Excerpt:
"I hear someone yell 'Allahu akbar,'" Sergeant Shawn Manning told Army Times. "Usually something bad is going to follow after that, so I look up at him and he started shooting. He probably fired five or six shots before he shot me in the chest."
Manning, a veteran of two deployments in Iraq, was referring to Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army psychiatrist who gunned down 13 and wounded 32 at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009. Nearly four years later the case is finally coming to trial but it is already clear that Major Hasan received more preferential treatment than his victims.
Hasan is still in the Army and retains his rank of major. The Army is still paying Hasan his full salary and has received more than $278,000 since his arrest in 2009. The Army is also taking care of the paralyzing injuries Hasan sustained in the gun rampage. That was before Hasan shot the unarmed Sergeant Alonzo Lunsford once in the head and six times in the body. Lunsford played dead and then fled the building but Hasan chased him down and shot him in the back. The bullet is still there but Lunsford told reporters that the Army refused to cover an operation to remove it, and docked his pay when he was undergoing treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.