A nation, given the tragic and ancient history of international warfare, has learned to expect being attacked from without.

But from within? Why should we be attacked from within?

After the terrorist attacks by native-born Americans against Americans of the last week, that is our Question of the Week.

What do you make of the truck rampage in New Orleans’ French Quarter on New Year’s Day, and the detonation of explosives in a Tesla Cybertruck outside a Trump-branded hotel in Las Vegas?

Both were apparently perpetrated by military men — the former a veteran, the latter an active-duty Green Beret.

One of them certainly seems to have been inspired by a foreign terror group. The Army veteran who drove his pickup into New Year’s partiers on Bourbon Street was “inspired by” the Islamic State terrorist organization, President Biden has said. If Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar took on an Arabic-sounding name, he was born in Texas, and served in the Army from 2007 until 2015, and was deployed once to Afghanistan, before serving in the Army Reserve until July 2020. He left with the rank of staff sergeant.

The soldier who blew up the truck and shot himself dead in Vegas, Master Sgt. Matthew Alan Livelsberger, contrary to some initial speculation, praised President-elect Donald Trump and wrote in a kind of manifesto that “our soldiers are done fighting wars without end states or clear objectives.” A former girlfriend who was an Army nurse who treated soldiers with brain injuries from their service said “she recognized many of the symptoms in her new boyfriend that she had seen in her patients,” The New York Times reports.

What does this say about the experiences of American servicemen? How is it that these soldiers, patently the most patriotic among us, have gone off the rails? What is it that our military can do to protect the mental health of those who serve? Were the two incidents related, or are these just random “lone wolf” acts?

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