Fort Hood is just down the road from us. I was stationed there as a brand new 2LT. It wasn't my favorite assignment. At the time, there wasn't a mall, no theater, only x-rated theaters, pawn shops and well, it wasn't a great place for a single brand new female officer. But you felt pretty safe. I was the 1st Cav Div Safety Officer and reporting deaths to the headquarters was one of my jobs. We did have a couple of suicides, but mostly they were accident related--

But you felt safe going to work.

My son is going into the AF and has an appointment Monday at Fort Hood to make arrangements to move his household goods to Pensacola where he'll be attending navigator's school. Before, he would have just gone there, without a thought about it. The place is huge, the only difficulty, finding where you need to go. I used to go to work, the PX, the commissary, and a couple of other places, and that was it. It's easy to get lost!

But now a cloud of death hangs over the place.

I feel for those who have to go to work after all that's happened. I feel for those who actually live on the post, and the kids who were locked down at their schools, the parents who couldn't get through to the schools because the phone signals were jammed there was so much traffic.

I've experienced a lockdown before. At Fort Sill. A man dressed as a sergeant waved an order at a private and told him to load up the M-16s into his truck. The private did. And then the place was locked down. The sergeant was either real, had been in the military, or was never in the military, although they suspect he had been. The orders were not real. Everyone's vehicles were searched. It took hours to leave the post. At least the sergeant didn't shoot anyone. He most likely sold the whole lot on the black market. But we did worry he might have planned to use them on Fort Sill personnel.

Another time someone stole a tank at Fort Sill. So yeah, we had some cases all right. And right before we arrived at Fort Riley, Kansas as ROTC Cadets for a summer camp, a soldier fired real ammo on his fellow soldiers instead of blank ammo in revenge during a training incident.

But generally, you think military installations are pretty safe places...until the soldiers themselves break.

So my heartfelt condolences go out to everyone at Fort Hood, to those injured and dead, and the families left behind. And to those who have to live so close to this. The memories will live with us forever.

Terry