American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing

Clint Hartung

American Terrorist:
Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing
(Regan Books, HarperCollins, 2002)

Timothy James McVeigh, whose parents met in a Catholic bowling league was baptized in April, 1968, and confirmed at Good Shepherd Catholic church in Lockport, N.Y on May 20, 1985. On April 11, 2001, he was anointed with the last rites and then executed by the government of the United States.
In between, he murdered 168 fellow humans in the most heinous terrorist attack on American soil.
What produced such a fellow mortal?
Buffalo news reporters Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck set out to find out. Their efforts resulted in a fascinating book American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing.
Michel and Herbeck, with unparalleled access to McVeigh's Lockport, N.Y. neighbourhood have produced an excellent reportorial job on the subject. They crawl all over him. We learn of his family trips to Toronto, (35), his computer skills and his deep anger at his mother ("a whore and a bitch") for the family break up.
McVeigh at graduation is a classic, unmotivated floater, laid-back and directionless. His ambition: "Take it as it comes, buy a Lamborghini. California girls." He drifts, drops out of college ("I know more than the teachers") and, like a lot of dropouts with some ability, is intellectually slovenly and unbalanced in his reading.
An affable young man, he finds himself hooked on the gun culture and survivalist literature. He falls in love with his new bible, The Turner Diaries, a racist novel which he had discovered in the pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine.
This bizarre underground classic culminates in a spectacular orgy of violence. The besieged protagonist, driven to fury against a state intent on the usurpation of individual rights, wreaks havoc on FBI headquarters in Washington. His method of revenge? A truck bomb.
The book is full of incremental evidence that McVeigh is the shadow side of the All-American boy. The authors however never seem to connect the dots, never allow themselves to draw Rap Brown's familiar conclusion that "Violence is as American as apple pie."
McVeigh spent thousands of dollars on guns, became a prolific marksman and with a series of dead-end jobs, discovered the perfect match for his obsession with guns and survivalism: the army: "McVeigh's impressions of military life had been formed by the action movies of the Reagan era, First Blood, the first of Sylvester Stallone's Rambo adventures and Missing in Action, with Chuck Norris as the hero rescuing prisoners of war. These were men's men in McVeigh's eyes.
Soon, young Timmy was chanting the Marine recruit classic "Blood makes the grass grow! Kill! Kill! Kill!" He was now at home in a structured universe which gave his life purpose.
Demobbed from the army, McVeigh found himself at square one again. With a chest full of medals but with no education, he impressed few employers during the economic downturn of the early 90's. Caught in the vortex of a new globalized world where high-paying industrial jobs were flying south, Timothy McVeigh's life began to implode. From being a military top-gun to a new low as a "rent-a-cop", he began to embrace the literature of alienation, white supremacy and survivalism.
It was 1992 and McVeigh, frustrated and fuelled by a growing anti-government paranoia, became obsessed with saga of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.
Only a serious loss of life would get government attention. Did not the U.S. military use the same logic about Hiroshima? Just like the heroic Jedi knight Luke Skywalker, whom McVeigh loved, had to take out innocents when the Death Star exploded, "Collateral damage" would be a necessary by-product.
On April 19, 1995, the anniversary of the Waco disaster, McVeigh brought down the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. Reportedly, 185 people were killed.
To Timothy McVeigh it was the moral equivalent of the U.S. government blasting government buildings in Serbia or Iraq. His logic, his twisted rationalization for his murderous activity was familiar government talk he had heard in Japan, Panama, Iraq and Serbia. The only difference was that this time, the victims were Americans. The violent chickens had come to roost.
Clint Hartung writes from Winnipeg.
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