For some, it’s justice; some don’t care

Russ Allen walked into his Creswell home Sunday after a night of bowling, and his wife, Caroline, told him the news: They got Osama bin Laden. Finally.

“Great!” the 78-year-old Korean War veteran thought. “Best thing that’s happened to our country.”

It had been 3,519 days since Allen and the rest of the nation watched in horror as the twin towers in New York City crumbled to the ground. Catching bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader and the mastermind behind the worst terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil, was something that had become an afterthought after almost a decade of elusion, said Allen, who is one of a couple hundred local veterans whose photographs adorn the walls of Mom’s Snak Shak, a Creswell burger and coffee joint. He is pictured in his white sailor’s uniform, next to his older brother, Rich, also in uniform, as they stand aboard a U.S. destroyer in Japan in the early 1950s.

“I really didn’t think we’d get him,” said the soft-spoken Allen on Monday, sitting at a table at the diner, where he had just finished lunch with his wife. “It sure was a surprise.”

While Allen might have thought the out-of-the-blue news of bin Laden’s demise was great news for America, others interviewed Monday in Eugene were not so sure.

“I could care less about bin Laden at this point,” said Trevor Wilson, 30, of Eugene, shopping for a new flat-screen TV at Video Only on Chad Drive, while most of the TV screens in the store were filled with CNN images of the aftermath of bin Laden’s killing. “Lots of people are out there jumping up and down, but as soon as they’re done with this, they’re on to the next thing,” Wilson said of the war on terror and the ongoing chaos in the Middle East.

Wilson even has doubts it was bin Laden who was shot and killed Sunday by U.S. Navy Seals and CIA operatives. “Who knows?” he said. “It might have just been some old guy who looks like him.”

If you were looking for some sort of celebration over bin Laden’s killing in the Eugene-Springfield area Monday, well, it would have been difficult to find. The U.S. Federal Building in downtown Eugene? No. The University of Oregon campus? No.

“Yeah, it’s great,” said UO student, Andrew Jorgenson, passing by the UO Duck Store at East 13th Avenue and Kincaid Street between classes. “But there’s probably a lot of other people who deserve to die just as well. I’m not really sure how to feel about it.”

The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were literally half a lifetime ago for Jorgenson, 20. “Maybe if they’d got him after only a year had gone by,” then it wouldn’t be so anticlimactic, said Jorgenson, who added that he thought it was “weird” that some Americans were celebrating someone’s death.

Let’s put it this way, Jorgenson said: “If there was a parade (celebrating bin Laden’s death), I probably wouldn’t go to it.”

Inside the Duck Store, former UO President Dave Frohnmayer was looking for a replacement for a wine glass with UO lettering that had broken, when he found himself the only one watching CNN coverage of bin Laden’s death.

“It’s macabre,” Frohnmayer said of Americans celebrating bin Laden’s death. “I’m more reflective. It doesn’t bring anybody back.”

Like many, Frohnmayer wondered if bin Laden’s capture and killing “would ever be done.” It had long been out of his mind, he said. But as he was asked about it, his mind wandered back to the night of Sept. 14, 2001, when he spoke at a candlelight vigil — part of that year’s Eugene Celebration — to honor the victims of the terrorist attacks on the East Coast three days earlier. He remembered talking about how all Americans wanted a firm and measured response to the attack. How most wanted revenge — and fast.

These were some of Frohnmayer’s exact words that night, according to a reprinting of his address in the Sept. 19, 2001 Register-Guard:

“There is anger and rage — perhaps now a channeled rage — but still a rage that wants justice and even dares to say it yearns for revenge. This is a time of wanting to be able to reach out, to do something to relieve the hurt of those afflicted and, as our anger rises, to smite those who have brought down this terrible injury.”

But Frohnmayer also cautioned in that talk, that “we must not … in the cause of retaliation, become fanatics ourselves. To do that is to lose the war. The sword of our retribution must be finely honed and carefully wielded.”

Almost a decade later, Frohnmayer said bin Laden’s death “brings some sort of closure.” But we should also reflect on the cost of it all — in upgraded security, in billions of dollars, in the political polarization of the United States, in lives lost, he said.

Back at Mom’s Snak Shak in Creswell, co-owner Bob Dugre cautioned that the war on terror is likely far from over.

“It’s one chapter that probably would have taken care of itself,” he said of bin Laden’s death. “But it doesn’t mean that we’re done.”

He likened it to a forest fire. “Just because you find the tree that started it doesn’t mean the fire’s out,” he said.