Five soldiers were shot at Fort Stewart in Georgia on Wednesday, but the incident could have clearly been far worse, as shooting suspect Quornelius Radford was tackled by other soldiers before the attempted carnage could get worse. Radford left a text for his aunt saying he’d be “in a better place” soon, but no official word has come down yet on why Radford brought a personal gun to the Army base and started shooting his fellow soldiers in the first place. Radford also had an upcoming court date for a DUI charge he received in May, though no one knows if that court case had anything to do with Radford’s motive.
Lt. General Richard Newton is a former U.S. Air Force Assistant Vice Chief of Staff and NewsNation senior national security contributor. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to help the audience make sense of why an American soldier would suddenly and shockingly turn on his brothers in arms.
Newton told host Larry Mendte what went through his mind when he first heard there was an active shooter on an Army base: “My first thought was concern for the soldiers at Fort Stewart… We have over two million men and women in uniform, all volunteers… They run to the sound of gunfire. This was a demonstration, however, not of a combat situation but still their training kicked in, and the fact that they were able to nearly immediately subdue this Army sergeant in what I’m going to term, and this is preliminary, obviously, an extreme case of work-center violence.”
Newton commended the troops for shaking off the shock of seeing Radford break the bonds of trust between soldiers and stopping him before he could shoot more people. “In the United States Army, and the Air Force and the other services, you don’t necessarily lean away from those you serve with; you lean into, and the fact is that it’s one team, one fight and so forth. I have to think that his fellow soldiers really had not perhaps even contemplated or even anticipated this type of violence.”
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