Fort Hood Had Heroes, Too

One thing it's important to remember in yesterday's tragedy is that there were heroes who took risks, and prevented the shootings from being worse than they could have been. Chief among those heroes is Sergeant Kimberly Munley, a civilian police officer, and an American Federation of Government Employees member, who shot Major Nidal Hasan four times, stopping his rampage, even though she'd been shot herself. We forget, too often, that it's impossible to separate civilian federal employees and the military. Their pay raises are debate separately. They receive wildly different amounts of prestige in American society. Most of the time, the military takes risks to protect civilians, whether they work for the federal government or not. But yesterday, it was a civilian federal employee who stepped in, and took a bullet, to protect members of the military on American soil.