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Dear Doug Collins

The Fort Hood Victims: Thirteen Killed in the Readiness Center, Five Years as 'Workplace Violence'

The Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood was not a battlefield, and that was the point of it. It was the building where soldiers went, unarmed, to be made ready — medical checks, dental checks, records, immunizations — before deploying overseas, and where they processed back in when they came home. On November 5, 2009, an Army psychiatrist who was himself weeks from deploying walked into that building and opened fire on the people inside it. Thirteen people were killed and thirty-one were wounded by gunfire. The government that had sent those soldiers to war then spent more than five years calling what happened to them workplace violence — a classification that kept the Purple Heart, and the benefits that travel with it, out of their hands — even though the shooter had been in communication with an al-Qaeda propagandist and would tell his own court-martial that he had switched sides. Congress finally rewrote the rule, and the medals were awarded on April 10, 2015. This page is the record of the service those soldiers were performing in that building, of what was done to them there, of the five years the institution spent misnaming it, and of the narrower fight — over whether the wounds count as combat-related — that the medal did not end.

The service and the promise

Fort Hood, near Killeen, Texas, was in 2009 the headquarters of III Corps and one of the largest Army installations in the world, the post from which division after division rotated to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Soldier Readiness Processing Center — the SRP, in Building 42003 — was the administrative throat of that rotation. Soldiers passed through it in both directions: outbound, to confirm they were medically and administratively fit to deploy; inbound, to be processed home. Its chairs and cubicles held a cross-section of the deploying Army — combat units, signal soldiers, and, heavily on November 5, medical personnel: the combat stress and behavioral health teams who deploy to treat other soldiers’ minds.

The thirteen killed reflect that room: Lieutenant Colonel Juanita L. Warman, 55, a nurse practitioner with the 1908th Medical Company; Major Libardo Eduardo Caraveo, 52, a psychologist with the 467th Medical Detachment, who had come to the United States from Mexico as a teenager knowing little English, earned a doctorate, and arrived at Fort Hood the day before the shooting; Captain John P. Gaffaney, 54, of the 1908th, and Captain Russell Gilbert Seager, 51, of the 467th; Staff Sergeant Justin Michael DeCrow, 32, and Specialist Frederick Greene, 29, of the 16th Signal Company; Sergeant Amy Sue Krueger, 29, of the 467th; Specialist Jason Dean Hunt, 22, of the 1st Brigade; Private First Class Aaron Thomas Nemelka, 19, who had recently signed up for explosive ordnance work — among the most dangerous jobs in the service, in President Obama’s words at the memorial, so that he could help save lives; Private First Class Michael S. Pearson, 22; Private First Class Kham See Xiong, 23; and Private First Class Francheska Velez, 21, just returned from Iraq and at the center in connection with her pregnancy — her unborn child is counted by the families and the memorial community as a fourteenth life lost, though the Army’s count is thirteen. Michael Grant Cahill, 62, was the one civilian: a retired chief warrant officer working as a physician assistant who, the President noted, was back at work that day just weeks after a heart attack.

The promise that attached to that room was not exotic. Soldiers in the SRP were on duty, in uniform, on orders, in the one place on post where they were required to be unarmed and seated in rows. If a soldier could be wounded by an enemy anywhere in the world and be honored for it, the soldiers in the readiness center — several of them days from the war, one of them just home from it and pregnant — were covered by the same obligation on the Army’s side of the bargain: the wound would be recognized for what it was. That recognition is what the next five years were about.

What happened

The warnings existed before the shooting, and they are documented in two official investigations. Major Nidal Malik Hasan was an Army psychiatrist who had trained at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The bipartisan Senate report of February 3, 2011 — “A Ticking Time Bomb,” by Chairman Joseph Lieberman and Ranking Member Susan Collins — found that evidence of Hasan’s growing embrace of violent Islamist extremism was on open display during his training, that an instructor and a colleague had each described him as a “ticking time bomb,” and that his officer evaluations sanitized that record rather than acting on it. He was promoted to major in 2009.

From December 17, 2008, through June 2009, Hasan exchanged a series of messages — eighteen, by the Senate’s count — with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric in Yemen who was a propagandist for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was already the subject of an FBI counterterrorism investigation. Hasan asked, among other things, about the permissibility under Islam of a soldier killing fellow soldiers and about suicide operations. The San Diego Joint Terrorism Task Force, monitoring Awlaki, flagged the traffic and sent it to the FBI’s Washington Field Office. The assessment that followed treated the contact as consistent with Hasan’s research as a psychiatrist. The FBI did not interview Hasan and did not notify his chain of command. The Senate committee’s judgment on the whole record: the Department of Defense and the FBI “collectively had sufficient information necessary to have detected Hasan’s radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it.”

On November 5, 2009, at about 1:34 in the afternoon, Hasan entered the Center carrying a laser-sighted FN Five-seven semiautomatic pistol. Witnesses testified that he shouted “Allahu Akbar” and opened fire, then followed fleeing soldiers outside. The attack lasted about ten minutes. Captain Gaffaney died trying to charge the shooter; Michael Cahill, by the Army’s later valor citation, died trying to charge him with a chair. Civilian police Sergeant Kimberly Munley exchanged fire with Hasan outside and was shot and wounded. Sergeant Mark Todd shot Hasan, ending the attack; Hasan survived, paralyzed from the waist down. Thirteen people were killed — twelve soldiers and Cahill. Thirty-one people were wounded by gunfire: thirty soldiers and Sergeant Munley.

Hasan’s own account of his motive was given to the institution that tried him. At his general court-martial in August 2013, representing himself, he admitted he was the shooter, said he had “switched sides,” and advanced the theory that he had acted to protect Taliban fighters from soldiers deploying to Afghanistan — a theory the military judge rejected, because the unarmed people in the Center posed no threat to anyone. On August 23, 2013, a panel convicted him of thirteen counts of premeditated murder and thirty-two counts of attempted premeditated murder — one more than the number of people shot, because it includes an officer fired on and not struck. Five days later the panel sentenced him to death, with dismissal and forfeiture of pay. He has been held since at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

None of that — not the Awlaki messages, not the Senate’s findings, not the shooter’s own stated motive — changed the label the Defense Department applied while the benefits questions were live. Its independent review, “Protecting the Force,” delivered January 15, 2010, framed the threat as disaffected individuals inside the force and, as the Senate committee later criticized, glossed over the extremism evidence. In the Department’s reporting the shooting stood classified as workplace violence for more than five years. The consequence was mechanical, and it was the whole fight: under the Purple Heart’s criteria as they then read, a wound had to result from action by an enemy or hostile foreign force. A workplace shooting did not qualify — and the benefits keyed to the medal, among them combat-related special compensation and Arlington burial eligibility, did not attach.

The victims organized rather than accept the label. A coalition of some 160 victims and family members released a video, “The Truth About Fort Hood,” in the fall of 2012, in which survivors made the argument in their own words — the soldiers in that room, Staff Sergeant Shawn Manning said, “were killed and wounded by a domestic enemy — somebody who was there that day to kill soldiers, to prevent them from deploying. If that’s not an act of war or an act of terrorism, I don’t know what is.” On November 5, 2012, 148 victims and family members, represented by attorney Neal Sher, sued the government, alleging negligence and that the designation was being used to avoid the responsibility a terrorism designation would carry. In Congress, Representative John Carter of Texas, whose district included Fort Hood, had pressed the combat-casualty designation since 2010; Representative Roger Williams joined him, and Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz carried it in the Senate.

What the institution did afterward

The institution moved in two registers at once: accountability for the failure to stop Hasan, and refusal, for years, on the name of what he did. On the first register, there was real movement. Fifteen days after the attack, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appointed the West-Clark review. The Senate committee reported in February 2011 that the attack was preventable. Secretary McHugh thereafter disciplined nine Army officers in connection with the failures around Hasan’s supervision. The Webster Commission’s 2012 report put the FBI’s errors on the record, and the FBI concurred with the principles of its eighteen recommendations.

On the second register, nothing moved until Congress moved it. Through the court-martial, the Department declined to recharacterize the attack, citing the integrity of the proceedings; after the conviction, the classification still stood, because the Purple Heart criteria, not the verdict, governed the medals. The fix was statutory and general. Section 571 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015, Public Law 113-291, signed December 19, 2014, provides that, for purposes of the Purple Heart and the Defense of Freedom Medal, an attack shall be considered an attack by a foreign terrorist organization if the perpetrator “was in communication with the foreign terrorist organization before the attack” and “the attack was inspired or motivated by the foreign terrorist organization.” The Congressional Research Service describes Section 571 exactly that way — an expansion of eligibility by redefinition — covering Fort Hood and the June 1, 2009, Little Rock recruiting-station shooting as well.

Under the new criteria, the Army reviewed Fort Hood and found the test met. Its February 6, 2015, announcement states the determination in the statute’s own terms: Hasan “was in communication with the foreign terrorist organization before the attack,” and his acts could reasonably be considered “inspired or motivated by the foreign terrorist organization.” Secretary McHugh’s statement conceded the five years in a sentence: “The Purple Heart’s strict eligibility criteria had prevented us from awarding it to victims of the horrific attack at Fort Hood. Now that Congress has changed the criteria, we believe there is sufficient reason to allow these men and women to be awarded and recognized with either the Purple Heart or, in the case of civilians, the Defense of Freedom Medal.” It was, he said, “an appropriate recognition of their service and sacrifice.”

The ceremony was held at Fort Hood on April 10, 2015, five years and five months after the attack. Secretary McHugh and Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland presented Purple Hearts to representatives of ten of the soldiers killed and to twenty-six of the soldiers wounded. The Defense of Freedom Medal, the civilian equivalent of the Purple Heart, was presented to the family of Michael Cahill and to Sergeant Kimberly Munley. Purple Hearts for the families of the remaining two soldiers killed and for four more wounded soldiers were awarded at local ceremonies — forty-two Purple Hearts in all, and two Defense of Freedom Medals. Retired General Robert Cone, who had commanded Fort Hood in 2009, called it “a day of victory.” Not every recipient experienced it as an ending. Sergeant Eric Jackson told the public radio report of the ceremony: “It’s kind of hard not to be bitter because you wonder, where’s the respect? Where is the recognition? Where is the support for what you’ve gone through and what you’re continuously going through?”

Four days after the ceremony, Secretary McHugh went a step further on paper. His April 14, 2015, memorandum directed the Army to provide “all possible benefits” to the recipients: hostile fire pay for those killed, injured, or wounded, and combat-related special compensation for retired soldiers whose disability is attributable to an injury for which they received the Purple Heart. “After making the determination that the victims of the Fort Hood attack are now eligible for the Purple Heart, it seems only right and fair that these soldiers also receive the benefits it traditionally entails,” McHugh said. “That’s why I directed an expedited process to make certain that happens.”

That memorandum is where the record splits, because a Purple Heart and a combat-related injury determination are two different findings, and Section 571 had rewritten only the first. The split is documented, with dates, in the case of Staff Sergeant Shawn Manning, shot six times on November 5, 2009; two bullets remain in his body, one in his leg and one in his back, and he lives with post-traumatic stress. Before the statute changed, the Army’s answer to him was absolute: a 2012 determination held that because Hasan “has been charged with criminal activity, but has not been adjudicated a terrorist,” the evidence did not support that his injuries were the direct result of armed conflict, and that his wounds were not caused by an “instrumentality of war” because Hasan’s weapon was a private pistol the Army had not issued. After the Purple Heart, Manning asked the Army to recognize his injuries accordingly. On April 6, 2015 — four days before he stood in the ceremony — an Army physical evaluation board answered, in a letter Fox News obtained and Military.com reported: Section 571 “addresses both the awarding of the Purple Heart” and the Defense of Freedom Medal for the Fort Hood attack, but “nowhere in the act, however, does it offer combat benefits for service members permanently disabled in attacks inspired or motivated by foreign terrorist organizations. Although subsequent legislation and guidance may change, currently, the Board has no authority to award V1/V3 (service related) designation to soldiers disabled during the Fort Hood attack.” Manning’s statement of the gap has not been improved on: “I think it’s almost unheard of for someone to receive the Purple Heart but not have their injuries deemed combat-related. I know that was not what Congress intended to have happen, but it is what currently the Army has determined is going to happen.” He put the practical stake at back pay and about $800 a month, and expected other survivors to meet the same reading.

By November 2015 the position had narrowed but not closed. Manning had received combat-related special compensation under the Purple Heart — about $700 a month, with a lump sum for back pay — while the board’s separate determination on his gunshot wounds, the one affecting his long-term medical benefits and retirement, remained unresolved: an Army email of September 18, 2015, provided by Manning, stated that his case was on hold awaiting “final guidance from Department of the Army.” Army spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith said the recipients “should have received all the benefits to which they are legally entitled to receive from the Army at this time,” and that “some individual cases may still have pending actions.” Manning’s summary, six years after he was shot: “I hope that this can be fixed. I mean it isn’t even necessarily about the benefits anymore, it’s just, getting this fixed so I can put this behind me.”

Where it stands now

The names are in granite. The Fort Hood Shooting Memorial in Killeen — built by volunteers, financed by donations, deliberately placed off post so families from anywhere could reach it — was dedicated on March 11, 2016. It holds thirteen black granite columns, one for each of the killed, counted by its makers as fourteen lives, including Francheska Velez’s unborn child. The remembrance is annual: the City of Killeen’s notice for the fifteenth anniversary, on November 5, 2024, states the facts as this page does, with families present and the names read. The post itself has been renamed twice since: Fort Cavazos on May 9, 2023, and Fort Hood again on July 28, 2025, now honoring Colonel Robert B. Hood, a World War I officer, rather than its original Confederate namesake.

The legal account closed, after seventeen years, in the autumn of 2026 — as of the writing of this page, October 17, 2026. Hasan’s appeals ran their full course: the Army Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in 2020; the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces affirmed, issuing its revised opinion on March 4, 2024; and on March 31, 2025, the Supreme Court denied review. Because a military death sentence cannot be carried out without presidential approval, the case then waited on the President. On October 5, 2026, the Pentagon announced that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had recommended, and President Donald Trump had approved, execution by Army firing squad. The next day, Acting Secretary of the Army Adam Telle set the execution for December 3, 2026, at 1 p.m. Central Time, at Fort Hood. If carried out, it would be the first United States military execution since Private John Bennett was hanged in 1961, and the Army’s first firing-squad execution since Private Eddie Slovik in 1945. A further federal filing remained legally available to Hasan and could seek to delay it; none is recorded in the reporting relied on here.

The execution announcement then reproduced, in miniature, the pattern this page documents: a decision about Fort Hood made over the victims’ heads, and corrected only after they objected. Secretary Hegseth said the execution would be public, and Pentagon officials confirmed to the Associated Press on October 8, 2026, that it would be livestreamed. Survivors answered that they had not been consulted — among them retired Sergeant First Class Paul Martin, shot four times in the SRP, who said of the plan, in a video released by VoteVets: “I don’t understand how that’s going to help my healing.” On October 15, 2026, according to reporting of the President’s statement that day, he reversed the livestream while leaving the December 3 execution in place, and said victims’ immediate family members could attend in person if they chose. As of October 17, 2026: the date stands, the broadcast does not.

The benefits account — the part of the ledger this series exists to keep — stands narrower than it did in 2015, and it is important to carry it at its true width. The central wrong is remedied: the statute was rewritten for every future case, the medals were awarded, hostile fire pay and combat-related special compensation were ordered, and the Little Rock victims were covered by the same law. What remains is the layer the statute did not reach, documented in individual cases rather than as a class: board determinations of whether a given soldier’s wounds are combat-related, with the long-term medical and retirement consequences that follow. The last public reporting on the named case, Manning’s, is dated November 6, 2015: medal in hand, special compensation paid, the board determination still awaiting Army guidance. No later public resolution has been located as of October 17, 2026, and the Army’s 2015 formulation — that some individual cases “may still have pending actions” — is the most recent institutional statement the record offers. The medals took five years and an Act of Congress. The determinations underneath them were left, case by case, to the boards.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Fort Hood’s case returned to camera in October 2026, when the execution announcement made the victims news again: a CBS News Texas retrospective; two local-news reports of the victims’ objection to the announced livestream; and the Associated Press explaining the scheduled firing-squad execution. Four films, in that order.

Seventeen years on. CBS News Texas's Meagan Harris, in conversation with Ken Molestina, reflects on covering the shooting and on the survivors and family members she has followed for nearly two decades, amid the execution debate. (CBS News Texas.)

The victims answer. Victims of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting push back against plans to livestream the convicted shooter's execution; the segment is credited in its description to NBC and KCEN. (WRAL.)

The objection, reported. Sydni Walker reports on 2009 Fort Hood shooting victims pushing back against plans to livestream the convicted shooter's execution. (11Alive.)

The method, explained. Associated Press reporter Jeffrey Collins, who states he has covered fifteen executions, explains the Army's announced public firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, scheduled for December 3. (AP Archive.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.