An ordained Baptist chaplain and army captain, Roger Benimoff spent two tours of duty in Iraq and months between deployments counseling soldiers in the U.S. During his career, he provided spiritual guidance to American soldiers through crises of faith, bereavement, and trauma until he himself broke down. While training and working as a chaplain at Walter Reed during the height of its crisis, Benimoff was diagnosed with chronic PTSD and spent months of treatment at some of the facilities where he trained as a caretaker. NEWSWEEK's Eve Conant has tracked Benimoff's experiences over the years, starting with his time at Walter Reed, and recently in a book about his experiences, Faith Under Fire. Benimoff retired from the army earlier this year. He spoke with Conant from Dallas, where he is a hospital chaplain, about what might have happened in Fort Hood, how the military families will cope with tragedy on the homefront, and why the army pushed him so far he had to leave.

Is "contact" or "secondary" PTSD a genuine problem?

Oh yes, definitely. I didn't have much time to counsel before I was deployed—I had only three weeks active duty before going over—but I would debrief my soldiers in Iraq all the time about events I was not present at. I remember when Eagle Troop had lost a soldier to a sniper and I did the CISD [Critical Incident Stress Debriefing]. I still have those images in my head. Or when one of Fox Troop's tanks went over a land mine. The soldiers told me about how the IED blew through their tank, how the driver's body was completely destroyed, how it was like spaghetti, and they were desperately trying to pull him out of the driver's seat while their command told them to leave the scene. They didn't leave him behind. But the tension of that, and their descriptions of that moment stay with me. When Eagle Troop lost a sergeant to an RPG, they told me about running into the hospital, seeing Iraq soldiers vomiting on the stairs after what they had just seen—walls covered in blood, brain matter on the floor. These images don't go away and I wasn't even there that day.

It's hard to draw too many conclusions right now, but we do know this: Thursday night, authorities shot and then apprehended the lone suspect, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. A psychiatrist who was set to deploy to Iraq at the end of the month, Hasan reportedly opened fire around the Fort Hood Readiness Center, where troops are prepared for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. And though this scene is a most extreme and tragic outlier, it comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers individually that it makes it increasingly difficult for the military as a whole to deploy for wars abroad. In an abrupt news conference, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the top commander at Fort Hood, said in response to the shooting that authorities would "increase the security presence" on the military base. On the surface, it seemed like a logical enough plan. But it makes one wonder how much any kind of lockdown will either get at the root causes of soldier stresses or better prepare them for more battle.

By Katharine Herrup

OMG! SWINE FLU! 

It seems like everyone is freaking out about the upcoming flu season and the havoc H1N1 might wreak in America. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius says she’s “preparing for the worst.” Experts are worried vaccines won’t be ready in time. Schools are contemplating quarantine situations. And the media is very concerned, judging by all the “Swine Flu – How Will It Affect Your Weekend?” stories each week.

But how worried should we really be? The facts can sound a little staggering: swine flu first hit the scene in late April, and by June 11, the World Health Organization declared swine flu a pandemic. The last flu pandemic declared was in 1967, 42 years ago—the Hong Kong flu, which killed about 700,000 people worldwide. So far, this swine flu is responsible for 1,462 deaths globally. Already, hundreds of thousands of people have contracted swine flu—so many that the WHO has stopped counting. In America, 447 people have died.

Yesterday, Perez Hilton got punched in the face. This lead to karma jokes, and "I've been wanting to punch him in the face for years" jokes, and all sorts of tacky, tasteless comments that make light of the fact that someone was the victim of violence. Yes, Perez is a pain; a pain who ridicules both gay rights activists and gay rights critics when not drawing crude genitalia on paparazzi photos. Did he deserve a beating? No: no one does. And yet that fact gets obscured when the victim of said beating is a churlish gadfly.

Some background: gossip blogger Hilton (nee Mario Lavandeira) is alleging that the manager of the Black Eyed Peas, Liborio Molina, assaulted Hilton backstage at the MuchMusic Video awards in Toronto. (Molina has since turned himself in to police). This came after a heated discussion wherein Will.I.Am asked Perez to lay off the band on Perez's site, and Perez responded by calling Will.I.Am a "f-----." (This is not high level diplomacy, here, people.) Perez called the cops after the attack, then went right to Twitter, asking his fans to do the same. That move, along with the fact that Perez is something of a media punch line while still being an incredibly important (and well-paid) media creator, has lead to lots of eye rolls and rationalizations and aforementioned jokes.

The weirdest of all this victim-blaming comes from musician John Mayer, who has also taken to Twitter to express his disgust with Hilton's handling of the situation. "P!nk kneed me in the nuts outside Chateau Marmont. I was pissing blood for days. Did I make a scene?" he asks in one post. Later, he and Hilton got into a rapid back and forth Twitter conversation (twonversation?), with Mayer insisting that the assault was the direct result of Hilton's abrasive personality. "I'd like to train you in Krav Maga," tweets Mayer. "Then you'll have the situational awareness not to get in someone's face." These types of comments continue, each insisting that Perez could have prevented the attack had he not been so darned annoying. The worst part is that Mayer's little sermons comes from this weird, faux-concerned place of condescending kindness. "From the heart, what you experienced these last 24 hrs is a profound lack of control. You can't blog the world, my friend," writes Mayer.  (Oh, it's from the heart? To a friend? That totally makes up for you excusing the assailant. Thanks, pal!)

Meanwhile, Hilton is responding with a maturity and restraint absent from his earlier...life's work, really. Aside from repeatedly asking Mayer to take the conversation to a more private venue (which...horse is kind of out of the barn there, Mario), he quite reasonably argued that, "Karma would be me losing my site and going bankrupt or what have u...Karma is not getting punched in the face." 

This whole discussion is just a 21st century version of what women and assault victims have been hearing for years. The logic that it falls on the victim to prevent irrational actions of the assailant is really outdated and really, really dangerous. Many victims of violence—and especially domestic violence—will tell you that the slaps, punches, and shoves perpetrated upon them didn't happen when they were just sitting their minding their own business. It came during some sort of disagreement. Maybe she snapped at him out of frustration. Maybe she hit on a particularly sore subject. These are all things that happen during the course of an argument—we're never at our best when tempers are inflamed. But that doesn't make it right, ever, to take the fight from cutting remarks to physical violence.

We all should try to be better people: less annoying or abrasive, less prone to reaching for the cheap (verbal) shot, more sensitive to those around us. But it's not our responsibility to ensure that the person we're arguing with doesn't cross the line from nasty name calling to physical violence. This tired line of thinking keeps women with abusers (because if she just avoided certain subjects...), makes it ok to beat up gay men who have the temerity to walk down a crowded street in the wrong side of town (because really, what did he expect?) and subtly endorses sociopaths who think it's their life's work to beat some sense into people who don't fit a cultural norm. It's Rhianna, it's Matthew Sheppard, it's Angie Zapata. It's wrong.

This is something we all know. Most of us claim to be all about non-violence and peaceful solutions and treating each other with kindness. The actual practice of supporting the victim, however, is a lot harder when the victim is kind of a douche. That, however, is when it's most important: you can't demand that people earn basic human rights with kindness points. 

So ersatz sensitive guy John Mayer is trotting out tired old tropes that basically boil down to "what were you expecting in a skirt that short," Perez Hilton is responding with a level maturity that makes it feel like opposite day, and all this is happening on Twitter. Tawdry, silly, and totally unimportant, especially when people are dying in Iran over the fight for democracy. Still, the point remains: it's never ok to hit someone in anger. Even Perez Hilton.

Update: The women at Jezebel, among others, say I'm brushing off Perez's misogyny and use of homophobic slurs. Let me state here what I should have said more clearly in the first place: Perez's behavior was out of bounds, and there should be consequences. But that reckoning can't be done at the business end of someone's fist. In fact, the second you rough someone up, it becomes much harder to take that someone to task for their abhorrent behavior.

If John Mayer wanted to challenge Hilton on his use of slurs, we'd be having a different conversation. But Mayer didn't write that he wanted to train Hilton in a martial art called "Never Call A Black Dude a F----- Jitsu" to make the point that Perez's language was hurtful and inappropriate. He did it to imply that if you call a "black dude" something gay, you're going to get punched, and that Hilton should have known better.

There's a LOT to say about Hilton's use of language and the impact of his words. Jezebel did a great job starting that conversation, and it's an important one. I chose to focus on Mayer's response, and the inherent dangers of victim-blaming—even, as I said, when that victim is kind of a tool. 

Losing sleep? You’re not alone. According to the National Sleep Foundation, a third of Americans are losing zzz’s over the state of the economy, personal financial woes and stress on the job—assuming they still have a job. Drugs are the fastest, surest way to a night’s shuteye. But many people don’t like sleeping pills or, well, don’t have the insurance to pay for them.

If that’s you, sleep consultant Michael Krugman, founder of the Sounder Sleep System, may be able to help. Krugman holds “sleep sominars” in which he teaches drug-free approaches to shaking insomnia. More than 200 instructors in 12 countries are now teaching his method, which includes 50 different techniques. And in July, he will be issuing a set of three CD’s called “Rest Assured.”

By Rebecca Shabad 

For the millions of Americans suffering from pteromechanophobia (aka fear of flying), the presumed crash of an Air France flight off the cost of Brazil only solidified their belief that planes are nothing but death traps in the sky. But considering as many as two in five Americans may have a flying phobia, why is the entire nation collectively glued to the tube, waiting for more details about the crash? NEWSWEEK talked to Jonathan Bricker, an assistant professor-affiliate of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, to figure out why we need to know—and what all this information overload may be doing to our psyches.

 Get his take on TV news, the fear of driving vs. flying, and the need for more comprehensive data about who, exactly, fears the friendly skies after the jump.