The horror brought by McVeigh

TERRE HAUTE - Halfway through the museum in Oklahoma devoted to the bombing, visitors stand in a conference room listening to a meeting of the water authority recorded on the morning of April 19, 1995.

After two minutes of formalities, there is a thunderous noise, silence, then screams.

The doors swing open, followed by the sound of fire engines, police cars and hysterical news crews. It is a powerful reminder of the moment the heart was ripped out of the American heartland. The final toll was 168, some of whom are pictured above.



With Timothy McVeigh's execution, the rage, fear, horror and sadness of the worst act of terrorism on American soil are being remembered throughout the United States. They were all the more vivid in interviews conducted straight after the bombing.

Lester LaRue did not even remember taking the picture that came to symbolise the horror of the attack - a heart-wrenching image of year-old Baylee Almon, bloody and lifeless, her tiny yellow socks torn and dirty, limp in a firefighter's arms.

LaRue, a gas company worker who grabbed a camera and started snapping shots moments after the explosion, said he did not know how dramatic the picture was until he heard a technician sobbing over the prints she had just made from his film.

As LaRue's and other pictures emerged, Americans were shocked that the violence seen in Europe and the Middle East had struck in Oklahoma.

In Washington, then-President Bill Clinton told aides he almost kicked a television after seeing the blast's effects and vowed the United States would catch the bombers. Attorney-General Janet Reno set a $US2 million ($4.7 million) reward.

"There is no place to hide," Clinton said. "Make no mistake, this was an attack on the United States, our way of life, everything we believe in."



While the manhunt raged on, attention was riveted on the search for survivors, especially for missing children who had been in a day-care centre in the federal building.

Dr James Sullivan, a small man who likes to carry a pocket knife, was trembling as he spoke softly of the most horrifying surgery he had ever known.

Sullivan, just small enough to squeeze into a dark and wet space between jagged steel rods and cracking concrete slabs, cut a leg from Daina Bradley. She was going to die if she could not be quickly freed from the rubble.

Taking the advice of disaster counsellors, Sullivan immediately afterwards sought an audience to tell of his fear of being crushed, of cringing at Bradley's screams, of having to use his pocket knife to finish the job after firefighters tried to pull Bradley free only to discover her leg had not been severed.

Throughout Oklahoma people wore coloured ribbons, turned on porch lights and drove with headlights on at all times as symbols of courage and hope.

The hope was of little help. The last victim found alive was a 15-year-old girl rescued about 12 hours after the blast.

But the search continued for many days.

The searchers worked on their hands and knees, sometimes using shovels and crowbars, sometimes just their fingers to sift the wreckage.

"You look down a hole and all you see is hands, legs, blood spattered everywhere," firefighter Homer Thompson said.

Firefighter Gary Thurman said the nursery in the building was the worst place. "All the toys are covered with blood."

Before firefighters were allowed to dig, they were carefully briefed about the horrors, with supervisors saying, "It's no shame if you don't want to do this," Thurman said.

They worked in teams, wearing masks and gloves. They put body parts from each section into separate bags and used dogs, cameras, microphones and heat detectors.

From time to time they had to evacuate as debris fell. Fears were high that another bomb may have been planted.

"Each worker is debriefed by counsellors at the end of every shift, but some are holding back," said Dr William Simcoe, a search and rescue specialist. "They have to get it out now because you can't bury it - the horror comes back later in flashbacks, even years later."

Relatives of the missing waited at First Christian Church. To comfort them, pets were brought to the church, including a huge dark brown rabbit that emerged from the waiting area wet with tears after being hugged by crying people.

The final toll included 19 children. Their deaths were the most disturbing. Dr Ernestine Dillard, a rescue physician, began crying when interviewed.

"This has been a real bad one," she said. "The children's toys, their shoes. There's no medical school anywhere that can prepare you for that."

In the confusion that had followed the explosion, many fingers pointed to the Middle East, blaming Islamic fundamentalists.

But within three days the FBI had its man, a young, white American, a decorated Gulf War veteran.

McVeigh knew that to hurt America, you did not strike at New York or Washington. You struck at the soft, white underbelly of the country, Oklahoma City, the kind of place where people say: "Things like this never happen here."

His motive in leaving a lorry full of explosives to destroy a federal building, he said much later, was to avenge the Government's mishandling of the siege at Waco, Texas, when agents invaded the headquarters of the Branch Davidian religious cult, suspecting sexual abuse and possession of illegal weapons.

The compound went up in flames, killing more than 70 men, women and children. The Oklahoma bomb exploded two years to the day after Waco.

McVeigh had been to Waco the month before.

For McVeigh, April 19 had another layer of significance: it was the day of the battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775, the first battle of America's revolutionary war against the British.

McVeigh saw himself in a grand tradition of patriots, ready to take up arms against tyranny.

He was also spurred to act by an incident in 1992 when federal agents fatally wounded a mother and her son during a stand-off at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

Since the beginning of this year he has persuaded himself that he will become a martyr to the anti-government cause, believing that his bomb forced the Government to rein itself in.

While those who knew him when he grew up in Pendleton, New York, remember a happy, smiling blue-eyed boy with golden, curly hair, all was not well at home.

His parents, a travel agent and a car plant worker, fought often, and eventually split up, leaving McVeigh, one son born between two sisters, feeling rejected.

At the age of 20 and apparently on a whim, he joined the Army, bored working as a private security guard. He was known as a dedicated soldier, so much so that his officers once said they would like to have had a "a hundred Tim McVeighs."

In the Gulf War he earned both a Bronze Star and a reputation as a deadly accurate tank gunner.

After he left the Army McVeigh grew increasingly disaffected and found like-minded individuals within the far-right groups that exist across America.

In addition to Terry Nichols, an Army friend currently serving life imprisonment for his part in the bombing, McVeigh fell in with white supremacists known as the Aryan Republican Army.

It is almost certain that McVeigh's actions were part of a wider conspiracy involving this group, which helped organise and fund the plan that would explode two years after Waco.

When McVeigh was caught, stopped as he left Oklahoma City by a patrolman who spotted he had no licence plate, officers found immediate clues to lead them to think he was their man.

On the front seat of the car was a pile of papers containing his "manifesto" as well as clippings about high taxes and the "slaughter" near Waco.

When FBI agents interviewed him they asked if he knew why they were there. He said: "Yes. That thing in Oklahoma City, I guess."

- AGENCIES