Thursday’s horrific attack on a U.S. army base has left this citizen uneasy. Frankly, all news of military action has hit closer to home this year as my younger brother prepares for his 2010 deployment to Afghanistan. I’ve tried to keep quiet. I bite my tongue when my skepticism of our country’s wars threatens to further harm my family’s already deepened sense of resignation to our involvement in this nation’s causes. And in reality, I trust and respect my brother too much to question his commitment and vow of duty at his young age.

What Thursday’s shooting has stirred in my mind more than anything is the question of implication of involvement in a volatile war atmosphere. I’m not one to make excuses for people that can find no other outlet for their own pain and anger than to take the lives of others, and I certainly won’t be doing that here.

But I have to wonder—how does a trained military professional, surrounded by a supportive nationwide family engaged in the same fate, find that the only answer to a possible death abroad is a certain one at home.

Major Nidal Hasan worked as a military psychiatric professional, and focused on traumatic stress in soldiers post-war. Did he witness so many horrific psychiatric disorders that the thought of returning from war with one himself was terrifyingly unthinkable? I’m certain he has seen more mental fall-out from war than any member of our international society should have to witness. I’ve often marveled at psychiatric professionals’ ability to remove themselves from a world of “crazy” and help from a distance, without succumbing to a poor mental fate themselves.

The military is not above noticing and addressing the mental state of its soldiers, and much has been done in the way of offering all the help they can to veterans of war. But my recent personal experiences have taught me that there is so much to be done before a soldier leaves these shores for war abroad. We take for granted our soldiers’ commitment and feel terrible but unmistakably relieved when they return home from duty alive but mentally and emotionally destroyed.

But what about before they leave? Soldiers are given nearly a year’s advance notice of deployment so that they may put their personal affairs in order, and I personally thank the system for that. I would be in my own wrecked mental state if I wasn’t given time to deal with my brother’s deployment adequately (if in fact there is any amount of adequacy to be found in this state).

The problem is, I am a spectator. My feelings and emotions about the whole thing are somewhat irrelevant. I have little to no idea what is going through my brother’s mind, alone in the middle of the night, or whilst enjoying the magical football season on his University of Iowa campus with joyful and carefree friends. My family holds the gravity of this Thanksgiving and Christmas, his twenty-first birthday in December, in heavy hearts. But what about his heavy heart? No matter how strongly he believes in what he is a part of, no matter how ready he is to actively support the causes of our nation, I know that heart of his weighs deep, heavy with things that his friends and family just can’t fathom.

Major Hasan had reportedly hired an attorney to attempt to get him out of deployment, a failed attempt that seemingly left him in deeper personal despair. On the one hand, that sentiment rings selfish—why should he avoid the same fate of deployment that thousands of other men and women accept everyday. On the other hand, a hand of logic, I have a deep struggle with the army’s law of resign. There is no other job in this nation that I can think of that people, once committed, cannot quit.

It’s true that the military sinks a lot of money into the lives and vitality of its enlisted men and women. But to me that argument screams of faulty American ethics. Money is god. If the military paid for your education, your training, your living expenses, then you owe them the completion of your duty, your job.

What about the health of our brave men and women? What about the very real emotion of regret? What about the difference three or more years of living your life between enlistment and deployment can make? I take out student loans to go to school, but if after a couple years I decide it’s just not what I want to do with my life, I can quit. When I, after quite luckily gaining employment in this economy, complete with benefits, decided that it just wasn’t for me, I quit. And that job afforded me the ability to pay my bills, enjoy my life, give presents to friends and family at Christmas…but I quit.

Now, I know what you might say. American taxes did not go to my paychecks from my private company. And I know that if men and women were allowed to leave the military at will we would certainly see abuse of the system for the ascertaining of funds to secure a free education. But is an economic enslavement any better than this? Can there be no compromise, where the military could determine if deployment is just not appropriate for individuals unable to deal with their fate? And is this really the type of person we want going overseas anyway?

I want to reiterate that I am making no excuses for anyone, and certainly not for Major Hasan. What happened on Thursday crushed me and left me deeply upset, not in the least because my brother will likely arrive at Fort Hood in the late Summer/early Fall of 2010, to prepare for deployment. I instead wish only to question an incredibly age-old way of doing things in our military, and to implore those with members of the military in their friend and family groups to support them before they leave, and not just after they come home.

The distinction of “veteran” is a highly respectable one in my book, but this Veteran’s Day, I will be celebrating someone who in my mind is already a veteran in strength of mind and spirit.