodies can be identified if they are slain in the line of duty. Although military personnel put their lives at risk for their countries, this requirement...
...denied him his martyrdom? That would be Kimberly Munley, the SWAT-team markswoman nicknamed Mighty Mouse, who with her partner ran toward the sound of gunshots at the Soldier Readiness Center, where men and women about to deploy gather for vaccinations and eye exams. It's practically been a motto stitched on their sleeves - "Better to fight the terrorists there than here" - except now they were at home, and there was one of their own, a U.S. officer, jumping up, shouting "God is great" in a language he could barely speak and then opening fire. (See pictures of Nidal Malik...
...Making of a Radical Hasan was a walking contradiction: the counselor who himself needed counseling; the proud soldier who did not want to fight, at least not against fellow Muslims; the man who could not find a sufficiently modest and pious wife through his mosque's matchmaking machinery but who frequented the local strip club. A man supposedly so afraid of deployment that he launched a war of his own from which he clearly did not expect to return alive. "Everyone is asking why this happened," said Hasan's family in a formal statement, "and the answer is that...
...mission and means. When an Army officer is reported to proudly call himself a Muslim first, an American second; when he appears at a public-health seminar with the PowerPoint presentation "Why the War on Terror Is a War on Islam"; when he applauds the killing of a U.S. soldier by a Muslim convert at an Arkansas recruitment center; and when he is caught corresponding with a radical imam in Yemen who has called on all Muslims to kill American soldiers in Iraq, you wonder just how brightly the red lights had to flash before anyone was willing to stop...