A View From Main Street: An awful week for a Virginia Tech graduate

This week was an awful week to be a Virginia Tech alumnus.

I graduated in 1992, 15 years ago this May, so I did not know anyone killed or injured in Monday's shooting. But like many graduates, my bonds to the school and with Blacksburg remain deep and what happened in West Ambler-Johnston and Norris Halls has repeatedly brought me to tears.

I grew up an army and later a government brat, and for much of my life, I've moved every one to two years. I have lived in California nine years now, having moved out here to be with the Hesperia girl that I later married, but in those nine years, I've lived in three different cities. In contrast, I lived in Blacksburg for six years, both as a student and afterward as a reporter at my first newspaper, the News Messenger in neighboring Christiansburg.

My final year at Virginia Tech, I switched housing assignments with a guy pledging my fraternity. The Pi Kappa Alpha house was particularly out of control that year, and I needed to knuckle down if I was going to graduate. I ended up living on the top floor of West Ambler-Johnston Hall. It was where I first heard Pearl Jam and Nirvana and where I made friendships that have lasted to the present day.

Prior to moving into the fraternity house years before, I'd lived at West Eggleston Hall, directly across the Drill Field from Norris Hall. My girlfriend, an industrial engineering student, had most of her classes there, and I had even taken (and later dropped) an Italian language class there.

Over the years, I've often thought fondly of my time at Virginia Tech, and had fantasized more than once about moving back to Blacksburg and reporting for the Roanoke Times. I've missed sledding in the winter and going tubing on New River in the summer, calzone at Backstreets Pizza and hearing the roar of the cannons every time the Hokies scored a touchdown. Blacksburg historically has only one murder a year, and is the sort of place where people feel safe walking the streets at night, whether they're tumbling home from a fraternity party, returning from a late-night study session or simply walking their dog.

It's one of the most wired towns in America, and my final story for the News Messenger, back in November 1993, was a piece that explained the town was being wired together in a strange computer network I had a hard time understanding, called the Internet, well before the World Wide Web exploded into the public consciousness and transformed the world.

This is not the Blacksburg or Virginia Tech anyone else is likely to ever know. Much like Kent State students' experience of their college life is overshadowed by a single horrible event in May 4, 1970, Virginia Tech is likely to be forever linked with the memory of April 16, 2007.

I find myself full of rage when I see Dateline NBC doing reports from in front of my old dorm and irritated when people elsewhere in the nation refer to Virginia Tech as an "urban commuter campus," even though they really can't be expected to know better.

It's misdirected anger, of course. What I'm really feeling is a sense of violation, and that one person, Seung-hui Cho -- a fellow English major, ironically, given how few of us there were at a school best known for its college of engineering -- has put a scar on the campus and the town around it that may never truly heal.

Obviously, the primary victims of Cho's rage were the 31 people he killed and 29 others he injured. But for the larger Virginia Tech community, the pain we feel is very real and unlikely to go away any time soon.

One thing that has helped is the very genuine outpouring of grief and support from around the country and, indeed, throughout the world. It is perhaps because Blacksburg was the kind of town where this sort of thing wasn't supposed to happen and the realization that this sort of thing could happen anywhere.

If there's a positive legacy from the events of that awful Monday morning, I hope it's that we all work together to try and prevent such events from ever happening again, to anyone, anywhere.