DEVASTATED: The remains of the Murrah building in
Oklahoma City, Okla.
April 19, 1995
A Homegrown Nightmare
By Amanda Ripley
No one
noticed the smoke seeping from the windows of the rental truck as
Timothy McVeigh pulled up to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that
gray morning. McVeigh had lit two fuses to the 7,000-lb. fertilizer bomb
in the truck and then parked beside the building's day-care center. The
explosion vaporized the front of the building, leaving a yawning
cross-section of oozing cable and smoke. The dead would number 168,
including 19 children. (At least six people who survived or lost loved
ones have since killed themselves.) When McVeigh was executed in 2001,
he remained convinced that he had punished the U.S. government for its
1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.
For
America, the bombing was an introduction to mass-casualty terrorism. The
enemy was no longer uniformed platoons but lone extremists in our midst.
They could not be easily ferreted out—or understood. But Oklahoma
City also wrote the book on recovery. The survivors have become
indispensable companions for the families of 9/11 victims. And the
memorial to the tragedy shows that traumatized cities can unite, as
author Edward Linenthal puts it, "to protest the anonymity of mass
death."
TIME Cover
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