Shots Fired in Terminal 2

by William Hazelgrove

  The restaurant was later razed and replaced with a monument to the twenty-one people murdered there. Police were criticized for not entering the restaurant fast enough. The police complained they had been outgunned by Huberty, and police departments as a result began putting together special teams who were trained to use high-caliber weapons and respond to situations like the one that had unfolded at the San Ysidro McDonald's.7 Huberty's widow would later sue McDonald's claiming it was Huberty's meal of chicken nuggets loaded with monosodium glutamate that made him go on his murderous rampage. The suit was thrown out.8

  The San Ysidro McDonald's shooting was the worst mass shooting at the time. The juxtaposition of the cultural icon of America's favorite restaurant—where the Ronald McDonald clown welcomed families and kids—with mass murder was jarring. The kids who were gunned down while riding to get a burger reminded me of my own many journeys to McDonald's. I don't know why I was unaware of this shooting at the time, but one has to wonder if it was pushed down under the juggernaut of McDonald's advertising. It is just incongruous to think that people died for nothing more than going to get some fast food.

  Mass shootings were still unique in 1984. They were freak accidents that should not have occurred, and so our national consciousness pushed them back into the category of plane crashes and towns struck by tornados. It was just really bad luck to be in a mass shooting in a McDonald's, and most people soon forgot the event, aided by the million-dollar advertising campaigns that branded McDonald's as the safe playground of middle-class families. James Huberty's name faded quickly from the public awareness, but the multiple gunshot wounds he inflicted and the number of people he killed and wounded attested to the firepower of the Uzi. Huberty claimed he had seen action in Vietnam, but he actually had never served in the military. Mass shootings had now taken a deadly twist in the United States. A shooter armed with an automatic weapon had the fire power of a battle squadron and in minutes could murder over a hundred people. In the end, James Huberty was a paranoid, failing white man who saw the government and others as conspiring against him. His moment in history collided with a clown named Ronald McDonald who quickly trumped our cultural recollection of a loner who gunned people down in a fast food restaurant in 1984, a rampage that his wife ultimately blamed on chicken nuggets.

  Only in America.

  Everyone is running again. It is like the sea, and the wave begins at one end and sweeps across to the other. The stampede of people comes toward the media trucks and then slowly dissipates again. Nobody knows anything. A bullet traveling a mile a second is the unknown. People can be shot from a mile away with rifles, and no one wants to be in that unlucky statistic. Word passes through the media that the police are going to detonate a bomb they've found and not to panic when it goes off. This does nothing for our nerves.

  The press conference held by the Broward County sheriff and the FBI has done nothing to alleviate the stress either, or the feeling that no one is control. The FBI drones on about their investigation while the sheriff fields questions. A reporter asks Sheriff Israel about the shots in Terminal 1.

  “There were no shots,” he responds.

  “But then why did you shut down the airport?” she persists. “You only did that after people were running out of Terminal 1.”

  Sheriff Israel frowns and repeats his mantra that they are only being thorough and that there is only one shooter but that they have an “active situation,” which everyone knows is code for there still being a shooter out there somewhere. Other questions come about Terminal 1 and all the witnesses who heard shots. The sheriff repeats that there was only a lone gunman, Esteban Santiago, and that they have him in custody. Someone asks about the victims, and the sheriff says they are still trying to identify the victims.

  The truth is that the victims are still inside Terminal 2 and the family members will not be notified for a long time. Many will not get the news until the next day. I am standing with the reporters and newsmen outside Terminal 2 on the rim of the press conference. I feel I should blurt out something, say that the sheriff and the FBI are wrong and that there were shots in Terminal 1, but I have been cowed by the skeptical CNN journalists who implied that I had either imagined it or lied. I didn't want all those cameras swinging around a second time toward the author who craves publicity. That is also pinging around—that somehow I am doing these interviews to push my books. It is something all modern authors have to deal with now to sell books, walking the line between being a monk and an aluminum siding salesman. So I say nothing.

  And now we are beginning to wonder about our luggage. It is among the twenty-five thousand pieces left by people running for their lives from a gunman the police say never existed. But I am standing in the exhaust of media trucks in the hot humid Fort Lauderdale night watching SWAT teams with submachine guns and shotguns at the ready. Something happened, and the media can only catch a piece of it. The real story is that ten thousand people are stuck in a major American airport in an active shooter situation. They can't know that my daughters are now sitting in a car with their mother because of the heat and the fact that outside there is a chance of getting shot.

  The photographer with her vest and multiple cameras hanging off her shoulder saved my daughters. I think about getting us out of the airport. We are stranded like ten thousand other people, and no one has any information. There have been rumors of buses being brought in but no one knows for sure. But I know I have to get our luggage back, or at least try to get it. My thinking is that we will rent a car and drive home, as the thought of getting on a plane is blasphemous. We will escape somehow and get away from the madness.

  I stand up and look at my son. I have to do something. I am tired of sitting and feeling like I am helpless against a tide of events that seem only to bring danger. I want to start trying to get out of the Fort Lauderdale Airport, and the first step toward that is getting back the luggage we left in Terminal 1.

  “I'm going back to Terminal 1 to look for the luggage. You want to go?”

  Clay stares at me with big dark eyes.

  “You are going back there. Are you crazy?”

  I shrug and turn toward the terminal. “I have to get our luggage or at least try if we want to get out of here.”

  He turns away and watches a SWAT team pass by.

  “Screw the luggage. I'm not going anywhere near that terminal,” he mutters.

  I find out later that not only did Clay hear the shots, he also saw smoke from the gunfire in the terminal. He is right to not want to return and I don't blame him. Fear affects us in different ways and all my life I have always been scared and then brave. Once when I was ice skating with a friend we were confronted by some boys who claimed the pond for their own and chased us away. The fear grabbed me and we left, but then I drove back ready to fight the boys. They were gone of course, but there has always been a delay like that with me. The shots were terrifying but now I wanted to go back and face whatever or whoever had made us all run for our lives.

  “Okay. I'll be back,” I say, not feeling good about heading toward the shooter.

  Clay shakes his head. “You're crazy.”

  I can't disagree but I start back toward Terminal 1, passing men ready for battle. They are everywhere now, and I wonder about all those returning soldiers like Esteban Santiago who were changed forever from the war. In the early days people had no idea what was happening to these men. Something affected men in the trenches in World War I after long bombardments with shells landing around them and shaking the earth. No one knew what a shock wave was. No one understood what we are just beginning to figure out from dead NFL players, who have concussive injuries that make men lose their memory and then their minds.

  Early doctors had no idea that one hundred years later people would watch grainy digitized films of men who could not control their limbs, their mouths, their tongues; men who could no longer speak, walk, or think, and study what they then called shell shock. That was the first term they came up
with, and they sent the men to hospitals to doctors who had no idea what to do. The phenomenon began to be noticed in World War I, although there must have been cases in the Civil War. World War I was the first mechanized war in history, and soldiers went into it not understanding the horror of machine guns, mustard gas, tanks, flamethrowers, and, most importantly, high-explosive shells. A man sitting in his trench could suddenly find himself buried by an exploding shell weighing as much as a small car.

  Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms would describe such a moment in this way: “I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh—then there was a flash as when a blast furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white then went red…. I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out…”1 Hemingway would never recover psychically and would revisit this moment in the character of the damaged soldier in novels such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, along with short stories such as “A Way You'll Never Be,” “Soldier's Home,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” and “In Another Country.”

  Hemingway, like many others of his time, could find no way to escape the memories of war but through drink or suicide. Tragically he would eventually commit suicide after drinking for decades. Some would say that suicide and depression ran in his family and that Hemingway was merely succumbing to a stacked deck. But the truth is that he probably suffered from shell shock in one form or another going all the way back to being wounded by a mortar shell in World War I. He would never be diagnosed as suffering from PTSD or shell shock, but we can connect the dots left by his long literary trail and his history of habitual self-medication.

  There were few answers at the time when Hemingway was buried by a high-explosive shell. The British Expeditionary Force had to come to grips with the mysterious ailment afflicting the soldiers. After intense bombardments, soldiers reported an inability to sleep, walk, reason, or even talk. Their nervous system seemed to be under assault. Film taken of the first shell-shock victims of World War I show men convulsing, trembling and shaking uncontrollably, falling down, or staring into space for hours at a time. Clearly something had happened to these men, even when they showed no outward sign of injuries. The term “shell shock” was born, referring to a psychological injury.

  These early victims were treated as cowards. The soldiers were coming back from the trenches blind, deaf, mute, paralyzed. Shell shock was thought to be the cause, the theory being that the concussion of the exploding shell was literally shocking their brains. This would be borne out one hundred years later in Afghanistan and Iraq, where roadside bombs like the ones Esteban Santiago was exposed to created the same type of brain changes seen in NFL players with multiple concussions.2 But the British soldiers in World War I showed something else as well. Soldiers who had not been near the bombardments and had not been blown up were also suffering from the symptoms of shell shock. The term shell shock was coined by medical officer Charles Myers and would become combat stress in World War II and then post-traumatic stress disorder.3 These terms would define a broad range of symptoms resulting from the horror of war and the human body breaking down under the stress.

  By the end of World War I, 20,000 men were still suffering from shell shock. This was not something that went away with the end of the war. During the war, in 1916, over forty percent of casualties were from combat-related stress.4 Britain could not provide enough mental institutions, spas, country homes, or insane asylums to handle the massive amount of shell-shocked men. Many soldiers never made it to hospitals and were court-martialed for cowardice, while others were executed for desertion.

  The treatment for many was as bad as the cause: solitary confinement, disciplinary treatment, electroshock treatment, shaming, re-education, and emotional deprivation. The medical community had no answers for men who had been altered by war. Many were returned to the front and the British High Command banned the use of the term “shell shocked” at the Battle of the Somme.5 The trickle of men coming back from the front permanently damaged turned into a flood that threatened the army. The British decided that the mention of shell shock could infect the entire army and that no one would be left to fight. Men were sent back to fight or were shot for cowardice. It was left to private-sector doctors to find a cure for the soldiers who came back as shadows of their former selves.

  Arthur Hurst pioneered a cure for soldiers at a hospital in Devon.6 He would take the men out to the peaceful rolling hills of the Devon countryside. The men would work the land and then they would talk about their war experiences. Therapy and writing exercises would follow as the men improved. But the bulk of World War I vets were left to deal with shell shock on their own.

  By the Vietnam War, the term post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) would be used to define any type of stressful life-threatening situation. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan created a new definition of PTSD. The random roadside bombs would create shell shock symptoms and soldiers going over with National Guard units would find themselves putting a soldier in a body bag on one day and on the next lighting the candles on their daughter's birthday cake. Jet travel had compressed time so that there was no period of readjustment at all for modern soldiers doing tours of duty in the Middle East and then returning to American life. For Esteban Santiago and the two mass shooters in New Jersey and Texas these adjustments were compounded by failure and resentment.

  Anger and rage are the salient emotions of PTSD shooters. Post-traumatic stress would be spread far and wide over the people in the Fort Lauderdale airport who could not leave except by climbing over fences or running though adjacent fields or trying to get into the one of the planes on the tarmac. The victims of mass shootings who survive have psychological wounds that often never heal. They have more in common than we would think with those British soldiers coming back from the hell of trench warfare. Shell shock is a distant country that many enter and few return from.

  It would be easy to pin mass shootings on shell shock or PTSD if all the shooters were veterans, but there is something much more sinister out there pushing people to kill large groups of people. The NRA says that guns don't kill people, people kill people. This may be true, but the invention of the gun changed the art of killing forever.

  When I was a kid I used to make gunpowder. I had a chemistry set and in it was powdered iron, sulfur, and powdered charcoal. I was missing potassium nitrate, or saltpeter as it is commonly known. Saltpeter was long rumored to have been given to troops in their food at various times in history to keep them from fornicating with prostitutes, since it supposedly kept men from getting erections.1 The drugstores in Baltimore when I was growing up sold saltpeter.

  So I went to the local pharmacy, run by two brothers. One of the brothers was high up behind the pharmacy counter and looked down at me when I asked for a bottle of saltpeter.

  “Do you know what this is used for?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I answered. “To give to animals.” I knew farmers used saltpeter to keep some animals from copulating. “They use it for cows,” I added.

  The brother stared at me and shook his head. He disappeared and then came back with a round flat container of saltpeter. “I know what you use it for. Just don't blow yourself up,” he said, taking the two dollars I handed him. He knew I was making gunpowder. When I returned home I quickly mixed the saltpeter with the sulfur, powdered iron, and powdered charcoal. I had borrowed one of my mom's mixing bowls, and the gunpowder looked gray against the white porcelain. Then I went outside and made a long line of gunpowder on the sidewalk. I struck a kitchen match and touched it to my creation. The gunpowder burned like the Fourth of July with fiery sparks and blue smoke. Psssssit! It had burned so fast all I was looking at was a black line. But it had worked, and I had created the propulsion behind every bullet that has ever killed a human being.

  I never put my gunpowder into a gun. I had other ways of demonstrating the basic mechanics of a gun though. I had been collecting the tennis-ball cans that my da
d discarded. I had three, and I taped them together to create a long tennis-ball-can bazooka. Then I stole the lighter fluid for the grill from the garage and took a tennis ball that my dad wouldn't miss. The cans were open end to end except for the last one, which I had covered with the plastic top that came with it. I had poked many holes in the top and then taped it on securely with masking tape.

  I was about to demonstrate the basic principal of a gun. I opened the lighter fluid and squeezed some drops down in the mouth of the open tennis-ball can. The lighter fluid vaporized and then I shoved a tennis ball down my cannon and looked around. Our yard was bordered by high shrubs, and so no one could see the boy about to shoot off a tennis mortar. I had my dad's lighter and I struck it several times before it lit. I positioned the can to the sky with one hand and touched the lighter to the holes in the tennis can's plastic cover for just a second. There was a loud thunk and the tennis ball blew out of the can and became a small dot in the sky. Smoke wafted out of my cannon and I shouted in victory. I had just built a gun.

  A gun is a normally tubular weapon or other device designed to discharge projectiles of other material. The projectile may be solid, liquid, gas, or energy and may be free, as with bullets and artillery shells, or captive as with Taser probes and whaling harpoons.

  Or it may be a tennis ball. My gunpowder was lighter fluid, my bullet was a tennis ball, and all I needed was another tennis ball and a few drops of lighter fluid and I would be ready to fire again. If I had put gunpowder in the end of the tennis-ball can there is a good chance I would have blown myself up, as the thin tin or aluminum of the can could not have contained the combustion. That would be more of a cannon, and I actually had one of those as well.

  Believe it or not Big-Bang Cannons were sold to kids and you can still buy them on the internet today.2 My cannon was green and made of heavy cast-iron metal. I had a tube of Bangsite, which is made from calcium carbide, the same chemical miners used for their lights in the early part of the twentieth century, known as carbide lamps. But I had a real cannon and all I had to do was take some calcium carbide and dump it in the breech of my cannon, which was filled with water. Calcium carbide produces highly flammable acetylene gas when it meets water. When I replaced the breech I counted to three to let the gas form, and then I pulled back a flint plunger much like the one on my dad's old lighter and rammed it forward.