Both Rohde and Elsner were freshmen at Columbine at the time of the shooting. After graduation, Elsner enlisted in the Marine Corps while Rohde attended Texas A&M University. They began dating a year after finishing high school, and will get married in June.

"I've had my perspective of the world spun around a few times," says Elsner, whose family lives about a mile from Columbine High, in Littleton, Colo. He describes the process of coming to terms with a tragedy of such proportions as gradual.

"It really hasn't hit home," he says of Monday's shootings. "It doesn't for a few weeks, until things start getting back to normal. But it's a different kind of normal."

But the feeling of safety that Virginia Tech students once felt, Elsner warns, will be a long time in returning.

"You lose your security," he says. "I went to Iraq and I saw how bad people were living, and I came back to the United States and I felt secure again. You can drive along the road and not worry about things blowing up. It gives me a feeling of placement in the world."

Now, he says, that sense is once again in jeopardy.