D.C. Shooter Is a Disturbed Gulf War Vet, Not a Terrorist

But this case is a prime example of our post-Sept. 11 attitude of knee-jerk reactionism and failing to see the forest for the trees.

First, the man is not, and never was, what could be remotely considered a sniper. Modern military snipers are highly trained individuals, well-versed in the ideas of concealment. A professional sniper's shooting skills are often second to none.

This man, as police have noted, generally shot his targets from between 100 and 200 yards. For a sniper, that's child's play, considering snipers are trained to hit targets with pinpoint accuracy in excess of 800 yards. This person, or persons, is obviously a lunatic with access to firearms, not highly trained by any stretch of the imagination.

During the coverage of the shootings, I was concerned by the automatic assumption by many news outlets that the shooter was a terrorist. This was muck-racking, turn-of-the-century journalism presented with 21st century technology. I know CNN has 24 hours to fill with only so many ways to tell the same story, but automatically assuming the man has terrorist motives is hyperbole at best.

Such proclamations by "respectable" news media only serve to fan the flames of hysteria and worry that already existed in the country.

When I went home over fall break, I found it bit surrealistic to see a sheriff's deputy sitting outside a gas station off Interstate 40 where I had stopped to fill up. In this modern age of terrorism, there's a fine line between taking the necessary precautions to stop madmen from waging a guerrilla war against our nation, but it's quite another to suspect every crime is somehow an insidious terrorist act.

After the arrests were made on Oct. 24, I was shocked -- not because they had found the two suspected shooters but because one of them had served in the Persian Gulf War. I'm surprised that any major news outlet has not begun to question the link between this war and the men who fought in it.

The 1991 Gulf War is, in many ways, like the Korean War -- it is our forgotten war. Though considered by many civilians at home to be a video game and television war, with dramatic images of bombs homing directly onto their targets and nightly broadcasts of anti-aircraft fire over Baghdad by CNN, the short conflict that was Desert Storm seems to have had a far more insidious effect on some of its combatants.

Timothy McVeigh, whom America has seem to forgotten, was a Gulf War hero. Yet after the war, he struggled to reconcile the war in Iraq with his life at home. In the end, it seems the only way he felt comfortable getting his point across was to kill 168 people in the Murrah Federal Building.

John Muhammad, now the suspected Washington shooter, is much the same case as McVeigh. With a clean service record, Muhammad even qualified as an expert on the M-16 in basic training. Though he served largely as one of the many support personnel for the war, something between then and now drove this man to shoot random people across two states and the District of Columbia.

Could it have been an experience in Desert Storm that Muhammad found irreconcilable with life back in the states?

The Gulf War left thousands of dead Iraqis and hundreds of dead coalition troops in its wake. Many veterans of that war are also suffering through the vague affliction known as "Gulf War Syndrome" which no medical authority has accurately diagnosed and treated. And now, it seems as if the Gulf War, like Vietnam, affected some of our troops in a far deeper and catastrophic manner than we could have ever fathomed when the troops came home.

Far from the forgotten war, it's still claiming lives today, in the suburbs of our nation's capital.

Reach Joseph Rauch at rauch@email.unc.edu.