Remember back in November when Major Malik Nadal Hasan went on a shooting rampage on the Army base at Fort Hood, Tex., and the media’s first impulse was to reflexively wonder why he had done it?  Was it because he was about to be deployed overseas?  Was it because, as an Army psychiatrist, he had snapped under the pressure of de-briefing psychologically shattered soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and was thus suffering from a hitherto-unknown psychological condition called “Secondary Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”?  The head-scratchers and chin-pullers scratched and pulled but, by golly, they just couldn’t seem to wrap their minds around why this man could possibly have done such a thing.

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Typical was The Christian Science Monitor:

According to reports, Mr. Hasan desperately wanted to avoid being deployed to a war zone. While there appeared to be several reasons for this, including a conviction that he was a victim of harassment, he was also troubled by the stories he heard from overseas.

The lack of mental-health counselors has been an ongoing problem that both the military and the Veterans Affairs have been working to resolve in recent years.

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