FORT HOOD, Texas - Some soldiers glared Friday as they identified the man in a wheelchair as their assailant. Several wept describing comrades dying where no one expected an attack. The judge presiding, prosecutors and defense lawyers looked grim - even stricken - as witness after witness recounted how a soldier readiness center became a charnel house.
Maj. Nidal Hasan gave them all the same impassive look that he has maintained during three previous days of his probable-cause hearing.
The Army psychiatrist blinked slowly as soldiers told of their desperate scramble for cover to escape steady gunfire. He rubbed his chin or forehead with pale hands as men and women described being shot again and again as they crawled through blood and bodies. Only during breaks did his blank expression change; he once looked anxious and once showed the hint of a smile as he conferred with the defense team.
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Hasan, 40, betrayed no emotion as soldiers from the mental-health unit he was scheduled to deploy with spoke of taking bullets and watching comrades die trying to stop the Nov. 5 attack.
The massacre ended when two civilian police officers shot Hasan four times. He remains paralyzed from the chest down.
Hasan faces 13 counts of premeditated capital murder and 32 counts of premeditated attempted murder. The proceeding, known in military law as an Article 32 hearing, will determine whether he faces a general court-martial.
The proceeding has included graphic details of the attack. Seventeen of the 29 witnesses who have appeared so far were wounded - some more than once.
The 10 soldiers called Friday said they initially thought someone was conducting an odd training drill when they heard yelling in a crowded post medical-processing center. Many recalled puzzlement at what they heard shouted - the Muslim exhortation "Allahu akbar" or "God is great." Then came a rhythmic noise that many initially thought was firecrackers being set off near the entrance of Building 42003.
"I honestly didn't think it was real," said Spc. Megan Martin, one of three soldiers who testified Friday via a video link from Kandahar, Afghanistan. "They told us to prepare for anything at Fort Hood."
Martin said she focused on a man in fatigues and ripple-soled desert boots moving with a laser-sighted handgun near an area called Station 13. He kept firing it "in a fan pattern" at the rows of 45 chairs where she and other deploying soldiers waited to see medical providers.
When she saw a soldier near her was bleeding from the mouth, Martin said, she hit the ground. But her eyes stayed riveted on the man with the pistol.
"Sir, I couldn't look away. I lay absolutely still as I could because he was shooting everything that moved," Martin said. "I couldn't stop watching. It was a nightmare that reoccurs every day."
Martin said a captain from her unit charged the gunman with a folding chair. "But he wasn't fast enough," she said, fighting tears, "and he was shot at close range."
During the testimony, Hasan sometimes jotted notes or doodled on a legal pad. He stared blankly when witnesses spoke of their determination to stay in the military.
When a defense attorney asked one soldier if she sought discharge or reassignment because of repeated nightmares about the carnage, the young woman shifted from tearful to determined. "I wanted to carry on the mission," said Martin, "as my fallen soldiers would have wanted me to."
