Pastor Jimmy Towers urged them to hold onto faith in God even as terror and loss threatened it.

"Things like this shake our faith," Towers said. "But sometimes our faith needs to be shaken to see if it's real."

Across Fort Hood and Killeen, home to the Army post, people searched for answers to Thursday's shooting rampage that killed 13 people and wounded 29.

The shooting spree that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is accused of reverberated across the USA as families caught flights to Fort Hood to be with wounded sons or daughters, or retrieve their bodies.

"We will never forget this Thursday of November 2009," pastor Kenneth Cavey told his congregation at Memorial Baptist Church in Killeen. "But like 9/11, like Pearl Harbor, like the Challenger accident, we move forward, we move on."

The consoling words could do little to erase the heartache that visited living rooms across the country this weekend.

Joleen Cahill was on the phone with her daughter, Keely Vanacker, around 11:15 p.m. Thursday when a government car pulled up to her home in Cameron. The occupants were coming to notify her that her husband, Michael Cahill, had died in the shooting, the only civilian to perish.

Even as the Army sergeant and chaplain walked to her door, Joleen Cahill refused to believe it. "No, no, no," she kept repeating. People weren't supposed to die on Army posts.

"Things are going to get harder before they get better," Vanacker said. "He meant so much to us."

Sudden death is no stranger to Killeen. In 1991, George Jo Hennard drove into Luby's Cafeteria, shot and killed 23 people, then killed himself.

And since Sept. 11, 2001, more than 500 soldiers from Fort Hood, the nation's largest military base, have died in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the back row of Lifeway Fellowship, Jeanne Isdale raised her hands and sang in honor of those slain Thursday. The shootings reopened old wounds, she said. Isdale was with her family at Luby's that day. They escaped out a back window.

"The families here have been through so much," said Isdale, her eyes welling with tears.

Inside Fort Hood, worshipers at the 1st Cavalry Memorial Chapel hugged one another and raised their hands in prayer. The chaplain, Col. Frank Jackson, asked the congregation to pray for the dead and the wounded — including Hasan and his family.

"Lord, all those around us search for motive, search for meaning, search for something, someone to blame," Jackson said. "That is so frustrating."

Hasan, 39, was in stable condition in the intensive care unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Fort Hood spokesman Col. John Rossi said.

Sandra McCleney, 63, a dispatcher for Fort Hood Emergency Medical Services, was working at the post's emergency call center Thursday when panicked calls started pouring in.

One caller, she recalled, yelled: "You've got to help us! He's shooting! He's killing people! You've got to help us!"

Fort Hood Police sergeants Kimberly Munley and Mark Todd arrived, exchanged fire with the suspect and subdued him, Rossi said. Munley was hospitalized with multiple gunshot wounds; Todd was unharmed. The whole incident — from the first 911 call to Hasan's bloody submission — took four minutes, he said.

Col. Ed McCabe, a Catholic chaplain at Fort Hood, arrived about an hour after the shooting. Barred from entering the crime scene, he stood in a doorway and prayed over nine of the dead still there.

"I've never seen anything of this magnitude," said McCabe, who has done tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

John Fisher, Bell County commissioner for the precinct that includes Killeen, said he's attended memorials for the Luby's killings and multiple-casket funerals for slain soldiers. Thursday's massacre may cut even deeper, he said, because an Army officer is alleged to have done the killing.

"The senseless of it will linger on for quite a while," he said.

Contributing: Jim Michaels and wire reports.

Hawley is Latin America correspondent for USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic.

Enlarge By Paul J. Richards, AFP/Getty Images An Army soldier prays Sunday during non-denominational church services at Fort Hood's 1st Air Cavalry Divisional Memorial Chapel.