By MICHAEL MOSS and RAY RIVERA
FORT HOOD, Tex. — Staff Sgt. Gilberto Mota, 35, and his wife, Diana, 30, an Army specialist, had returned to Fort Hood from Iraq last year when he used his gun to kill her, and then took his own life, the authorities say. In July, two members of the First Cavalry Division, also just back from the war with decorations for their service, were at a party when one killed the other.
That same month, Staff Sgt. Justin Lee Garza, 28, under stress from two deployments, killed himself in a friend’s apartment outside Fort Hood, four days after he was told no therapists were available for a counseling session. “What bothers me most is this happened while he was supposed to be on suicide watch,” said his mother, Teri Smith. “To this day, I don’t know where he got the gun.”
Fort Hood is still reeling from last week’s carnage, in which an Army psychiatrist is accused of a massacre that left 13 people dead. But in the town of Killeen and other surrounding communities, the attack, one of the worst mass shootings on a military base in the United States, is also seen by many as another blow in an area that has been beset by crime and violence since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began. Reports of domestic abuse have grown by 75 percent since 2001. At the same time, violent crime in Killeen has risen 22 percent while declining 7 percent in towns of similar size in other parts of the country.
The stresses are seen in other ways, too.
Since 2003, there have been 76 suicides by personnel assigned to Fort Hood, with 10 this year, according to military officials.
A crisis center on base is averaging 60 phone calls a week from soldiers and family members seeking various help for problems from suicide to anger management, with about the same volume of walk-ins and scheduled appointments.
In recent days, Army officials have pledged to redouble their efforts to help soldiers cope with deployment. The base, which uses some of the most innovative approaches in the military, plans to expand a help center set up in September that provides a variety of assistance to soldiers, including breathing techniques for handling combat stress and goal-setting skills upon their return.
“Fort Hood is very attuned to this,” said Col. William S. Rabena, who runs the help center known as the Resiliency Center Campus. “It’s the only thing to do.”
The Army has also sent an array of specialists to Fort Hood to help soldiers and their families, including chaplains, social workers, combat stress specialists, counselors and experts in crisis and disaster behavioral management. Army officials said more such assistance might be sent to the base.
But interviews with soldiers who have deployed one or more times to Iraq or Afghanistan, and with family members of those who died violently back here in Texas, show that the Army’s efforts are still falling short. Even some alarm bells rung by the Army leadership have gone unanswered.
In July, two weeks after Sergeant Garza’s death, Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch, then the base commander, told Congress he was in dire need of more mental healthprofessionals. “That’s the biggest frustration,“ he told a House subcommittee. “I’m short about 44 of what I am convinced I need at Fort Hood that I just don’t have.”
Among the medical personnel brought to Fort Hood to help deal with the growing mental health issues was Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who arrived in July. Major Hasan is accused in the attacks last week, but little is known about what might have driven him.
“Our soldiers are coming back and not getting the help they need,” said Cynthia Thomas, an Army wife who runs a private assistance center for soldiers in Killeen called Under the Hood Café. “Whether it’s self-medicating, anger or violence, these are the consequences of war, and you have to think about all the people affected by soldiers coming home, the parents, spouses, children, brothers, sisters, aunts and cousins.”
Pfc. Michael Kern, of Riverside, Calif., said he tried unsuccessfully to obtain help for stress last year in Baghdad, but was ridiculed by an officer in front of his tanker unit. “He said he would have to impose mandatory sleeping times,” said Private Kern, 22, “and that health care was for people with serious problems.”
Back at Fort Hood, Private Kern said he had a breakdown that led to hospitalization and is now awaiting discharge at his request. If he had received therapy in Iraq, he said, “I might not be in this situation now.”
Military officials say the crime and violence associated with Fort Hood must be viewed with the base’s size in mind. With 53,000 soldiers assigned to the base, it has become the largest facility in the country, and much of the surrounding area is tied to the military through family or business.
Col. Edward McCabe, a Catholic chaplain at Fort Hood, said signs of fatigue and other strains are “rampant” on the base. “The numbers of divorces I’ve had to deal with are huge, the cases of physical abuse,” Colonel McCabe said. “Every night in my apartment complex some soldier and his wife are screaming and shouting at each other.“
The Army influences nearly every aspect of life in Killeen, a cotton town until the base moved in during World War II. About 55 miles north of Austin, the town straddles U.S. 190 and is split by a long corridor of strip malls. Most of the 102,000 residents are soldiers, their families or Army retirees. Business here and in the surrounding smaller communities like Belton and Harker Heights ebbs and flows around the first and 15th of each month — military paydays — and around deployments.
At The Killeen Daily Herald, which covers the base with a sympathetic ear to its military readers, employees see similar patterns play out with each troop rotation.
One day, it is a homecoming, with hundreds of families waving flags and homemade signs along T. J. Mills Boulevard leading into the base’s main gate. The next day, crime reports increase, especially cases of domestic violence. “Unfortunately, you see the trend every time there’s a homecoming, when the divisions come home,” said Olga Pena, the paper’s managing editor.
Nicolas Serna, the managing attorney of the local legal aid office, said requests for protective orders had steadily increased over the last several years.
He questioned whether Fort Hood was doing nearly enough for soldiers or for victims of domestic violence. A few years ago, he said, the base refused the group’s offer to provide legal assistance and to help with protection orders for families on Fort Hood.
Some social workers in the area see it differently. The Army, while not perfect, has been trying to address the situation, said Suzanne Armour, the director of programs at the Families in Crisis shelter in Killeen.
Michael Sibberson, the principal of Killeen High School, which has 1,880 students, a little over half with military parents, said in one sense the wars had helped the students relate to one another. On the other side, Mr. Sibberson said, the students are not getting the parental guidance they need because so many have parents deployed. That has led to poor grades, and more behavioral problems.
“Kids are not getting the support at the dinner table they need because Mom or Dad is not there,” he said, adding, “When you call the house you are likely to get Grandma, or a mom who says, ‘I am so full I don’t know what to do with him anymore.’ ”
Henry Garza, the district attorney for Bell County, which includes Killeen, said increases in crime might reflect the town’s rapid growth, though the federal crime data is adjusted for population changes. But the data may be understated because it does not count crimes prosecuted by the military authorities, who sometimes handle serious felonies and misdemeanors by active-duty soldiers even when they occur off base.
Base officials declined to release crime data without a Freedom of Information Act request.
Whether civilian or military official investigate deaths, the proceedings often leave families frustrated by the lack of clear answers.
The list of medals awarded to Sergeant Garza (no relation to the district attorney) tell of a good soldier. After two tours in Iraq, he shared a tight bond with unit members and missed them greatly when the Army sent him to a base in Georgia for additional training after a second deployment. He was troubled by a breakup with a girlfriend. And though he seldom spoke with his family about his combat tours, he once confided to his mother that he had a killed a person in Iraq. “He said, ‘It was him or me,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “But you could tell it troubled him.”
His family believes he did not get the care he needed, despite signs he had fallen into despair.
In June, he left the Georgia base without permission, and the Army tracked him to a hotel room in Paris, Tex. In a suicide note he sent to a friend before leaving, he said he wanted to end it close to his friends. Among his purchases was a shotgun.
Sergeant Garza was brought back to Fort Hood and committed for psychiatric care, first to a civilian hospital because there was no room at the base hospital, said his uncle, Gary Garza, who lives in Killeen. After three days, he was transferred to the base hospital. He was released after two weeks and assigned to take outpatient counseling.
“We thought he was doing better,” said his grandfather, Homer Garza, a retired command sergeant major who served in Korea and Vietnam and who himself had silently suffered for decades with post-traumatic stress.
In fact, Sergeant Garza had shared misgivings about his treatment at the base hospital with his uncle.
“He said he felt like he was getting really good treatment at the civilian hospital,” his uncle said. “He said the civilian doctors seemed to care more. And for the military doctors, it was just like a job for them.”
True or not, on July 7 Sergeant Garza received a message on his cellphone canceling what was to be his first outpatient appointment.
Though his family says the Army was supposed to be checking his apartment for guns and alcohol, that Sunday he put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. His mother later listened to the message.
“They said, ‘Sorry, we don’t have a counselor for you today,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “ ‘If you don’t hear back from us by Monday, give us a call.’ ”
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