I don't rightly remember what I was doing when I heard about the
Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. I was probably on my way to work. But the bombing, which for the next six years was called "the worst terrorist attack on American soil," became part of my life over the next few weeks. Now, 15 years after the attack, memories come back in a flood.
It's one of those things that you can't forget unless you're lobotomized. Nor is it something that should be forgotten. Maybe if we Americans had a lot more memory and a lot less wishful thinking, we'd be much better off as a nation. But I digress.
I do remember a rather strange incident a few weeks earlier. A bomb went off in a vacant lot near where I worked, and being the dutiful reporter I went to check it out. As far as the cops were concerned, evidence was pretty thin. It didn't merit a lot of attention at the time, and the story didn't get more than a paragraph or two. I could have ended the story with that horrendous news cliche, "the investigation is continuing, police said," and I wouldn't have been far off.
Oh. A little footnote about work. I was editor/reporter/photographer/layout man for The Mohave County Standard, based in Kingman, Arizona.
As news of the Oklahoma City bombing became public and a suspect was named, I knew I was going to live with this story for a while. The prime suspect, Timothy McVeagh, lived in Kingman.
There was more. He worked at a hardware store in town with another Kingman resident named Michael Fortier. He kept a mailbox at a local mail-drop business. He rented his movies at a local video store. He was all over Kingman, and soon the FBI was also all over Kingman. For a while the FBI worked with the theory that the vacant-lot explosion was a test run; if I remember straight, evidence suggested fuel oil and fertilizer was the explosive agent -- same stuff that was used to destroy the Alfred Murrah Federal Building.
I don't know if Mac McCarty is still around. Mac was in his early 70s at the time, and I knew him quite well. Mac was the one who reminded me it is grammatically incorrect to refer to someone as an ex-Marine. Mac always carried a gun -- in Arizona you could carry one openly back then -- and he was upset that he had to check his weapon in at the door whenever he went into the county courthouse. He'd staged one-man protests defending his Second Amendment rights in front of the courthouse, with a sign in his hands and his weapon on his hip.
Mac had a little side business when Arizona revamped its weapon-carry laws. To legally carry a concealed weapon, you needed to take a class in handgun safety, and Mac was accredited as a teacher. For a time, he had two students in one of his classes -- Timothy McVeagh and Michael Fortier.
Mac wasn't sure why these two were in his class. They both knew their way around a firearm, he told me. The closest he could figure was that maybe they were involved in militia activity and they were looking for interested people. Mac said he would have been interested in hanging out with the two if that was the case.
While the FBI staked out Kingman, the national and international media also swarmed my town. And many of the foreign reporters -- from the Sydney Herald in Australia, and the L.A. Times in California -- thought the town was a real hoot. Militia types everywhere, they reported. Strong anti-government sentiment all around. Most people lived in mobile home parks, flush toilets had just arrived, and FAX machines had yet to be installed. Or something.
It's true the folks in northern Arizona are a little different from the rest of the country. We Southwesterners (and I freely use "we" because I lived out there for a long time and these roots still show) don't usually recognize foreign powers, and Washington, DC is about as foreign as it gets. We tend to take matters in our own hands and go to the government later, if we think
about it.
But in the weeks and months after that bombing that killed 168 people -- many of them children at a day-care center -- my memories come out in chunks:
- Spending an evening on a press stakeout in front of Michael Fortier's house while the FBI executed a search warrant. His was easy to pick out; it had the Gadsden flag ("Don't Tread On Me") flying proudly in the front yard. I talked my way into his next-door neighbor's living room for a chat; she was in her 80s and rather thrilled at all this drama in her neighborhood. The FBI sprung for about a dozen large pizzas for the press, so they got on my good side for at least a few minutes.
- Stopping in at a military surplus place, Archie's Bunker, to pick up a gas mask bag -- which is great for carrying cameras and film. The place was across the street from the National Guard Armory, which served as the FBI staging area. I know they were monitoring the doors of Archie's Bunker; I'm probably on some federal film archive somewhere.
- Talking to a man who was bicycling from Kingman to Oklahoma City. He wanted to raise funds and awareness, and to let the people in Oklahoma City know we're not all bad in Arizona.
- Meeting a delegation of visitors from Somalia. I'm not sure why they visited Kingman, but they sure had some preconceived notions about the place. In broken English, one told me he'd heard about "these people who did bad things and now they're ..." That's when, searching for the right word, he held his wrists together in that international gesture. In handcuffs.
- Hearing from a magazine called Media Bypass, an alternative publication that was self-described as somewhere to the right of Attila The Hun. They were particularly interested in my editorials, where I suggested the bombing took a lot more financing and organization than what two clowns making minimum wage at a hardware store could muster.
I'm no conspiracy nut, but I still think McVeagh took a lot of secrets with him when he was executed; secrets that the federal government wanted to stay hidden. But then, I don't recognize foreign powers.
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