As I’m walking up to it the gunshots start. Slow and methodical. But continuous. Two ambulatory wounded came out. Then two soldiers dragging a third who was covered in blood. Hearing the shots but not seeing the shooter, along with a couple other soldiers I stood in the street and yelled at everyone who came running that it was clear but to “RUN!”.

From there, he explicitly details the blood, bullet holes and the eventual takedown of the shooter:

(I’m about 15-20 meters from the shooter.) I yell at the cop, “He’s reloading, he’s reloading. Shoot him! Shoot him!) You have to understand, everything was quiet at this point. The cop appears to hear me and comes around the corner and shoots the shooter.

He goes down. The cop kicks his weapon further away. I sprint up to the downed female cop. Another captain (I think he was with me behind the cars) comes up as well. She’s bleeding profusely out of her thigh. We take our belts off and tourniquet her just like we’ve been trained (I hope we did it right…we didn’t have any CLS (combat lifesaver) bags with their awesome tourniquets on us, so we worked with what we had).

He calls the subsequent media photos “the most bizarre moment of the day” and continues to describe the emergency response:

The female cop had been taken away,and a medic was pumping plasma into the shooter. I’m not proud of this but I went up to her and said “this is the shooter, is there anyone else who needs attention…do them first”. She indicated everyone else living was attended to. I still hadn’t seen any EMTs or ambulances. I had so much blood on me that people kept asking me if I was OK.

Mediaite contacted MilBlogs for more information about the source, questions addressed in the following note on ROFASIX which now appears at the bottom of the post:

A number of folks have asked me to identify the writer for them. This email was passed around in the “good ol’ boy army aviator” circuit. When it was sent the comment was made that they didn’t doubt the veracity of this supposed JAG officer. It read right, and reflected some of the confusion that just now is being resolved. Yet, no one could verify this was an actual 1st person eye witness account. I tend to believe it is.

MilBlogs also passed on the above photo, which was reportedly published with the caption: “A first responder to a lone gunman’s attack at Fort Hood Nov. 5 renders honors at retreat after aiding his fellow soldiers. U.S. Army photo.”

The chilling story can be read in its entirety here.

UPDATE: At his blog, Abram Sauer details the similarities between the above Ft. Hood account and another anonymous version of the story running at Mother Jones. The tone is different, the newer version is more politicized, but “[t]his is the same person’s account,” writes Sauer. “Whether that person was really there or not is impossible to tell … But if it’s fake, what’s the motivation?”

(h/t Abram Sauer)

On Friday night’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor the host pulled no punches, launching directly into an especially vicious Talking Points segment aimed at Ft. Hood gunman Major Nidal Malik Hassan, but mostly the media’s portrayal of the killings. O’Reilly was indignant as he called out the “far left loons” who questioned the role that public policy played in these “vile crimes.”

Armed with examples, O’Reilly began by incredulously showing a New York Times headline that read “Told Of War Horror, Gunman Feared Deployment” and continued with examples from the Washington Post (“For Hood has felt the strain of repeated deployments”) and even Dr. Phil‘s appearance on Larry King Live. “The fear got him and he just snapped,” said the “dopey” doctor.

Blaming foreign policy for mass murder, O’Reilly said, is “unbelievably stupid and insulting to the military.” Hassan is “a coward” — either “a Muslim terrorist or a crazy person,” according to O’Reilly. “That’s it — those are the choices,” and for Newsweek to claim that “the two wars currently being waged are taking a psychological toll” is offensive. ”Media that use tragedy to ram home political points are despicable,” he said.

O’Reilly was incensed enough to conjure the name of murdered abortion specialist Dr. George Tiller, claiming that after his murder, the left wing media blamed only the Fox News host, due to the  ”problem with personal responsibility” on the “far left.” Guest ally Bernie Goldberg called it a “politically correct virus” in the “lamestream media.”

O’Reilly then touted his huge viewership numbers from the previous night — something covered extensively by Mediaite — claiming that Fox News had wiped MSNBC and CNN “off the face of the earth,” before stating, “The guard has changed in this country — the media guard has changed.” And looking at the numbers, it’s hard to deny. O’reilly’s justification for this, though, is far more debateable.

To hear him tell it, cable news viewers knew that Fox News would provide the honest take — spin-free, of course — without any of the… healmostsaidabadword! But you get the idea. On the other hand, there may be reason to believe that consumers of the news are flocking toward partisanship, eager to hear their beliefs echoed back to them. Whatever the case, numbers don’t lie.

Check out O’Reilly’s entire Talking Points segment and interview with Golberg in the clip below:

After the “hey look, Twitter did a new thing!” factor wore off, there was a backlash against Twitter lists. Early on, Jeff Jarvis astutely pointed out that aside from adding a “listed” stat for accounts, the lists themselves weren’t being used all that much:

As Mediaite pointed out, they take a long time to make correctly, and even then the current infrastructure favors already-big players like corporations and celebrities. The laundry list of problems goes on: they’re easy to game with blogroll-like listing exchanges; there are so many redundant lists as to cancel out the value of any individual one.

The response to the tragic Forth Hood shootings highlights a potentially fruitful approach. Rather than creating broad, evergreen, mostly useless lists like “/blogs/,” a topical list like “/ft-hood/” can emerge in a time of need to filter out the drek that inevitable emerges in a sure-to-be-flooded hashtag like #forthood.

Writing on the same topic, the Columbia Journalism Review notes that many of the best and most authoritative lists covering the tragedy emerged from established media outlets riffing off of other established media outlets. “Journalism and curation—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine where the one ends and the other begins,” CJR writes. Lists “represent a new—or, more precisely, a newly facilitated—way for news organizations to collaborate … So The New York Times gets to provide its users real-time information from Waco’s NewsChannel 25—and NewsChannel 25, in turn, gets to have its reporting amplified to the readers of the paper of record. Win and win.”

One problem: what if everyone is getting it wrong? Glenn Greenwald compellingly condemns big media outlets and Twitter alike for putting out tons of inaccurate details about the Fort Hood shooting (were there three gunmen? was the shooter a convert to Islam? did the shooter die? did combat fatigue have something to do with it?) and influencing early news consumers’ views of the situation as a result.

A feed of information can only be as good as its components, but upping the quality of those components can only be good news for its consumers and, by extension, for its curators.

Related: two especially good lists:

NY Times’ curated list

CNN Breaking News’ curated list