Yesterday marked twenty-five years since Timothy J. McVeigh
murdered 168 people, including nineteen children, when he attacked a federal
office building in Oklahoma City with a massive truck bomb.
Between Pearl Harbor and 9/11, the bombing was the deadliest
deliberate attack on the United States. However, as the New York Times
notes, “it has not been similarly woven into the tapestry of American
history.”
McVeigh joined the Army at the age of twenty, earning a
Bronze Star as a gunnery sergeant in the Persian Gulf War. However, he washed
out of an audition for the Special Forces. Two sieges by US law enforcement
agents against suspected armed compounds (Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and Waco,
Texas, in 1993) enraged him.
So he plotted revenge.
On the second anniversary of Waco, he constructed a seven-thousand-pound
bomb using fertilizer in a Ryder truck, parked it outside the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, lit the fuse, then drove away.
A horrific explosion ripped through the city at 9:02 a.m.
McVeigh never expressed remorse, calling the children who
died “collateral damage.” He was executed three months before the
attacks of September 11, 2001.
Most anniversary events planned for yesterday were canceled
because of the coronavirus pandemic. The annual reading of the names was
prerecorded, along with brief remarks from political figures.
Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, a Baptist seminary graduate and former vocational minister, said on the memorial recording: “How do we identify things like anti-Semitism, racism, or hatred for government? We as a culture need to recognize those moments and not just allow them to lie dormant, but to engage.”
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