Heroes among the horror at army base

But it was already bloody chaos.

Munley heard shots and saw a rush of scared people, some wounded by gunfire, scrambling to get away.

Figuring the shooter must be between buildings for medical and psychiatric services, she rounded the corner and saw him chasing after an already-wounded soldier. She fired twice.

"He turned to her and charged, firing rapidly. She returned fire and fell to the ground to help protect herself," said Chuck Medley, director of Fort Hood's emergency services.

Munley and the gunman hit each other simultaneously; she took shots in both legs and the wrist. Altogether, she fired four shots into his torso with her Beretta 9mm, dropping him to the ground and ending the worst mass shooting a U.S. military base has ever seen.

"She eliminated the threat. She did what she was trained to do," Medley said. "She, in my mind, saved countless lives."

Medley, who talked with Munley early Friday as she recovered, identified the civilian officer as a hero.

But she wasn't the only one.

Firing into a room where hundreds of unarmed soldiers were lined up for vaccines and eye tests, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had created a battle scene worse than most had witnessed in Iraq, killing 13 and wounding 30. Many stayed to help the wounded at a scene most would have fled, falling back on their military and medical training, working furiously to save lives.

"There were many cases of soldiers and police officers yesterday putting their life on the line to save somebody else," Medley said, fighting back tears. "And that's what I saw."

Sgt. Andrew Hagerman, a military police officer from Lewisville, Texas, who was on his rounds in the barracks area, was about a mile and a half away when the first crackle across the radio of "shots fired" came in.

He didn't think much of it -- probably someone throwing firecrackers off the roof again.

But "shock and awe" came, he said, when he heard, "Officer down." With sirens blaring, he made it to the scene in three minutes.

Even so, a tremendous amount of damage had been done in a short amount of time.

People were screaming. Some were on the ground, with soldiers hovering over them and ripping off their own shirts to staunch the bleeding. Some were being carried out of the two buildings where most of the carnage had occurred.

"I did spin a circle a couple of times, thinking, 'What do I need to do here?' " Hagerman said.

He walked past the gunman, unconscious on the ground in military fatigues. Ambulance drivers and medics had arrived and with his training taking over, Hagerman began directing traffic and sorting out the most serious who would need an ambulance first.

"It was controlled chaos," Hagerman said. Even still, it was clear who the gunman was. Soldiers generally don't carry weapons on post, and Hasan "had a lot of weapons and magazines on him," Medley said.

Soldier Marques Smith of Fort Worth was in the medical services building. Preparing to deploy to Afghanistan in January, he was filling out the paperwork to get the right medical tags for an allergy.

He was chatting with the ladies in the office. "Then all we heard was popping noise. I thought, 'What is this?' " he said.

Soon, the screaming started.

He said his first reaction was to be still until the shooting stopped and he could escape. He instinctively went to the ground, but for a second, his foot caught up in the chair.

"Just then, a round came through the fabricated wall," he said, pointing to where the bullet had lodged in the heel of his tan boot. "Another second, and it would have been my spine."

Col. Steve Beckwith, a doctor and triage expert, was tending a patient at the post hospital when a nurse told him there were gunshot injuries needing attention. He started dispatching ambulances, then heard from his first driver that shots were still being fired. Suddenly, he was concerned he had sent medics into harm's way.

Beckwith made his way to the ambulance bay and already cars were pulling up -- soldiers, rushing to a battle scene, picking up the wounded and taking them to the hospital before ambulances could even arrive.

Col. Kimberly Kesling, chief of medical services, was at the hospital going into a meeting when an aide gave her and other top commanders the word of an ER on full alert. She thought initially it would be a relatively minor thing, a single patient or maybe two.

By the time she got to the ER, "it quickly became evident that it was a massive event," Kesling said.

In short order, Kesling said all six operating rooms were filled with teams working on the injured.

Kesling said she was proud of her staff. Going from station to station, "I didn't see a cracked emotion," she said. "Today, tomorrow, that might be a different thing."

-- Dallas Morning News

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 7, 2009 A16