The attack on Fort Hood remains profoundly disturbing to me. My phone vibrated with the news on Thursday, as I pulled the short, simple facts out of my pocket. I felt paralyzed, unwilling to think too much about the events, and felt lost to ask any of the important questions. “Twelve dead, 25 wounded,” my phone read.

“Jesus,” I said over and over.

The information wasn’t satisfying, turning my stomach as more and more facts began to bleed in. I turned to local news for any kind of direction, looking for a quick explanation to an event that remains foggy.  I suspect most of those around the base felt the same way — lost in the wake of violence.

The ironies still give me shivers, as if looking at the heart of absurdity. A mental health professional that snapped. Soldiers going off to war, uncertain of survival, gunned down before they even left their home. My father, safer in a war zone than where he was stationed, and where we lived, in Texas.

He is deployed to Iraq, but last Thursday my first thoughts were with him. Could he be there? Had he gotten home early as a joke, ready to surprise my mom? The rational didn’t really strike me right away. And seeing footage of the town I graduated high school in — a small community I thought I would never have to see again — gave me a lucid experience. It was a nightmare being played out on TV and explained by Wolf Blitzer.

The lives of those who live around the base are intertwined with violence. We could all feel it in the small town of Belton, a short 20-minute drive from Fort Hood. The rumble of artillery fire would shake my house and keep me awake late at night. The conversations in math class turned to relatives waking up screaming — victims of post-traumatic stress disorder.  When importing violence is a local reality, the immediacy of a war thousands of miles away becomes inevitable. The burden of the military is something that is hard to understand outside the Army community.  I can only really explain it as a hardening of the nerves.

Fort Hood is the largest military complex in the United States. It is home to more than 50,000 active duty soldiers, and the communities around the base are economically tied to the soldiers. So an event as destructive as this shooting is sure to affect central Texas like no other place. These communities take the good and the bad of the base. The spiking domestic violence rates, the suicides of young soldiers, robberies and the drug use. But also the pride of being a military community — the broad overarching dedication to freedom that rolls throughout the south, but especially in Bell County, Texas.

In high school, I hated living in the middle of nowhere. I thought I had gone back in time, where the football star got all the women. Where racism was still overt and methamphetamine destroyed the lives of some of my best friends. Where the long expanses of land, unbroken except for the repeating strip malls along I-90 that seemed to go on forever. I came to believe that those Texans never needed to leave that little area, because they could already see all the way to the end of the earth.

I hardened to that place instantly, but after the shooting I find myself with an eerie, new sense of solidarity with the people of my former home.

All I can feel is the absurdity and the images of raw violence superimposed over my memories of Fort Hood. I think of the soldiers from the 1st Calvary Division, and all the other divisions stationed there, returning from a war zone and being accepted by a building that hosted its own war once. I think specifically of my father — who will cycle through that building in December — what his thoughts will be and what ghosts will touch him when he steps out into the heat, the sand and the violence, not in Iraq but in the middle of Texas.

Curtis Combs is a junior journalism and politics major. He can be reached at ccombs1@ithaca.edu.