Fort Hood attack hits home for Muslim deployed in Iraq

But I wasn't prepared for what happens when violence intrudes on my loved ones, who are supposed to be safe at home while I am in a combat zone. It flipped all of my attitudes toward deployment upside down. And the aftermath of the attack at Fort Hood, Texas, allegedly committed by a fellow Muslim, also raised a different set of concerns — not just about my family's safety, but about the perceptions of my faith.

I was working late on Thursday and decided to call my wife, who was at home on post at Fort Hood, to check in. She didn't answer. I tried again. A busy signal. That was unusual, so I went to e-mail her. She was already online. The instant-message conversation we had was so surreal that I ended up posting it on the blog that I've been keeping during this deployment and that was picked up by some media outlets. Here's what we wrote:

Angela: We are on lock down, baby.

Me: What?

Angela: We have shooters.

Me: Lock Down?

...

Angela: Soldiers? Who is doing it?

Me: They're not saying.

Angela: ugh

Me: This is ridiculous. I'm in the war zone not you!

Angela: I know!

As my wife watched the events play out live on television, we got increasingly worried. We both frantically searched the Internet for news about the violence unfolding a short distance from the home where our 18-month-old son slept in his crib.

More information started to come in: 13 dead after a shooting at the soldier readiness center.

I felt worse: A gunman could be on the loose near my family. The first reports that afternoon were hazy. Some said there were possibly four shooters, one dead on the scene and three at large at Fort Hood. Suddenly, the sprawling, 300-plus-square-mile post seemed much smaller, as if an armed and dangerous masked man were standing in my backyard, staring through my home's glass door.

More than anything, I felt completely helpless listening to my wife on the other end of the phone, on the other side of the world, alone.

I could picture exactly where the shooting took place. I had been through the readiness center in June, preparing to deploy. For soldiers headed to Iraq or Afghanistan, the center is a one-stop shop to take care of financial issues, identification cards, Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance, vaccinations and myriad other issues related to deployment. The medical wing was always crowded, making what should have been a 30-minute process stretch on much longer.

The doors to the center open to an expansive waiting area from which soldiers are called one by one to the finance specialists. I spent most of my time in those comfortable blue chairs dozing and daydreaming of putting this deployment behind me. Rows and rows of soldiers, laughing, sleeping and watching mind-numbing loops of CNN, fill the center at any given time.

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