Seventeen years after Army Maj. Nidal Hassan shouted “God is the greatest” in Arabic and opened fire at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, the 12 soldiers and a civilian physician’s assistant who died on Nov. 5, 2009, and the 32 injured, appear on few memorials or databases marking post-9/11 casualties, despite receiving the Purple Heart more than a decade ago.
The Fort Hood November 5 Memorial in Killeen, Texas, pays tribute to the wounded and dead, with the deceased marked by a pillar, etched photograph and sculpture. Pfc. Francheska Velez is remembered with a Scooby-Doo sculpture — one of her favorite stuffies — embracing a smaller Scooby, her unborn baby who also died.
The Middle East Conflicts Wall Memorial in Marseilles, Illinois, also features the names of the Fort Hood fallen, as do the names of service members killed in an attack on a recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2015, and the active-duty personnel who died on Sept. 11, 2001.
Carla McPhee, the memorial’s vice president, said that from the beginning, the sponsors wanted to include troops killed in terrorist attacks regardless of where they occurred, because “the enemy and the sacrifice are the same.”
“We did not add these names lightly, and we did not add them to make a political point. We added them because they are fallen American service members killed in the War on Terror, and our promise at the Wall is that no fallen hero in that fight is forgotten — whether they fell in Iraq or Afghanistan, or here at home at Fort Hood,” McPhee said in an email to Military Times.
But the Army’s own tribute to post 9/11 troops, the Global War on Terrorism Memorial at the National Infantry Museum, Fort Benning, Georgia, and its accompanying online database, doesn’t include the dead of Fort Hood.
Neither are the names included in the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which lists the fallen by conflict, or non-military databases maintained for more than 20 years by Military Times, CNN and others.
It’s an omission that retired Army Col. Kathy Platoni, who treated victims at Fort Hood and says she was at the top of Hasan’s hit list, finds egregious.
“There was a special authorization under the National Defense Authorization Act for the Purple Hearts, but that never changed the classification — it is still considered workplace violence,” Platoni said in an interview with Military Times. “We put our lives on the line to serve, sacrifice and pay with our very lives, and yet we have the betrayal by our own government.”
For years after the mass shooting, the Army referred to it as an incident of workplace violence, even as an investigation revealed that Hasan attended the mosque of al-Qaeda recruiter and imam Anwar al-Awlaki and remained in contact with him when al-Awlaki joined al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
In 2015, as a result of a congressional directive, the victims received Purple Heart medals, despite protests by the service and the Pentagon that said awarding them would “irrevocably alter the fundamental character of this time-honored decoration” and compromise Hasan’s right to a free trial.
After the medals were awarded, then-Army Secretary John McHugh promised the victims all related combat-related benefits as well.
Plutoni said, however, she will not be satisfied until the shooting is formally classified as domestic terrorism and the victims and their families are provided associated line-of-duty benefits for the time frame between 2009 and when they received their Purple Hearts.
She also believes they should be included in all official post-9/11 casualty databases.
The Defense Department maintains the Defense Casualty Analysis System database. When asked why the Fort Hood victims aren’t included in the system, DoD officials referred questions to the U.S. Army.
The Army did not respond to several emails by publication.
An official with the National Infantry Museum said the names are not included in its GWOT database because it receives its names from the Defense Department and DCAS.
The circular denial is a state that Eric Strand, who wrote an article in 2023 on the subject, finds maddening.
“I never got anywhere,” said Strand, a former Minnesota Army National Guard member who collects artwork and graffiti from the post-9/11 wars era. “It’s embarrassing for the military, right? He was a mental health professional when mental health is the most important thing we’d been talking about. For a mental health professional to be radicalized and commit this in the name of, you know, this new caliphate is really embarrassing and is a really hard story to tell.”
A national Global War on Terrorism Memorial is in the works for the area of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial. A person familiar with the ongoing discussions on the memorial’s design has said that the current plan doesn’t include names, although nothing is final.
“The CEO has always talked about how he wants it to really be inclusive, and so many of our veterans have committed suicide since coming home from the GWOT, and that’s another concern. How do you include all of them as well?” said the foundation supporter.
Sheryll Pearson’s son, Pfc. Michael Pearson, a gentle soul who aspired to be a music theory and guitar teacher after he left the Army, was killed on Nov. 5, 2009. He was 22.
Pearson is proud that her son’s name is included on the memorial in Marseilles and finds the memorial in Killeen to be a reflective reminder of her “Mikey.”
She said that during the trial, listening to a 911 call, she heard her son moaning from pain in the background.
“I hear it when I am awake, I hear it when I am asleep … Michael will be a part of our family now and forever,” she wrote on a Facebook post following an October announcement by the Defense Department that Hasan would be executed by firing squad.
She told Military Times she doesn’t want her son or anyone who died or was injured to be forgotten.
“There were people at that time who did not even know that that happened,” Pearson said. “Now we have a whole generation of people that aren’t even aware of these incidents and terrorist attacks. You want the next generation to know. These names should be everywhere.”
Hasan’s execution is slated for Dec. 3 at Fort Hood.
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