Army Spc. Seth Hotchkiss, a 2003 graduate of St. Regis High School, and his wife Amy were headed to the library - a couple doors down from the Soldier Readiness Center - at Fort Hood, Texas, last Thursday, when they decided to detour home and eat lunch first.

An eruption of uncountable sirens shortly after they got there sent them scurrying to the television to see what was happening.

For Hotchkiss, 25, it was unimaginable.

For the second time in just six months, he was stationed where a member of the U.S. Army had turned a weapon on fellow soldiers and officers and murdered them.

Thursday's mass shooting at Fort Hood, which left 13 dead and 29 wounded, returned Hotchkiss to all-too-familiar territory.

Hotchkiss was in Baghdad in May when a U.S. soldier killed five of his peers inside a stress clinic at Camp Liberty.

In fact, Hotchkiss had an appointment to see his counselor, Cmdr. Charles Springle, that very day.

The meeting never happened. Springle was one of five to die two hours before Hotchkiss' appointment, allegedly at the hands of Sgt. John M. Russell.

Then Thursday, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, allegedly opened fire in the Fort Hood readiness center.

"It kind of feels like it's following me," Hotchkiss said Monday in a telephone interview. "My friends have kidded me that I can't come home to visit."

Hotchkiss didn't know any of the dead or wounded in Thursday's attack, nor did he know Hasan, but the shooting launched him on a somewhat familiar course.

"First, my wife and myself went around to all the neighbors to make sure none of them were victims," he said. "Then we called family members to let them know we were OK. Then we started calling friends here to make sure they were all right."

It remains difficult to come to grips with, though.

"It's hard to think of a fellow soldier taking the lives of so many people, with no purpose," Hotchkiss said.

Seth Hotchkiss enlisted in the Army during his junior year at St. Regis High with the thought that he might make the military his career.

He completed basic reserve training before his senior year and, he said, "As soon as I graduated I went through my advanced individual training, was sent to Germany, and I was in Iraq before 2003 was up."

During his second deployment to Iraq, earlier this year, he began seeing Springle at the military stress clinic at Camp Liberty.

"It was the stress of being away from home," he said. "My wife had a hard time with my being away, and I likewise had a hard time being separated from her."

The couple has a 4-year-old son, Noah.

"I felt that to perform at the highest level, it was better to have the help of a professional in dealing with the emotions," Hotchkiss said.

He called Springle a "compassionate, understanding" person whose death he felt "pretty hard."

"You tend to get close to someone you're talking about personal feelings with," Hotchkiss said. "I felt I was making progress with him, and after he was killed, I had to start over at square one with a new counselor."

Russell, the suspected shooter in Iraq, had been disarmed and forcibly taken to the stress center because of concerns over his mental health. After a subsequent trip to the center, he beat up the soldier escorting him back, stole his gun, and returned to allegedly murder the five people.

All the victims were unarmed. People were required to check their weapons at the door before entering the stress center.

It was especially unsettling, Hotchkiss said, because "At Camp Liberty, you feel as safe as you can - when you're deployed to Iraq, anyway."

Last week's mass shooting at Fort Hood, ironically, was allegedly carried out by a mental health professional.

"You definitely see the effects" of the shooting, Hotchkiss said. "There are armed guards at all the major buildings on-base, inside and out, and the schools are being guarded. There's military housing off-post, and all those villages are being guarded.

"They're searching considerably more cars coming onto the base - before it was one out of every 10, or whatever it was, and now it's like every third vehicle - we've just seen a huge jump in security."

It takes a toll.

"It makes you feel uneasy," Hotchkiss said. "It's hard to get warm, fuzzy feelings about your surroundings - but they're definitely taking every measure necessary to make sure nothing happens again here on base."

It was not the two shootings, but the separation from Amy and Noah that prompted Hotchkiss to decide he would not make the military his career after all, even though he's scheduled to be promoted to sergeant in the next few days.

He also expects to be honorably discharged in the next couple of weeks after six years of active service and two trips to Iraq.

Hotchkiss plans to attend the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute in Phoenix after he's done.

"I decided to get out," he said. "The time away from my family is just not worth the joy of being a soldier."

A joy that, coincidentally, has been crippled twice in the last six months.

Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at (406) 319-2117 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.