A tremendous shock in return

On New Year’s Day, two American cities were rocked by spectacular attacks. In New Orleans, a man drove a Ford F-150 Lightning onto Bourbon Street, killing fourteen before dying in a shootout with police. Barely seven hours later, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded at the entrance of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, injuring seven people. The driver was found dead inside.

At first, many wondered if the two events were connected. Both targeted tourist spots on a travel holiday; both involved electric trucks rented through the same obscure carsharing app. Speculation ran rampant through both traditional and social media. Was this the start of a nationwide wave of terror, timed to Trump’s impending re-inauguration?

Authorities quickly threw cold water on that theory. Word came down from the FBI’s counterterrorism division that there was “no definitive link” between the incidents. While the New Orleans attacker, a U.S. Army veteran named Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar, had recorded an oath to the Islamic State just before his attack, the Las Vegas car bomber, an active-duty Army Green Beret named Matthew Alan Livelsberger, had left a note which the narrative quickly boiled down to a single line: “I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” The message was clear: the New Orleans attack should be treated as a national security threat; the Las Vegas one a personal tragedy.

The New York Times homepage on January 4 illustrated this perfectly: The lead story was about Jabbar’s “secret radicalization,” followed by a sidebar on “How the Islamic State Radicalizes People Today.” Then, halfway down the page, a humanizing story about Livelsberger’s bout with PTSD and possible traumatic brain injury, or C.T.E. titled “Soldier’s Struggles Began Long Before Las Vegas Blast, Nurse Says.” A key quote from the nurse, who was in fact Livelsberger’s ex-girlfriend, said, “He was just a really loving guy with a deep well of integrity.”

But the truth is that the two attacks were deeply related, equally political, and similarly ominous. It’s just not in ways that Americans are trained or encouraged to recognize.

The first thing to emphasize is that Jabbar and Livelsberger were U.S. Army veterans with overseas deployments. Not only were both deployed to Afghanistan but both were reportedly there — in very different units and roles — at the same time: during the “surge” of 2009 and 2010, when U.S. troop levels rose from 30,000 to more than 100,000, with commensurate surges in the deaths of both troops and civilians.

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