Two soldiers with ties to Rapid City missed the carnage at Fort Hood on Thursday -- one of them just barely. The other one lost three friends who were killed in the mass shooting.

Capt. Walter Sowden, son of Gaiola Sowden of Rapid City, had left the Soldier Readiness Center about 15 minutes before an Army psychiatrist began the shooting rampage that left 13 people dead and another 30 wounded.

Pfc. Tommy Champion, son of Cody and Peggy Champion of Rapid City, had been scheduled for processing in the readiness center Thursday along with others from his platoon. But his sergeant had sent him out to a machine gun range to clean up after his platoon, Champion's father said Friday.

"He's always been lucky," Cody Champion said. "This was really lucky."

However, Cody said three members of Tommy's 22-member platoon were killed in the shooting. They were inside the readiness center filling out forms and getting blood work done in preparation to deploy to Afghanistan in January when they were gunned down.

Tommy called his parents less than an hour after the shooting started, before they had heard anything about it on the news.

Champion said his 19-year-old son was "taking it hard," pointing out that the platoon was a close-knit group, because most of the soldiers had been together since basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.

Tommy joined the Army in September 2008, a few months after graduating from Central High School. The combat engineer platoon, trained in explosive ordnance disposal, is part of the 36th Engineer Brigade.

Sowden had been working in the Soldier Readiness Center all week, his mother said. Sowden is a logistics officer with the Army Medical Corps who was on temporary duty at Fort Hood helping prepare troops for deployment overseas.

Sowden left the building and had just driven off the post and headed for his regular station at a medical facility in Dallas when Fort Hood went into lockdown.

"He really wasn't aware of what happened until the unit he was supporting called him on his cell phone," Gaiola Sowden said. The Army officer immediately called his wife and then his mother.

Members of the unit he was helping were in the readiness center when the shooting started, but Capt. Sowden didn't know whether that unit suffered any casualties.

Sowden didn't grow up in Rapid City, but he attended South Dakota State University after his parents moved here. He received his Army commission through the ROTC program at SDSU.

He arrived for duty in Texas in August, after a four-year stint at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

His mother is relieved, of course, that he was not hurt.

"I told my mother-in-law that the year and a half he was in Iraq, I worried about him," Gaiola Sowden said Friday. "But this brings it home. It's really unthinkable that this could happen on our homeland soil."

Contact Steve Miller at 394-8415 or steve.miller@rapidcityjournal.com.