WHAT GIVES: Tragedies test the human spirit, but never win

PEOPLE RESILIENT IN DIFFICULT TIMES

By Greg Harton

Monday, November 9, 2009

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FAYETTEVILLE — I remember walking into the restaurant for the first time. It was just off the main highway and didn’t look all that extraordinary — just another cafeteria-style place to eat.

But the concrete barriers one had to walk through to get to the front door seemed out of place. They were carefully placed to keep anything bigger than a motorcycle from passing through, to avoid any chance that something as big as, say, a pickup truck could make its way past. This restaurant wanted only people walking through the front door.

The time was 1993, a few months after I had moved to Texas for a newspaper job in the Hill Country. I was never much of one for the pick-your-item food bar types of eateries, but I oddly felt that if I was going to live in Killeen, I had to eat at that particular restaurant.

As I ate my meal, I looked around and wondered if anyone else was thinking about what had happened there. How could they not?

About 18 months earlier, a man named George Hennard from the nearby town of Belton had plunged his blue Ford Ranger through the glass front doors of this Luby’s outlet. In the moments after the crash, he systematically walked through the restaurant shooting people. It became the worst mass shooting in U.S. history at the time. Twenty-two people died, and Hennard took his own life.

It’s strange that one can be drawn to such historic places, ones that give a town its primary characteristics or, in some cases, its worldwide infamy. Not going would be like living in Hot Springs and never going to historic Bathhouse Row or never actually taking one of the resort town’s famous hot spring baths. Or living in Fayetteville and never setting foot on the University of Arkansas campus or Dickson Street.

The same goes for tragedies.

So I ate at Luby’s, as did a decent number of town folks and visitors who were intent that one man’s rage and violence were not going to dictate what they did. The people of Killeen had encouraged Luby’s to re-open the restaurant. After a complete remodel, Luby’s did just that in March 1992.

That visit was on my mind a lot Thursday as news came that a new tragedy had occurred in Killeen. This time a gunman killed a dozen people and wounded more than 30. Inexplicably, authorities say a U.S. Army psychiatrist was the assailant.

Killeen is home to about 70,000 soldiers, many of whom have been dispatched to Iraq or Afghanistan multiple times. The community revolves around military life. A lot of military retirees stay in the area because they have a deep appreciation for the military culture that runs through every part of Killeen’s history.

With a force of men and women who are sent into the world’s most dangerous circumstances, Killeen is perhaps used to learning tragic news. But who could possibly expect such horrific violence to descend upon the community itself, especially a town that has already experienced such a massive act of violence before?

The people of Killeen recovered from the Luby’s shooting, forever changed but marching on. They will emerge from this tragedy as well, but it’s heartbreaking that any community would have to go through such an experience once, much less twice.

Time and time again, people who embrace or simply acquiesce to their impulse toward violence demand of us a resilience that’s hard to imagine but is revealed in our most difficult times.

Thank God the fullness of our humanity is really beyond our imagination.

Greg Harton is the local editor of the Northwest Arkansas Times.

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