To understand the upcoming execution of Nidal Hasan, understand Plot E at Oise-Aisne.
At the beginning of June 1943, American soldiers searching for a missing nine-year-old girl in Algeria found her body face down in a field. An army doctor examined the body and concluded that the child had been sexually assaulted and suffocated, probably several days earlier.
A soldier, Pvt. James Kendrick, had been seen with the girl. He told a series of shifting stories that ended with the claim that the sexually aggressive child had come on to him and asked to have sex, after which she suddenly and inexplicably just started to choke. Kendrick’s court-martial opened on June 12, quickly convicting him and sentencing him to death. He was executed by hanging on July 17.
Pay close attention to the timeline: crime in very late May, discovery in early June, trial in mid-June, execution in mid-July.
Later, the army dug up Kendrick’s body in Algeria and transferred it to a new cemetery plot, Plot E at the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in France. That hidden plot, locked away behind tall walls, is where the American military relocated the bodies of 96 soldiers executed in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The graves in Plot E are marked only by a number, the names of the dead denied to them in shame. Visitors are rare, and need special permission for brief and supervised entry.
The army quickly executed soldiers who shamed their uniform and betrayed their brothers-in-arms, then took the trouble to relocate the bodies to a place where they couldn’t be honored, visited, or mourned.
You can find the stories of the army’s 96 hidden bodies in Col. French MacLean’s detailed history of Plot E, The Fifth Field.
Those stories tend to go about the same way. Pvt. Fred McMurray and Pvt. Louis Till raped a pregnant woman in Italy, causing her to miscarry, and raped a second pregnant woman, then shot and killed a third woman who resisted as they tried to force their way into her home. The crime took place on June 27, 1944. Administrative delays slowed the opening of the court-martial – because the US Army was kind of busy in Europe in the summer of 1944 – so the executions by hanging weren’t carried out until July 10, 1945. By the prevailing standards, a year was a long wait. Soldiers who murdered a pregnant woman could expect to be executed.
Betrayal, dishonor, cowardly violence, willful cruelty to defenseless victims: rapid and certain execution upon discovery. This is the American military norm, though it began to shift after World War II as the military justice system was steadily reformed to look more like civilian justice.
For an example of the way the military has treated American soldiers who kill other American soldiers, consider the ending of the St. Patrick’s Battalion during the Mexican-American War. Irish immigrants enlisted in the US Army, sometimes at the docks as they arrived in the country, but then rebelled against nativist officers who applied harsher discipline to Irish Catholics. Many deserted and fought for Mexico, firing at their former colleagues in battle.
Captured, dozens were executed. On September 13, 1847, thirty were hanged in a group as the American flag was raised at Chapultepec Castle, signaling an American victory. The Irish deserters to the Mexican army watched the Mexican flag come down, then watched the American flag go up, then felt the drop.
Supervising the mass execution, Col. William S. Harney declined to have the executed men cut down and removed from the gallows. As he said, he had orders to hang them, but no orders to unhang them. Their bodies were left to rot, hanging where the men died. They were regarded as traitors who had worn the uniform of the U.S. Army before turning against it, and the intensity of that sentiment transferred to their lifeless bodies.
Compare all of that to the example of Maj. Nidal Hasan, who chose to take an officer’s commission in the U.S. Army, then killed other men and women who wore the same uniform. Pvt. Francheska Velez was pregnant, and screamed, “My baby! My baby!” as Hasan started shooting. He killed her as she begged for the life of her unborn child. Hasan attacked his fellow soldiers in 2009, wearing their uniform as he fired.
In the context of American military history, the anomalous fact of the execution is that it has taken so incredibly long to be scheduled. The man has been treated with far more restraint than any American soldier should ever have expected after so consequential a betrayal.
Chris Bray is a senior correspondent at The Federalist and a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army. He has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at "Tell Me How This Ends," here.