Story by Chris Graham

Richard Holland was on campus the day of the shootings - and though they don’t come to mind for him on a daily basis anymore, the weather, of all things, can trigger the memories in an instant.

“On warm summer days, when the campus is kind of quiet, days like that day in 1966 when this happened, the memories do come back sometimes,” says Holland, now a professor at the University of Texas, who was a graduate student at UT-Austin on Aug. 1, 1966, when another student, Charles Whitman, concluded a murderous rampage at the Tower at the center of the UT campus that left 16 people dead and 31 wounded.

Holland, the editor of The Texas Book, a tome chronicling the history of the University of Texas, was reminded of that day 41 summers ago again when he heard the news of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech that left 33 people - including shooter Cho Seung-Hui - dead and 15 others wounded.

“I thought immediately about Whitman, of course,” Holland says.

***

Amy Almarode was on campus the day of the shootings - it was a Monday morning, and she and her twin sister, Emily, both sophomores at Virginia Tech, were taking their time making their way from their East Campbell dorm to their schedule of classes across campus.

“We woke up to sirens blaring outside of our room, and we were kind of wondering what was happening, so we went and checked our e-mail, and got the e-mail that there was a gunman loose on our campus. It was pretty scary. We were looking out the window, and the only thing that I can describe it as is pure chaos,” Amy Almarode says.
“People were running across our drill field trying to find safety, trying to find their friends, and there were police officers with guns crouching behind buildings and crouching behind cars,” Almarode says.

“We could see, when we were looking out the window, we could see directly into Norris Hall, and we could see bodies being carried out one after another. And they were reporting on the news that, you know, it was two people who were shot in West AJ, and Emily and I were looking at each other and just saying, No, it’s so much more than that. We were just seeing bodies after bodies being brought out,” Almarode says.

***

“That was the first call that I made - and I reached her immediately. She was on her way on campus - and I told her to go back home at that point in time. I was very much relieved once I got a hold of her,” says Hite, the associate head football coach at Virginia Tech, recounting the horror that had everybody who knew anybody that they knew to be on the Blacksburg campus scurrying to try to find out if they were OK.

After ascertaining that Kirsten was alive and well, it was on to “his guys,” as Hite, who has been at Virginia Tech since 1978, calls his players.

“When I did get through to one of them, you know, Have you talked to anybody else? And they kept telling me that they talked to so-and-so and so-and-so - but when I went to bed that night, I still didn’t feel comfortable, because I hadn’t talked to all of them,” Hite says.

“Each position coach was calling each one of their guys - and everybody had the same problem. I ended up getting about seven or eight of them (the first day), and by the next day, I talked to all 14 of them. And thank God they were all safe,” Hite says.

***

Elizabeth Hart was on campus the day of the shootings - and it was her name and face that was among those associated with the response that Virginia Tech students delivered to the tragic events that endeared the school to the world.

“There’s a new sense of pride - a new level of pride in being a Hokie,” says Hart, a 2007 graduate who was near the end of her term as the spokesperson for Virginia Tech student government in April.

“When this initially happened, students weren’t shying away from talking about it - they wanted to get the message out there that something bad happened, but that that isn’t a direct reflection of Virginia Tech students or of life here or of the amazing educational experiences or the past four years of relationships that we’ve had to each other. There’s so much more to Virginia Tech than just this,” Hart says.
“The way that we responded is very much Virginia Tech - it’s something that we can be proud of, and something that we can really stand behind because we care so much, and because we cared before this,” Hart says.

“We were always close - but then when something happens, you redefine and reappreciate what you had,” Hart says.

***

Hart was on campus a day after the shootings - when the world saw what Virginia Tech was made of.

Nobody wanted to leave the candlelight vigil held on the drill field at the center of campus - that’s what it seemed like, anyway. And then, at first barely audible over the unseasonably chilly winds, then louder, then full throat, came the chant that is often heard at Lane Stadium on Thursday nights and Saturday afternoons in the fall.

“It gives me chills to think about,” Hart says. “What ‘Let’s Go Hokies!’ means to us initially - that’s what we see in our football games when we need to pick our team up, whether we are in the lead or something has happened our team, or we’re slightly behind or faced with an obstacle. And I think that the emergence of that reminded us of who we were before this, and also that that spirit that is at football games where that chant originated doesn’t just stay in the football stadium - that speaks to the Hokie way of life. Whether we’re ahead, whether we’re trying to challenge adversity, we have that spirit that is continual,” Hart says.

“An informal chant became a very poignant message,” Hart says.

***

And so were sown the seeds of recovery - though recovery, for everyone, from individuals to the Virginia Tech community in Blacksburg proper to those spread out across the Hokie Diaspora, is not something that will sprout from those seeds in immediate full bloom.

“And that’s a problem that is going to have to be overcome as people work their way through this,” says Cathie Gray, a professor of social work at The Catholic University of America who is a nationally recognized expert on mass-trauma issues.

“What we find whenever we have a major crisis is that everybody is positive in the beginning - we are supportive, and we are going to support each other, and we are a wonderful community rallying together. But what we see with the community backing off is that the community often gets depressed in a way very similar to the individual process - and what you start to see is people are more irritated to each other driving patterns of change and aggression. It’s because they’ve been affected by this - but they’re into another stage of the process, the community process of grief,” Gray says.

The recognition that grief is not just personal in situations like that of the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech or the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, but is indeed something that is very much collective, is just now starting to catch on in popular culture.

“In this instance, there’s individual crisis in this grief process, and then the school crisis in this process, and then the community of Blacksburg grief process,” Gray says. “On a community level, it’s a short-term allotment of time for grief - and an expectation that people will move on. What we learned in 9/11 is some of the people who were most directly affected by lost family members or they themselves got out of the buildings, some of those people never had post-traumatic stress disorder - but some people, especially those who have had other traumatic stresses in their lives, who were simply in the city of New York or watching it on television, developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“What people do is they set up in their own mind an epicenter - if I had a direct family member, then what I’m feeling makes sense, but if I’m six steps removed from it, there is no justification for the fact that I’m depressed now, or the fact that I’m very anxious now or vigilant now, or the fact that I’m suspicious of people walking around,” Gray says.

Another thing that trauma experts found after 9/11 is that “everybody rushes in to provide grief counseling - but a lot of the grief counseling is needed down the road, not immediately,” Gray says.

“The sense that we learned from 9/11 is that there’s a rush of doors open for grief counseling immediately - but one of the things that we’ve learned over the years with advanced brain scanning is that people tend to approach a person who has been through this trauma and keep asking them to tell the details and tell the story. That’s not necessarily helpful to the person at all,” Gray says.

“When what happened at Blacksburg happened that day, everybody that knows anybody at Virginia Tech was calling there, and they were asking the people who were there the details of what happened. That actually increases the potential for trauma. What the community needs to do is be a listening community - just listen to the people, listen to people’s experience, and provide the support longer term,” Gray says.

“The support is often needed in the second year - because the coping has worn out, the support system has moved on, and the judgment has moved in. I should be over this. I should move on. So you put all three of those together, and the second year is worse,” Gray says.

“If people get support in that second year, they then can - I don’t think anybody ever forgets anything, or gets quote ‘back to where they were’ - but they can get restabilized to a new normal. And that’s a very helpful term - a new normal, rather than get back to where we were. Because you can never go back,” Gray says.

***

Gary Lavergne was on campus the day of the shootings - with Richard Holland at the University of Texas, a million miles away from Blacksburg.

And yet Lavergne was in high demand only minutes after the events in Southwest Virginia became known worldwide.

“There were two TV crews waiting for me - and I didn’t know why,” says Lavergne, the director of admissions research at UT and the author of A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders.

“I just asked them to hold on for a second, and I went into my office, and I had 14 telephone messages and 60 e-mails,” Lavergne says. “Now, my career is in admissions, and I knew that this didn’t have anything to do with admissions. So when I looked at my e-mail, and they all began with, in the title line, ‘Virginia Tech,’ well, I knew that something happened.
“I didn’t get all these inquiries because I’m such a great guy. I got them because I’m the author of A Sniper in the Tower,” Lavergne says.

The fact that TV crews search out and find people like Lavergne four decades after the Austin shootings could be one indication of how long Virginia Tech is going to be dealing with the tragedies of April 16.

“They’ll be grappling with this for at least 40 years,” Lavergne says. “What’s going to happen - if the Tower incident provides a kind of road map as to what they can expect - every year now, for about 10 years, there’s going to be an anniversary and a retrospective. And then after that, it will be every five years, and then after a while, it will be pretty much every 10 years,” Lavergne says.

“We had the 40th anniversary Aug. 1 of last year - and I was really surprised at the level of interest that the incident brought about. I was really busy doing interviews for about three weeks before Aug. 1 through Aug. 1 itself,” Lavergne says.

The dedication of the first memorial plaque to the victims of the Aug. 1, 1966, shootings was done just this past January - yes, 40-plus years later. Lavergne says UT officials have long made it a point not to “dwell on” what happened that day.

“The memorial plaque to the victims and the people affected by this was installed in a quiet area, a small, quiet area, just north of the Tower, that already had a reputation for reflection and peace and quiet,” Lavergne says. “There has been some talk by some people that memorials be placed on the south mall where a lot of people were gunned down - but that area is also the area where we welcome entering freshmen, and we have activities for them there, and they literally dance in that area. And it’s also the area where we have our commencement ceremonies - where 8,000 people receive their diplomas, and their families are there.”

The focus in the short term at Tech, Lavergne speculates, will be on “striking a balance between how to memorialize the victims and how to remember them without going so far as changing the mission of the university and what the university is for.”
“That hall, that classroom building where all the tragedy took place, we have to remember that that building was put there to educate people - and I don’t think the killer should deserve the satisfaction of succeeding in changing that building from its core mission,” Lavergne says, referring to talk in the early aftermath of the shootings at Virginia Tech that Norris Hall, where 31 of the 33 people killed in the shootings lost their lives, be torn down or at the least closed forever to the public.

School officials did decide to reopen the building last month - though not for classroom use.

Lavergne understands well the difficult position that Virginia Tech is in regarding the use of Norris Hall.

“The balance between memorializing what happened without changing the mission of Virginia Tech and what it stands for is the biggest challenge. The university is going to have to strike a balance between doing one and being true to the other,” Lavergne says.

This is a balancing act “that in some ways UT still has to make,” Lavergne says.

***

Elizabeth Hart has a balancing act of her own to try to work out.

She has a job lined up in Florida - but the communications grad doesn’t want to leave Blacksburg just yet.

“It’s difficult for me to leave,” Hart says. “There is a portion of the graduating class that doesn’t want to leave here. We can’t wait for the next step, but in light of everything that’s happened, we’re kind of hesitant to leave. Students have told me, Maybe I’ll take a year off and work for admissions and get Virginia Tech recruitment back to where it needs to be so that it doesn’t affect the future of the alma mater that I love.”

There isn’t any indication that admissions numbers are expected to be affected adversely in the fall - since many high-school seniors who had been accepted to Virginia Tech for the coming school year had already made their minds up regarding their future plans before the shootings. And while that doesn’t mean that there might not be trouble down the road, Lavergne, who heads up admissions research at UT-Austin, says that there doesn’t appear to be anything for Virginia Tech officials to be worried about, from the Texas example, anyway.

But maybe that sentiment that Hart describes - that has recent alums wanting to do whatever is necessary of them to get Virginia Tech back on track - is saying something else.

“Now, everything that Virginia Tech does, everything that our students do - whether it’s as simple as going to class, or it’s recognizing huge events like commencement - there’s an added dimension to everything that we do,” Hart says. “And it is the remembering, it is the commemorating, it is a new sense of appreciation - so while things are continuing, and routine is starting to come back, and in fall we know we’ll see even more of that routine, nothing will ever be the same again. But we’ll be moving forward with that in mind.”

Sounds an awful lot like that “new normal” that Cathie Gray was talking about - doesn’t it?

“It’s going to be hard for our community to get together and work together to get past all of this,” Amy Almarode says. “But I know, and I know that all of my fellow students know, that we do need to move on, and that we will come back - and that we will have a great football season, and we’ll support our teams and support our schools and support President Steger through everything that he’s done. It’s just really important for Virginia Tech to come together and stay Hokies.

“We need to make sure that we stay in the Hokie spirit and remember that we are Virginia Tech - and we will prevail,” Almarode says.

For further reading

Virginia Tech - www.vt.edu

Virginia Tech football - www.hokiesports.com

Gary Lavergne - www.garylavergne.com

University of Texas - www.utexas.edu

The Catholic University of America - www.cua.edu

Filed under: 6-July 2007 Issue