I was driving the truck back to Kansas City from the trade show in Houston. Somehow, after my overnight stay in Dallas, I missed the turn north at I-45 and ended up farther west on I-35.
My delay out of Dallas, though, meant daughter Meghan and I wouldn’t be able to meet for lunch in Tulsa. So I was on my own clock.
As I neared Oklahoma City, I remembered I’d always wanted to stop at the site of "the Oklahoma bombing" – that horrendous day on April 19, 1995, when a non-descript guy named Timothy McVeigh drove an explosives-packed Ryder truck to the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, parked it and walked away.
At 9:02 a.m., the truck and more than one-third of the building disintegrated into shards of glass, metal and cement dust.
Killing 168.
It was America’s first major dose of contemporary political terrorism, this at the hands of the extreme right wing of the nation’s political culture – those who saw the events of Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge as a sure sign that America’s liberties were at risk.
McVeigh, executed on June 11, 2001, believed as much.
Today, the site is a remarkable memorial to the pain and destruction that rained down, literally, on this Oklahoma community as well as the nation.
I parked my truck on N.W. 5th Street, facing north. The memorial loomed ahead of me. It was raining slightly … had been all morning.
The nine-story building is gone now, of course, though foundation remnants remain – by design. In its place is a large, green field upon which sit nine rows of chairs, each chair representing one of the victims, each row representing a floor of the building. Because children were laughing and playing at the child-care center inside the building that morning, sixteen of the chairs are smaller than the rest.
McVeigh parked his truck directly under the child-care center.
Where once stretched N.W. 5th Street upon which the Ryder truck sat, there is now a long, horizontal pool of water – placid, nary a ripple. Peaceful. And at each end of the memorial are the start and stop times surrounding the destruction: 9:01 and 9:03.
Of course, the destruction caused by the blast would go on for years ... goes on now.
After I walked around the memorial taking pictures, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go into the memorial’s museum. I have friends who did not go once they got here. But school children on tours were streaming in and out. Silly for me not to.
The museum is housed in the Journal Record building immediately north of the memorial. This building has been carefully maintained to show the damage caused by the enormous blast across the street. Layers of the building’s brick walls were lifted by the blast, and gravity slammed them back down – like layers of a cake. You can still see the cracks. The museum chose to leave one Journal Record office exactly as rescuers found it after the explosion.
Inside the museum awaits an incredible, sobering journey. You take an elevator up, then move down floor by floor. At a key point at the start, you are ushered into a facsimile of a hearing room. And you listen to an actual recording of a permit hearing that went on that morning … the drone of the bureaucrat talking about the morning’s agenda.
At first, you don’t understand why you're in this room witnessing the conversation … and then you do. You know that you’ll soon hear the blast as it punched through the hearing room, hear the real screams of anguish and shock, then the silence.
I won’t go into the details of what follows as you emerge from that room. Just know it is wrenching, unimaginable, tortuous and so very, very sad. And yes, there’s tremendous anger, too.
On this day, school children were everywhere, moving from exhibit to exhibit, their attention spans incredibly short. Teachers, meanwhile, worked mightily to maintain a sense of decorum. At one film, the children would squirm, ready to run to the next station; the teachers would dab their eyes, fight back tears – perhaps they knew a victim.
I didn’t stay long – I couldn’t. It’s difficult in such a place to keep your emotions in check. The hardest stop for me was a room devoted to some of the victims and what they had with them that morning: their car keys, their wallets, their shoes.
I turned to the left at one point, and there in a glass case was a pink toddler’s shoe – the right shoe of one of the children in the day-care center. Her name was listed. The room spun a bit, and my eyes misted; the shoe was pure innocence colliding with the absolute evil of a twisted mind. “God!? …” I thought.
I remembered that Meghan wore such shoes; I wondered if I could even fathom sharing a shoe in such an exhibit.
As I left the museum, I walked by the fence where the public can still post memorials. Flags, personal messages, photos of victims adorn the chain link.
I then moved, again, past the site’s pool of water, looked again at the rows of chairs – the large ones and small. I thought of the pink shoe.
I wondered how many Americans have actually seen this site, have learned up close its painful lessons of intolerance and extremism. It’s distant Oklahoma, after all. Yet, in a sense this was our Sarajevo. It deserves attention.
I climbed the long stairs to North Robinson Avenue, away from the memorial, and pulled myself back into the comforting isolation of the truck.
I took a deep breath … looked around the empty street.
And then, free now, I cried.
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