Robert the Westie. My life. By me.

13. Of bombings, funerals and a bad year for Elton John.

          So what does the date, April 19, 1995 mean to you? Well, there’s a big clue in the last chapter. Are you with me yet? Yes, you got it! It’s the second anniversary of the deadly fire that ended the Waco siege, an event that had fuelled the imaginations of conspiracy therorists of the far right wing in America, just as much as it had appalled citizens in general.

            This thought did not immediately occur to government agencies in the immediate aftermath of the huge fertilizer bomb that exploded on that Spring day in Oklahoma City. The first reaction to the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building was the organisation of a massive hunt for Islamic terrorists. Three Arabs were reported seen fleeing the scene. Cable news shows, fed by tips from a former CIA official, pointed the finger at Iraqi despot, Saddam Hussein.

            Enter on the scene an inquisitive Oklahoma state trooper named Charlie Hanger. With the FBI preoccupied with its search for suspicious Arabs, Hanger found himself drawn to a beat-up Mercury Marquis with no license plates cruising down a motorway towards Kansas. He pulled the car over to the hard shoulder. The driver, a youthful Army veteran with a Glock pistol, chose, for no apparent reason, to emerge from the car. Hanger ordered him to lift his hands and pointed his gun.

            "My weapon is loaded," the driver, Timothy McVeigh, told Hanger.

            "So is mine," replied the trooper.

            The rest is history. I’ll summarise for you in case it is history that has somehow passed you buy. Yes, as you may have noticed, I am more than a little obsessed with terrorism and the mindset of the American nation. Blame Locherbie, if you like, but blame too Steve, for whom America remained a fascinating enigma, in his view the world’s greatest force both for good and for evil. I can even report that his opinions continue to receive daily reinforcement from current events. I’ll get to a really recent one very shortly.

            Anyway, at the time, Steve saw the Oklahoma event as yet another moment of the Great American Paranoia that I alluded to earlier. The FBI obviously had many legitimate reasons to be worried about Islamic extremists in the mid-1990's. But they were apparently ignoring the equally menacing threat represented by a resurgent movement of loosely related extremist hate groups, Christian fanatics, and gun-toting militia members, all convinced that American liberty was in grave peril with Waco as the key plank in their belief system.

            Timothy McVeigh was a product of this extremist subculture, a brooding loner who, as an army gunner, had enjoyed mowing down surrendering Iraqi soldiers during Operation Desert Storm. On leaving the military, McVeigh had joined the gun-show circuit, aiming to earn money from the sales of blast simulators, smoke grenades, and copies of his favorite book, The Turner Diaries. This virulent tome chronicled the fictional efforts of a group of valiant race warriors who blow up the FBI building in Washington, D.C.  It was on the gun-show circuit that McVeigh went into business with Terry Nichols, his convicted co-conspirator, who ultimately helped him assemble the bomb that destroyed the Murrah building.

            This explosion remained the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers. Here come the dark statistics. The blast killed one hundred and sixty-eight people, including nineteen children under the age of six. Almost seven hundred people sustained injuries.The bomb damaged three hundred and twenty-four buildings within a sixteen-block radius, total damage estimates exceeding six hundred and fifty million dollars.

            The bombers were tried and finally convicted in 1997. McVeigh was executed by a lethal injection on June 11, 2001. Nichols received a sentence of life imprisonment.