WIngman's brother survives Fort Hood shooting

  • Published
  • By Gene H. Hughes
  • 908th Airlift Wing
MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala. --  For Master Sgt. David Royer of the 908th Airlift Wing's 25th Aerial Port Squadron, Nov. 5, began much like any other day. The Thanksgiving holiday was approaching, and he considered himself a very lucky man. After all, he had a good civilian job at Auburn University, a wife, two children and a close family.

When the phone rang at 3 p.m., what began as a seemingly ordinary day would become marked by a historic tragedy that would bring the Royer family a lot closer than they could possibly imagine.

He was sitting in his university office, going over some projects he was working on with co-workers, when a call from his mother came in.

"Have you heard from your brother?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Well, don't you watch the news?"

"I haven't watched it in the last little while."

"There's been a shooting out at Fort Hood."

Immediately, Sergeant Royer whipped around to his computer and brought up the news. There was a heightened sense of urgency that wasn't there before. His elder brother, Maj. Randy Royer of the Alabama Army National Guard's 135th Expeditionary Sustainment Command, was at the Texas Army post preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.

It was there that events surrounding the tragic shooting which shocked the entire nation began to unfold. Watching the news, Sergeant Royer learned that there were 40,000 troops at the post and only a handful had been injured. It seemed unlikely that his brother was in the Soldiers Readiness Center, the location of the shooting, when it occurred.

"I told my mother, 'Don't worry about it. That's an awful lot of people. I'm sure it's all right,'" he said. "A couple of minutes later, I got an e-mail from his wife saying that she'd received a text from him and that he was OK, so I didn't worry anymore about it. I turned back around, and we finished our meeting."

About an hour and a half later, his sister-in-law called him back and said, "He's not OK. He's been shot."

"I guess by him saying he was OK, he was trying to relay 'I'm still alive,' or 'Don't worry about me,'" Sergeant Royer said. "But she told me she had to get to Texas that night, so my son and I picked her up and we drove all night Thursday night - 900 miles in 14 hours."

Sergeant Royer knew he and his son could drive her there faster because she would never catch an airline flight so late in the evening, and he wasn't going to leave her alone. He'd made a commitment to her only two weeks before, when his brother had departed, that if she needed anything, he'd drop everything he was doing and help her.

"I didn't know what to expect while I was driving," he said. "I heard he had a tourniquet on his leg and a tourniquet on his arm, and from what I'd always heard, if they're not done correctly or are on too long, you might lose a limb. So I was fully expecting to get out there and find him missing an arm or a leg. That was my biggest fear."

Throughout the long drive, the wounded brother would call, asking where they were, and then fall back to sleep as a result of the pain medication. The Royers arrived at Fort Hood about 9:30 the next morning; a mere 15 minutes after Major Royer went into surgery.

So they waited, and as the time ticked by, thoughts of how close he had come to losing his brother churned in Sergeant Royer's head.

The major came out of recovery and was placed in intensive care.

After the shooting started, the major had been shot in the back part of the left arm, and the bullet had broken the small bone before exiting through the forearm below the elbow. As he tried to get behind cover, the shooter fired at him again, hitting him in the back of the left thigh. Rendered unable to move, he might have been shot yet again, but a woman reached out and pulled him out of harm's way, and applied a tourniquet to his arm.

After it was over and the wounded were removed from the building, Major Royer found himself lying next to a woman whose wounds were life-threatening.

"He was holding her hand, trying to get here to hold on," Sergeant Royer said. "She didn't make it, and he was pretty torn up about that. All he could remember was her name was Juanita. We found out later she was the highest-ranking person who was shot."

The woman turned out to be Lt. Col. Juanita Warman, a 55-year-old nurse practitioner with the Maryland National Guard. She was one of the 13 fatalities of that tragic day, and one of two victims to receive burial honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

"When I first walked in the room, he was all wired up." Sergeant Royer said. "He'd open his eyes a little bit and ask, 'Where am I? Why am I here?' I'd tell him and he'd go back to sleep. Ten minutes later he'd wake up and ask me the same thing."

According to the surgeon who operated on the major, he was lucky that the second bullet lodged in his leg. If there had been an exit wound, the blood loss might have been fatal.

After working all day Thursday, driving all of Thursday night and staying up all day Friday, Sergeant Royer was completely exhausted, so he left his sister-in-law with her husband and went to his room to get some sleep. That's when former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura visited the hospital.

"They came in, and he talked to my sister-in-law and gave my brother a presidential coin," Sergeant Royer said. "She tried to call me on my cell phone, but I was so wiped out I didn't even wake up. I hated missing that, but in a way, he kinda missed it too because he was so doped up he didn't remember a lot of it."

Major Royer and his family received quite a few VIP visitations while he was hospitalized, including ABC reporter Bob Woodriff, Texas Governor Rick Perry, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. On such occasions, a staff member would come in the room first and ask if the patient felt up to a visit.

For Major Royer's most distinguished visitor, things happened a little differently.

"My brother said the door opened a little bit, President Obama stuck his head in and asked, "Randy, can you take a visitor?"

"I was surprised at his height," Sergeant Royer said. "And no matter your political affiliation, he and the First Lady are extremely nice people."

The major was eventually released, and returned home, where the press was waiting. But despite the attention and probing questions concerning details or possible religious motivations, the unassuming man and his family have been rather quiet about the events of that day.

"I think of the 908 as a great big family, and the family should know what happened," Sergeant Royer said. "But we don't get into specifics about what happened because my brother wants this guy to have his day in court.

We've got our personal feelings, but until he has his day in court, that's where they need to stay."

The major is expected to make a full recovery, and the Royer family will face the dawning of a new year together with a renewed and stronger bond of love and affection.

"I think of my brother as being 10-foot tall and bullet-proof," Sergeant Royer said. "He's my hero."