Oklahoma City Bombing

In Shock, Loathing, Denial:
'This Doesn't Happen Here'
April 20, 1995

 By Rick Bragg

Before the dust and the rage had a chance to settle, a chilly rain started to fall on the blasted-out wreck of what had once been an office building, and on the shoulders of the small army of police, firefighters and medical technicians that surrounded it.

They were not used to this, if anyone is. On any other day, they would have answered calls to kitchen fires, domestic disputes, or even a cat up a tree. Oklahoma City is still, in some ways, a small town, said the people who live here.

This morning, as the blast trembled the morning coffee in cups miles away, the outside world came crashing hard onto Oklahoma City.

"I just took part in a surgery where a little boy had part of his brain hanging out of his head," said Terry Jones, a medical technician, as he searched in his pocket for a cigarette. Behind him, firefighters picked carefully through the skeleton of the building, still searching for the living and the dead.

"You tell me," he said, "how can anyone have so little respect for human life."

The shock of what the rescuers found in the rubble had long since worn off, replaced with a loathing for the people who had planted the bomb that killed their friends, neighbors and children.

One by one they said the same thing: this does not happen here. It happens in countries so far away, so different, they might as well be on the dark side of the moon. It happens in New York. It happens in Europe.

It does not happen in a place where, debarking at the airport, passengers see a woman holding a sign that welcomes them to the Lieutenant Governor's annual turkey shoot.

It does not happen in a city that has a sign just outside the city limits, "Oklahoma City, Home of Vince Gill," the country singer.

"We're just a little old cowtown," said Bill Finn, a grime-covered firefighter who propped himself wearily up against a brick wall as the rain turned the dust to mud on his face. "You can't get no more Middle America than Oklahoma City. You don't have terrorism in Middle America."

But it did happen here, in such a loathsome way.

Whatever kind of bomb it was -- a crater just outside the building suggests a car bomb -- it was intended to murder on a grand scale: women, children, old people coming to complain about their Social Security checks.

The destruction was almost concave in nature, shattering the building from the center, almost front to back, the blast apparently weakening as it spread to both sides of the structure. Blood-stained glass littered the inside. So complete was the destruction that panels and signs from offices several stories up were shattered on the ground floor.

People could not stop looking at it, particularly the second floor, where a child care center had been.

"A whole floor," said Randy Woods, a firefighter with Engine No. 7. "A whole floor of innocents. Grown-ups, you know, they deserve a lot of the stuff they get. But why the children? What did the children ever do to anybody."

Everywhere observers looked, there were the discarded gloves, some blood-stained, of the medical workers.

There seemed to be very little whole inside the lower floors of the building, only pieces -- pieces of desks, desktop computers and in one place what appeared to be the pieces of plastic toy animals, perhaps from the child care center, perhaps just some of those goofy little things grown-ups keep on their desks.

Much of it was covered in a fine powder, almost like ash, from the concrete that was not just broken, but blasted into dust. One firefighter said he picked through the big and small pieces almost afraid to move them, afraid of what he would find underneath. Here and there, in a droplet or a smear, was blood.

One woman, one of many trapped by rubble, had to have her leg amputated before she could be freed. Earlier in the morning, firefighters had heard voices drifting out from behind concrete and twisted metal, people they could hear but could not get to.

A few blocks away, Jason Likens, a medical technician, wondered aloud how anyone could have walked away unhurt. "I didn't expect to find anybody living," he said.

He was sickened by what he saw, but did not know who to hate.

"I would get mad, but I don't know who to get mad at," he said.

Next door, a group of grim-faced medical technicians, police and others gathered just outside the foyer of a church, not to pray, but to watch over the dead that had been temporarily laid inside in black body bags.

The stained-glass windows of the brick building had been partly blasted out, with a few scenes hanging in jagged pieces from the frames, but it was still the most peaceful place for blocks.

"I hope this opens people's eyes," Mr. Woods, the firefighter, said. What he meant was, it should show people everywhere that there really is no safe place, if a terrorist is fanatical enough.

Like others, he believes it was intended to send a message to the United States: not even your heartland is safe.

A few blocks away, two elderly women slowly made their way up the street, their faces and clothes bloody.

They are retirees, living in an apartment building next door to the office building that was the target of the explosion. Phyllis Graham and Allene Craig had felt safe there. But this morning, as the glass went flying through their home, life changed forever.

"It all just came apart," Ms. Craig said. It was not clear if she meant her building, or something else.