Moral Injury at One O'Clock

I have been in the chamber for fourteen different executions: Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Florida, and Alabama. I was the first spiritual advisor in this country to stand beside a man while the state killed him with nitrogen gas. I know what the people who run these rooms look like when the body is cold. I know what the bodies look like in my nightmares.

I have never watched a firing squad obliterate someone. No one serving today in the military today has either. The last military execution was a hanging in 1961. The last military firing squad was in 1945. Every soldier who walks into that building at Fort Hood on December 3 for the execution of Nadal Hasan will be walking in blind. I am writing because I am not.

Nothing here is a defense of Hasan. He was an officer and a psychiatrist. On November 5, 2009, he walked into the Soldier Readiness Center where troops waited in line for checkups before deployment. He opened fire. Thirteen people died. Twelve of them wore the uniform. Thirty-two more were wounded. He told the jury he was the shooter. The dead have names. Their families have carried those names for seventeen years. We have a duty to always honor their memories.

Secretary Hegseth recommended the rifles. The President approved them. The acting Secretary of the Army set the date. Hegseth wanted it livestreamed. The President has since shut that down. A closed door changes who has to look. None of the men who ordered this will be in the room. So, we are talking about the shooting of a paralyzed man in a secret room.

Here is what the room does. It takes everything you were told about procedure and hands you a body. In Alabama, the protocol promised unconsciousness in seconds. I stood there while the promise failed.

The rifle does not fix this. South Carolina shot three men last year. In one of them, the autopsy showed the bullets missed the heart. The shooters were trained. They were volunteers. Their names are sealed. What they carry is not. Nobody tells you about coming home after shooting an unarmed defenseless person.

The Army's own regulation for executions describes lethal injection. Nothing has been published about how a firing squad at Fort Hood will work. Who will stand on the line. Whether they will shoot once or twice. Who will give the orders. Of course, orders move down a chain. Everyone on that chain can point to someone above. The bullets will not be fired by an abstraction called the Army. A soldier's finger will be on each trigger. Each of those soldiers will have to live with themselves after this is over. For what? So a terrorist can claim to be a martyr?

Medical professionals have a name for what that room leaves behind. Moral injury. The wound of doing a thing, or standing by for a thing, that your own conscience cannot carry. The military speaks of it as something war does to you in a fight you did not choose. This one is on the calendar. One o'clock. A man who cannot stand. The Army plans to hand a fresh case of moral injury to every soldier on that line, to the officer who gives the command, to the chaplain who has to stand there and to the families of the thirteen, who were told this would feel like an end. Everybody will see the execution for exactly what it is. A paralyzed man being strapped down and shot to death.

The Army is good at a great many things. It is not ready for this. Soldiers are not trained to kill restrained paralyzed unarmed people. There is no range qualification for that.

Hasan can live out his days paralyzed in a prison and be denied his precious desire to be a martyr. This is a greater punishment than what is being planned. There is no reason to make the Army an executioner again after sixty-five years. 

To any soldier asked to volunteer for that line: you do not have to. In fact, you will better serve the moral functioning of your nation by standing down.

Rev. Jeff Hood is a priest who has served as a spiritual advisor in fourteen executions. His latest book is The Lie of the Clean Kill: Idaho, the Firing Squad, and the Allure of the Bullet.