Sunday, August 19, 2007
Being there, being worthy
David Grant
Grant, a junior at Virginia Tech majoring in religious studies, is spending the fall semester at the American University in Cairo.
AMMAN, Jordan -- My Orange Effect T-shirt was drenched with sweat. Between pickup basketball games under the flickering lights at the Hussein Gardens, I came hurtling back to a place I would rather not revisit. In the shadow of Jordan's most beautiful mosque, I was propped against the chain-link fence surrounding the courts, sipping a water bottle, when a 20-something Jordanian man startled me with an Ahlain, or hello.
"You were there?" he said, in English, pointing at me. When I responded quizzically, he paused. Then he made a gun with his hand and pointed it at the faded "VT" in the center of my chest.
The question is a good one. Was I there for the tragedy of April 16?
It has been easy to pretend that I wasn't. I first heard the news of the shooting over a static-pocked A.M. radio station driving down Interstate 81 on that fateful Monday morning. I did not reach campus until 2 p.m., far out of harm's way. I lost no family. I did not have a class with the killer.
But in a very real way I was there. I spent the night of April 16 working at Virginia Tech's student newspaper, the Collegiate Times, calling the families of the slain to determine the names of the victims. I crawled through the next week collecting myself on a campus suddenly bereft of students and infested with media. I lost a friend in Norris Hall, where my Arab-Israeli Dispute class met in Room 207 on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
Since leaving Virginia Tech, I have remained conflicted. My classmates have been through the proverbial wringer of friends, family and associates pelting them with questions about the shooting. I have been insulated by a populace with the war in Iraq on one border and the Israeli-Palestinian debacle on the other. The family and friends who burned up my cellphone with messages in the minutes after the news hit the networks, those who might conjure the entire experience by simply asking, "How are you doing?" with the right intonation, are mostly inaccessible.
Yet I went into a cold sweat when an Asian student peeked in the window of my classroom for a second too long at the University of Jordan. I was more than moist-eyed in the lobby of a Damascus hotel when a man wearing a Virginia Tech hat responded to my "Hokie Hokie Hokie Hi," with a hearty "Tech Tech VPI".
The question, "Were you there?" appears to be a geographic inquiry. At its heart, however, is an emotional barometer. For those of us who weren't law enforcement, medical personnel, professors, students or families of students in Norris or Ambler-Johnston on the morning of April 16, "being there" is more about the effect, less about the incident. The question is, "Did it change you?" because anything less would be to have been apart from the experience. To carry on the same as before would be to ignore the experience. It would be inhuman. Was I there on April 16?
In a New York Times op-ed titled "Flags of our sons," Billy Shore writes of watching a family escorting their son's casket from Boston to Washington, where the fallen Marine is to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. While the family watches the casket being moved from the plane to the hearse, Shore writes, "The disconnect between those who serve and those of us who are beneficiaries of their service has always felt great to me, but never greater than at that moment."
Indeed, it is much the same phenomenon for those of us who are lucky enough to fail the geography section of our oft-repeated exam. But as the hearse rolls away, Shore writes, "I went to my car and drove to work with no ambition for the day other than to be worthy."
Will we be worthy? Will we have an intellectual, emotional and moral dedication to the rigorous academic inquiry, the invigorating friendship and the love that our friends, colleagues and family members died pursuing? Will our Drillfield memorial be a cold receptacle for varied floral arrangements, or the physical embodiment of the strength of the Hokie spirit?
Today, we dedicate 32 pieces of Hokie Stone to our fallen family. I won't be there for the ceremony. But 6,000 miles away, I too am having a dedication. I profess that I was there on April 16. And I will be worthy.
