KILLEEN, Texas — Nothing prepared Army Chaplain (Capt.) Jason Palmer for his initial tour of the yellow-taped crime scene at Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Center, where he saw trails of blood still on the floor, bloody handprints on the walls and the telephone pole outside where the alleged shooter collapsed to the ground after being shot four times in the abdomen.
Palmer said Army personnel were still cleaning up the site 48 hours after the Nov. 5 mass shooting that claimed 14 lives — one an unborn baby — and left 43 others wounded, according to Fort Hood’s military Web site. The alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist and a Muslim, remains conscious and in stable condition at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
Working a minimum of 12 hours a day since the shooting, Palmer, a chaplain endorsed by the North American Mission Board, said counseling for the grieving and traumatized ramped up Nov. 9, the first work day back for most of the more than 50,000 officers and enlisted men at Fort Hood, the nation’s largest military base.
“The soldiers are grieving about the loss they’ve seen with their own eyes,” Palmer said. “Some of them had seen loss while deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, but Fort Hood is supposed to be a safe place, their home. They see this incident as wrong on so many levels.”
Palmer, along with more than 50 other military chaplains — not only the 12 Southern Baptist chaplains at Fort Hood but those of several other denominations, and including Muslim and Jewish chaplains — are counseling people from the 18 different Army units at the base impacted by the shooting.
Palmer’s orders originally assigned him to Fort Hood for two weeks but he said that could be longer.
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