Young soldiers show heroism in Fort Hood tragedy
November 08, 2009 22:46 PM
Written by Dan Reed, USA Today
Unlike many, maybe even most of the soldiers on this enormous military post, privates first class Marquest Smith and Jeffrey Pearsall had never seen combat before Thursday.
But the pair of 21-year-olds emerged from the tragic shootings of 43 soldiers and civilians here as bonafide combat heros.
Smith, from Fort Worth, possibly saved the lives of five soldiers and a civilian Fort Hood employee while repeatedly running back into the building where 39-year-old Army psychologist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan began a shooting spree that resulted in the deaths of 13 people.
Pearsall, of Houston, turned his five-year-old Ford F150 pickup into a makeshift ambulance and hauled five or six wounded soldiers to the hospital, at least one of whom, he was told later by medical staff at Darnall Army Medical Center on the post, likely would not have survived had Pearsall not gotten him to the hospital so quickly.
"There's not just one or two heros in this, there's a whole bunch of heros," Pearsall said, referring to soldiers and civilian Department of the Army police officers who responded to the shootings and their bloody aftermath. Caring for wounded soldier amid chaos "is a job we're trained to do on the battlefield, and now it's a job, obviously we have to do here in the United States too."
Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey told reporters at a news conference here Friday afternoon that after visiting with Fort Hood's leaders, crime scene investigators and some of those who were at the scene on Thursday, that the shootings were a "kick in the gut, not just for the Fort Hood community, but for the entire Army."
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