5) The small, terrible space between the doorway - which Cho would have entered with guns blazing – and the groupings of desks where the victims would have been sitting, would have been the deadliest space in the room. For a student to rush Cho, the student would have had to immediately overcome the shock of the attack, unhesitatingly bolt from his or her desk, and charge exposed and unarmed directly across the deadliest space in the room to the source of the killings. This would have been a wholly unnatural act for anyone (I’ll explain this in a moment), yet we may never know if one or two victims actually did do this.
6) The charging, unarmed student would have had no way of knowing whether or not there were more unseen gunmen following behind the visible shooter, Cho.
7) Cho was a fanatic, and prepared to die in his own attack.
8) Most of the victims were young, and probably none of them had any combat training, much less experience under fire: The exception being Dr. Liviu Librescu, the 76-year-old professor and Holocaust survivor who sacrificed himself for his students.
Twenty-five years ago as a Marine infantryman, I remember my squad constantly running immediate action drills: the actions taken in response to an ambush while on patrol.
We were always taught to counterattack directly in the face of the ambush, quickly closing the gap between us and the enemy, and in doing so, attempt to gain fire superiority by shooting back.
We practiced the immediate action drills over-and-over for two reasons. First, if in the event of an actual ambush we were to have sought cover or attempted to run (the natural human reaction), we would have been shot to pieces and the squad probably wiped out. Second, if we didn’t practice the immediate action drills until they became instinctive responses to an ambush, we – just like any other human beings – would instinctively run, seek cover, or hit the deck. And we were U.S. Marines, so there was never a dearth of courage or aggressiveness.
Which brings me back to the students and faculty at Virginia Tech who fell victim to Cho.
They died not because they were too afraid to act. In fact, the heroics of many of them already have been chronicled. More stories of heroism in the face of unequivocal horror will surely surface in the coming weeks and months. And most likely some of the stories of the greatest courage died with the victims before they could be told.
It’s amazing what good men and women are capable of doing in the most desperate moments of life and death. It’s even more amazing how people measure up to a task, even when they are not prepared to do so.
But the odds were against the victims at Virginia Tech. Under the circumstances, they did all they could to survive and help their fellow students and professors. But it wasn’t enough; it never will be against a determined killer like Cho.
And, as retired Navy SEAL and Medal of Honor recipient Mike Thornton told me in an interview for National Review Online’s The Tank, “Thank God, he [Cho] didn’t have guns staged all over the place. The losses would have been even higher.”