I think it happened when the kids started screaming and yelling, Help me! Help me!

Or maybe it was when I overheard the 911 call Bobbi Rae Myers made.

She told the police dispatcher that the shooter wore a mask and the other man was dressed all in black.

It could have happened when I saw Terry Williams comforting a young girl who was sitting on the floor under her desk, crying.

Usually, I dont get emotionally involved when Im covering an assignment. Theres too much to think about: Wheres the story? Whats being said? What question do I ask next? What are other people saying? Whats going on around me? How does it look and sound? How do other people feel?

I usually put my own emotions aside and push on intellectually with what I have to do. Its not my story that Im telling, after all. Its the story about what others are doing.

So, when I started to feel tears welling up in my eyes during the mass casualty drill at Cannon Beach Elementary School Monday, I was surprised.

Sirens were blaring. An orange and white U.S. Coast Guard helicopter was flying overhead, around and around the school. Cannon Beach Police officers and Clatsop County Sheriffs deputies were running back and forth in and out of classrooms, their fake guns poised. People were shouting.

A few times in the beginning I heard gunshots.

I knew the blood on the childrens foreheads, legs and arms was really paint, put there an hour before by moulage technician Susan Agalzoff.

But Agalzoff is also a paramedic with the Seaside Fire Department, and, as she created bullet wounds and lacerations on students and adults who volunteered to play victims for the drill, she recalled her experience at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

It was the site where 12 students and a teacher were murdered by two young shooters, who then took their own lives.

She was in Colorado, doing a paramedic internship. On that day in 1999, she was sitting in a movie theater watching The Matrix. Suddenly, she was paged and told to go to a mass casualty incident stage out.

No one told her it was at a school. But she knew it wasnt a drill.

When she arrived at Columbine, she became part of a SWAT team that went into the school to attend to the injured children still inside.

She called Mondays drill awesome. It was, she said, a chance to prepare for something that everyone hopes never will happen.

I wore a green vest, handed to me by Cannon Beach Police Chief Jason Schermerhorn. The vest meant I was an observer and couldnt be shot. I was given free rein to follow the shooters and the police in their mad dash around and around the school. With notebook in hand, I jotted down descriptions of the shooters, who, with fake automatic assault rifles, entered each room.

My notes, scrawled rapidly, say, Shots-shots-shots.

In classroom. Shooter shooting. Sheriff dep. running after shooter.

Terry Williams comforting young girl on ground.

Then the sirens filled the air.

A childs scream. Help me!

A woman in the school office pleads with a deputy, Please stay with me, please! I cant breathe.

The deputy tells the woman, Medics will be here soon.

In a classroom, an assault rifle was on the floor, and a few feet away was the shooter, dressed in camouflage, still wearing his helmet, lying face-down. He was already handcuffed, and a deputy stood over him, gun drawn just inches from his head.

At that moment, I didnt have time to think, really, only react. It was a maze of confusion, and I took notes furiously while trying to stay out of the way of the role-players.

But by the time the paramedics from the Cannon Beach and Seaside fire departments arrived, a calm, almost an eerie quiet had spread through the school.

A deputy told them, We have a multitude of injured children and a teacher in Room 3.

The firefighters some rather young themselves methodically went from the school office to each of the three classrooms, quickly glancing at the victims. Lt. Matt Gardner, the departments training officer, instructed the team.

His tally of injured and dead broke down into colors: green for minor injuries; yellow for serious wounds; red for those needing immediate attention; black for death.

The office has three reds, Gardner said and moved on to the first classroom. Got one green, one red and one black in classroom 1.

Moving to classroom 2: One green, one red, three blacks.

Classroom 3: One red, one black.

Altogether, inside the classrooms and outside, the medics counted five greens, two yellows, eight reds and six blacks.

Somewhere in that hour, that frenetic hour, those tears stung my eyes. It was only a drill, I told myself. It would have been even more chaotic, more panic-stricken, much more intense if it had been real.

As children were being wheeled out on gurneys to waiting ambulances outside the school, I paused to talk to Dave Pastor, who runs the local liquor store and freelances as a camera operator/reporter for Portland area television stations. I admitted my surprising emotional reaction to him.

I found myself a little emotional, too, he told me. But this crap happens.

Despite my green vest, which was supposed to protect me from being involved, I was touched, anyway. The questions went beyond the who, why, what and where of the story.

There was a big how that remained unanswered.

How did we ever get to this place? 

Nancy McCarthy is the South County reporter for The Daily Astorian. Her column appears every other week.