Growing up in the Reagan years with first-strike nuclear weapons pouring off assembly lines, he became a survivalist. Fresh out of high school, he pooled money with a friend to buy nine wooded acres on the side of a mountain in New York on which to build a bomb shelter.
Opting for a military career, he became a superb soldier. Of fifty-six gunners at Fort Riley, he out-shot them all. His written evaluations glowed with praise, including the observations that he "displays absolute loyalty to superiors and to the unit . . . and a high degree of honesty, loyalty, and integrity," and that he "inspires soldiers to win."
Decorated for his performance in the Gulf War, he was shocked by the butchery of Iraqis that Pentagon estimates claimed killed 200,000 people in all.* After waiting out weeks of U.S. bombings before he could join the mission, he encountered not the battle-hardened Iraqi army he had been told to expect, but hordes of panicked conscripts, eyes wild, mouths agape, outstretched hands begging for mercy. Bulldozed into mass graves, they were succeeded by starving Iraqi children pleading for food, which the U.S. army forbade soldiers to give out. McVeigh disobeyed orders and dispensed cases of prepackaged meals to the desperate. After he got home, he reflected on the gruesome mission, deeply regretting the injustice of it all.
The 1993 Waco Massacre was the final straw. Watching on television, McVeigh saw tanks and CS gas used on U.S. citizens, heavy weaponry smashing through the Branch Davidians' defenses, and then the entire compound wrapped in flames. Dozens of men, women and children trapped inside were burned alive. McVeigh screamed in horror.
On the second anniversary of Waco, McVeigh loaded a bomb onto a Ryder truck and drove to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. **
The north face of the building buckled when the explosion peeled the roof back on the top floor, slicing the edifice in half. Dozens of office workers pitched to their deaths as large sections of concrete, mortar, glass and plywood cascaded deafeningly into a huge crater where solid structure had been moments before.
Beyond the building's collapsing walls, parking meters were ripped from the ground, roofs caved in, and metal doors twisted around themselves. At 9:02 a.m. a red-orange fireball hung over downtown and thick black smoke mushroomed into the morning sky as glass, paper and debris rained down on whole sections of the city. Fifth and Harvey Streets were engulfed in flames.
With cable and concrete drooling out of the building's carcass onto the plaza below, stunned and bleeding survivors emerged from the smoking ruins, stumbling along in blood-filled shoes or staggering barefoot over the glass-strewn ground. Frantic parents scrambled through the wreckage screaming for the children they had left in the daycare center on the second floor. Rescue workers plunged into the devastation to excavate blackened babies and children with their faces blown off.
Scattered toys and severed limbs lay everywhere. ***
Within hours of the attack talking heads in the U.S. media were glibly announcing that Muslims had to be behind the bombing. A "terrorism expert" on CBS Evening News asserted that, "This was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait." The New York Times editorialized that, "Whatever we are doing to destroy Middle East terrorism has not been working." In a Newsday column Jeff Kamen recommended that U.S. military commandos "shoot them now before they get us."
A Palestinian-American on his way to Jordan was strip-searched and paraded in handcuffs through London's crowded Heathrow Airport. Photographed and finger-printed, his name was leaked to the news media and reporters besieged his family's home in Oklahoma City. An angry crowd spit at the house and threw trash on the lawn.
Elsewhere in town vigilantes shattered the windows of an Iraqi refugee's home with stones. Seven months pregnant, Saher Al-Saidi began suffering abdominal pains and internal bleeding.
Her baby was born dead. ****
No one could conceive that a decorated U.S. soldier driven over the edge by his required participation in wholesale massacre against people with no effective means to fight back might be moved to launch an attack against his own side.
But that is what happened.
Notes:
* Michael Parenti, "Democracy For The Few," 7th Edition, (Thomson/Wadsworth, 2002) p. 89
**Richard A. Serrano, "One of Ours: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing," (Norton, 1998) pps. 21, 26-30, 32, 36, 44. Mark S. Hamm, "Apocalypse In Oklahoma: Waco and Ruby Ridge Revenged" (Northeastern University, 1997)" pps. 146-9)
***Time Annual, 1995, "A Blow To The Heart," The Year in Review, pps. 40-5
****Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, "The Wizards of Media Oz," (Common Courage, 1997,) pps. 104-6. "Oklahoma Fallout," Z Magazine, July/August 1995)
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