Of all the explosives that Eric and Dylan used during the attack on Columbine, 30 small bombs exploded; none of which hurt anyone. 46 bombs did not explode, six of which were the six big propane bombs in the cafeteria and in Eric’s and Dylan’s cars.
In almost every columbine story it says that had the cafeteria bombs went off, hundreds of people would’ve died. That was definitely their intention, but that wouldn’t have happened.
What I understand of it, is that the design for the propane bombs (which were actually liquid propane bombs) was flawed. That they were sloppy in their work, and even if they had done it right, it still wouldn’t have happened the way they wanted it to.

We Are But We Aren’t Psycho – Tim Krabbé (via dylan-wrath-klebold)

But in the performance of the two on the day itself was no stage
fright, no horror at the things they got to see, no shame, no awe that
they were somewhere nobody had been before – it was as if they were
visiting a brand new amusement park that was better than expected. They
walked around elatedly and their fun, witnesses agree, seemed genuine.

Maybe
that fun was a way of not having to see the evil in what they were
doing. Or it was a case of the giggles over the incomprehensible madness
of it all. Or it was something that helped them maintain their attitude
toward their victims and toward each other.

Maybe it was
disappointment-fun. “This is great”; “this is what we’ve been waiting
for all our lives”; “this is the best thing we’ve ever done”, they
yelled, but it wasn’t at all what they had always wanted to do – they
had wanted to blow up at least half the school, create hundreds of
casualties, hugely outdo Oklahoma, become the greatest mass murderers in
the history of the United States. But their bombs hadn’t worked, and
now they had to convince themselves that this poor and pathetic heap of
killing that remained with the shooting was exactly the thing they had
so looked forward to.

Maybe that disappointment was one of
the reasons as to why they had such few victims; this too is one of the
riddles of Columbine. They had wanted to break all records, right? Then
why stop at thirteen? After that final murder, about a quarter of an
hour after the first, they roamed the school for another half hour
without trying to enter any of the classrooms where, as they could see
through the windows in the doors, dozens of people were still trapped.
They didn’t hit anyone anymore. And even when they were still killing,
in the library – if they had gone to work systematically, they could’ve
killed thirty to forty people.. or everyone. They had plenty of ammo.
But they wasted their time playing God, toppling a bookcase over,
bullying, exchanging gunfire with the cops. They must have thought they
had killed more than thirteen people – but if it was originally
intended to be a couple of hundred, then thirty was just as bad a
failure as thirteen!

Maybe, when they had to improvise
because the bombs hadn’t detonated, the true nature of NBK came forward:
vandalism. For Dylan, who’d already killed more than he could count,
there was something he’d “always wanted to do” upon leaving the library
– smash a chair onto the computer on the library counter.

They
probably stopped shooting people because the bombs in the cafeteria
remained the main target. Like Eric said, when Dylan kept pushing him to
kill Bree Pasquale: “nah, we’re going to blow the school up anyway”. He
was the leader, and it was a military operation to him. Maybe he didn’t
want to detonate those bombs in order to get even more victims or
collapse the school, but because a real Marine never loses sight of his
operation target.

When they caused that fireball in the
commons, there may have been a thought that he would succeed after all.
But a quarter of an hour later, upon their arrival back in the
cafeteria, the fire had already been mostly put out by the sprinklers,
the pillars were still standing, the library hadn’t crashed. The bombs
had failed for sure – time for suicide. Maybe Eric wanted to go to the
library because that was his chance to die in a firefight. But that,
too, didn’t happen. He must have killed himself with the thought that
everything had failed.

– excerpt from We Are But We Aren’t Psycho (Wij Zijn Maar Wij Zijn Niet Geschift), by Tim Krabbé.

Goddamn, says one, why don’t we actually just DO it? If two little shits aged eleven and thirteen can do it, why can’t we? Jesus, yes, says the other, and we’d be better at it too. That’d totally be like something out of Doom. Yeah, we’re just gonna blow the whole school up, all the fucking jocks are gonna die. Everybody’s gonna die! Then we’re gonna die too. I don’t care. I don’t, either.

The big mouth has found a God, the Halcyon-traveler has found a tour guide.

– excerpt from “We Are But We Aren’t Psycho”, by Tim Krabbé.

The Man comes to take revenge on a group of preps who’ve done something to him. There are nine of them in total, and not much is described about them – aside from one of them, who appears in the story four times in total. It’s “the smallest of the group”; a cocky, power-hungry prick, and out of everything that is called out, one remark from this guy sticks with the “I-protagonist” more than the others – he challenges The Man to shoot him. The Man laughs at him. 

A few others are slaughtered. When the little prick comes back into view, he’s one of two remaining survivors and has wet his pants out of fear. A little later, he runs away; The Man strikes him, and he stays on the floor while crying out in pain. In the end, he’s the only one alive; he bawls, tries to crawl away, and is beaten to death. The metal-enhanced left hand of The Man disappears two inches into his skull.

Is it possible that Dylan, without realising it, was beating Eric to death in his imagination because Eric had taken the place of The Girl? 

– excerpt from “We Are But We Aren’t Psycho”, written by Tim Krabbé.

The pictures above are snapshots taken from the actual short story that Dylan wrote for his Creative Writing class. Krabbé dissects it in his book in the way I’ve translated above, proposing a scenario in which Dylan harboured a level of unknown resentment against Eric for essentially “invading” the scenario of death and dying he’d fantasized about having with The Girl. The class was one Dylan and Eric shared – Krabbé theorises that Dylan was unwittingly telling Eric the truth. It’s not hard to see why the connection was made: Eric was the smallest out of their group of friends and could indeed be quite the power-hungry little shit. “The Man” in the story is Dylan: the same height, the same dominant hand, the same “look”.

I thought it was a rather interesting take. It’s not necessarily one I share, but it’s one I personally love to contemplate because it’s vastly different from most views on the relationship between Eric and Dylan.

Interview: Tim Krabbé

On this Dutch review site, a review of Wij Zijn Maar Wij Zijn Niet Geschift (We Are But We Are Not Psycho) is rounded off with a fragment from one of our regular talkshows that features its author Tim Krabbé speaking about his book and about Columbine in general. I’ve done my best to translate the main gist of what Krabbé says, though I would definitely recommend listening to the interview because you will hear him speak with infectious enthusiasm about his 5-year(!) research about the case. 

Krabbé originally started his research after the Virginia Tech massacre, because the news from that case kept mentioning Columbine and the boys. He remembered Columbine vaguely, but wanted to know the details.. and began to figure out that the reality of the case isn’t how it’s commonly portrayed in the media. The interviewer incredulously asks him “but why, why spend five years of your life on this?”.. and Krabbe responds with the following.

Because I found it fascinating, spellbinding, right from the start, and I discovered that it was possible to dive into that riddle of ‘why’ and after reading their journals and the 26000 pages of evidence I discovered that there’s a lot of bullshit being published about Columbine and that the reality of it is far more interesting than what I had always assumed.

But, well, Krabbé is Dutch. He’s a European author diving into a very American subject. What does he have to offer us?

There’s bullshit in the police report, too, and I found that I could ‘improve’ on it – the police timeline doesn’t compute with the witness statements they took down at all, it’s all pure and utter nonsense!

There have only been publications about Columbine that are riddled with mistakes. There wasn’t a reconstruction of what exactly happened and what happened in those six years that Eric and Dylan knew each other, so I created it. You can see them slowly grow further into that idea, slowly become these philosophical murderers.

Then, the interviewer says something like “we always come to the conclusion that these kids are ‘crazy’ – but that’s not the one you drew“. Krabbé’s response is actually quite philosophical, here:

Of course you’re quite ‘crazy’ if you’re going to do something like this.. but what is ‘crazy’ when nobody in your environment has come to the conclusion that you are? They had a really solid grip on reality and on the truth. They were completely normal boys. In the US, they have been getting stuck in this idea that these guys were complete psychopaths!

Krabbé goes on to describe both Eric and Dylan: 

Eric was full of brawn. He had what I call the ‘Catcher in the Rye’-syndrome: everything that adults say and do is completely ridiculous. The world of adults is not real. It’s false – and we need to resist against it. Eric had a terrible inferiority complex. He, full of brawn, began to shout that all the world must die. It’s a little difficult to do that on a teenager’s budget, so he confined himself to the school. He is always seen as the leader, as the malicious brain who pulled that poor tall dude into it.

Dylan was the colder one of the two. His interactions with Eric gave form to the brawn. Dylan had this dream, quite like the thing portrayed in the movie Natural Born Killers, to unite with an ultimate lover in a mass killing. They would die together and become happy in the afterlife. It was this idea that drove Dylan, and Eric was pulled along into it somehow. 

The interviewer asks him about the moral of the story and about what Krabbé feels his book ultimately has as a bottom line, which is the closing end of the interview. Krabbé has been adamant throughout the interview that there have been so many lies told about Columbine. He’s been telling everyone that the truth about Columbine is out on the table for all the world to see: the journals and witness accounts are out there, as well as the videos. Diving into it uncovers the truth. Diving into it uncovers the reality of Columbine. And here, too, in his closing words, he is forceful on that matter:

The moral of the story is that you need to try to speak about reality, need to attempt to tell the truth. When Columbine first hit, all these bullied kids everywhere were full of admiration toward the boys for getting their vengeance. My book may be able to contribute to the idea that any thought of justified vengeance is not accurate at all.

Interview: Tim Krabbé