I finished my latest audiobook today,
Columbine, by Dave Cullen. My
review is posted at
Goodreads, or just keep on reading below.
Columbine by
Dave Cullen
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
I first learned of this book in 2009 from an e-mail I got from Very Short List. I am glad I took their advice and checked out this book.
The book, by author Dave Cullen, was released in 2009 just prior to the 10th anniversary of the April 1999 attacks.
I can remember clearly where I was when I first hear about the Columbine attacks – I had just deployed to Okinawa, Japan from Hawaii. I had less than a year left on active-duty as an enlisted Marine. It seemed surreal – what would make these high school kids do something like this? Since I was so far away and busy with military training and exercises, I wasn’t blasted by the blanket media coverage that assailed folks back in the U.S. Therefore, I only had the barest understanding of the “why” portrayed in the mass media at the time. I heard about the rumors of the so-called Trench Coat Mafia, targeting “jocks,” the shooters as outsiders, picked on, and so forth – all things that carried the day in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. I was shocked to learn from Cullen’s book that less than 15 people were killed in the attacks – my memories of the sensation reports I did hear in 1999 were that there were a lot more dead.
Cullen’s book peels back the onion on the attackers in a way that only 10 years remove can. He slays myth after myth about the attacks, the attackers, and why they did it. I feel it was a very useful endeavour to listen to this unabridged audiobook from
Audible.com (
http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/product...), particularly since the 11th anniversary of the attacks is but a few days hence, on April 20.
The choice of date is no coincidence – the killers very badly wanted to outdo Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995 in which 168 perished. McVeigh in turn took action on April 19 in protest against federal action against the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas on that day in 1993 that resulted in over 75 killed. The Columbine killers were forced to delay their so-called “Judgment Day” attack by a day, to April 20, because of problems making last-minute arrangements. April 20 was OK, too – it was Hitler’s birthday. (One of the boys was a Nazi apologist.) As a result of these incidents, federal and domestic law enforcement folks in the U.S. understandably get a bit edgy this time of year. Could this have been one of the reasons that the FBI took action against the Hutaree militia last month?
A few threads really resonated with me:
1. As a father of two boys myself, Cullen’s exploration of mental disorders and afflictions in the two attackers was very interesting to me. The conventional wisdom was that the boys’ actions were largely a result of poor parenting, and the surviving parents were widely blamed for this, especially since the attackers committed suicide to cap off their horrible day in 1999. From the book, it seems obvious they weren’t perfect parents to their boys, but really, who is? And the discussion of psychopathy / sociopathy is fascinating – these people may truly just be born different, with nothing that can be done to “help.”
2. I did not know that Harris, the dominant personality amongst the two attackers, had a tie to the Marine Corps. Cullen explains that the boy had always dreamed of joining the Marines and that at one point he even mused that the “good” version of himself would have made a great Marine. In his final weeks, he used contacts with a U.S. Marine recruiter as a smoke-screen to buy time and create space and distance with his parents, who had been hounding him about his future.
3. The “we should have seen it coming” narrative is pretty strong, but it seems to me that in many ways this is like the classic “intelligence failure” – in hindsight and with all the evidence laid out before you, it’s pretty easy to say that the Columbine attacks should not have come as a surprise. In fact, it’s pretty comical how far the perpetrators went to signal their moves, and how many times they were almost caught / the scheme was almost derailed. Yet it wasn’t.
4. One of the “lessons learned” among SWAT folks after the Columbine attacks was that it was not an acceptable tactic to “wait out” an active shooter in a potential hostage / attack scenario like Columbine. The SWAT police at Columbine did just that – they cordoned off the area and waited outside the school, waiting for the situation develop, more situational awareness, etc. In the meantime, the shooters kept rampaging, shooting, killing. Henceforth, and as we have seen recently at Fort Hood and Virginia Tech, law enforcement responders know that they can do no such thing with an active shooter – they must press the attack and take the fight to the shooter, take him out in order to save other innocents. In fact, the only adult to die in the attacks, one of the Columbine teachers, bled to death because the law enforcement personnel whose job it was to rescue him refused to take decisive action in time.
There are some happy endings. The boy who escaped out the library window after being shot in the head recovered from not being able to walk and talk to be the valedictorian at graduation the next year.
The 14 hours and 9 minutes of audio are well worth your time. If you remember the Columbine attacks but still don’t know the full story, you should listen to this book.
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