A Grim Study In Horrifying Reality:
My Interpretation Of "American Terrorist"
Mama, just killed a man.
Put a gun up to his head,
Pulled my trigger, now he's dead.
Mama, life had just begun,
But now I've gone and thrown it all away.
----Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody."
I have just finished reading "American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing" by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck. The world as I knew it doesn't exist anymore. Nothing I ever valued or cherished seems worthwhile and as I write this, I have to make repeated trips to the bathroom, where I am violently ill. I knew, during the months that I saved money to purchase this book, that it would not be an easy read. I wondered if it would change the way I felt about Tim McVeigh and the death penalty. I worried that I would join the millions all over the world who despised the man and who figured that he deserved to be put to death for his crime. In short, I feared losing my ability to look at myself in the mirror and claim to be a civilized member of the human race.
Those of you reading this page are most likely surprised that this book would have such a devastating effect on me, since I have been one of Tim McVeigh's staunchest supporters. You may be eager to hear that I now possess a newfound, vigorous appreciation for capital punishment, as well as a wish for it to remain an integral part of the American way of justice.
You would be wrong. Yes, I was beyond any normal sense of grief when I read about the little children, clinging to their mothers as they were left at the day-care centre for the last time. I stared, horrified, at the before and after photos of the Alfred P. Murrah building and grew sickened. Yes, many, many people suffered that morning and would continue to do so for years to come. They died for nothing and I must face that fact, even as I still maintain that Timothy McVeigh was not fully and completely responsible for those deaths. Was he an evil man, the second coming of the Antichrist? Was he the "All-American Monster" that the unauthorized biography attests? Did his death barely come even close to avenging the 168 who died that day in Oklahoma City?
I have to answer with an emphatic "No!" to all of those hypothetical questions. As I give you my review of "American Terrorist," I will tell you precisely why the world must not carry on the ravenous hatred for a man who is no longer a threat to anyone, a man who paid the ultimate price and, with his execution, managed to succeed in his six-year-long wish for a "state-assisted suicide." What we must face, by reading the book, is that Timothy James McVeigh killed himself and, unfortunately and tragically, took 168 people with him. He may just as well have driven that Ryder truck right into the side of the Murrah building. He resembled the desperate man, angrily brandishing a gun and taking out his entire family before killing himself with the same weapon. McVeigh joins the ranks of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the high school kids responsible for the thirteen deaths at Columbine, as well as their own. All of these cases are terrible tragedies. They appear senseless and unprovoked and, most of all, they elicit nothing but rage and desperation in the people left behind after such carnages. With this in mind, I begin my interpretation of this volatile volume. Some of you may agree with my observations and explanations and many will not. Still, for the sake of the 169 people who died in the blast, the last of whom didn't succumb until this past June 11th, 2001, I urge you to read it.
From a purely literary standpoint, "American Terrorist" is not particularly well-written. The story is fraught with cliches, words are repeated twice in one sentence and the entire body of work virtually screams "seat-of-the-pants journalism." However, that is, for all intents and purposes, a minor detail. What the authors lacked in structure and syntax, they more than made up for with the tragic tale itself. At times harrowing and always engrossing, it was a book that, read over a period of five horrific days, that would be forever burned into my psyche. As I type this, it is late at night and I am unable, once again, to sleep. But, as upsetting as this exercise was for me, I knew that I owed it to everyone involved to learn the unabashed truth of what happened, why it happened and how such a kind, quiet and sensitive boy and young man pulled off the worst case of mass murder in the history of the United States. The authors have called their book "a tale that is uniquely American" and that smacks of angry criticism in a nation who, for the most part, embraces the "unalienable right to bear arms" and sends its young people off to wars into which the government has no business butting. Many people, American and otherwise, believe this and have since the Korean conflict and the devastating Vietnam war.
Where will it end? Perhaps Armageddon will become a chilling reality in my lifetime. Are we nearing the "point of no return," the end of the world as we know it? This book, with its stark, nakedly candid restructuring of a crime to end all crimes, pushes us ever closer to that cataclysmic edge of certain self-destruction. This is not just Timothy McVeigh's story---it is America's story. God help the USA.
My initial reaction to this book, after I had slowly and carefully read it, often re-reading sentences and paragraphs that either touched me, moved me or puzzled me. I did not, as my friends predicted, end up hating Tim McVeigh; rather, my heart broke for this once idealistic and gentle boy who was verbally and psychologically pummelled, first by insensitive classmates, then by drill sergeants after he eagerly joined after high school. What he envisioned as both a great adventure and an excellent way to both see the world and leave his sheltered life behind, quickly turned to fear and a certain amount of revulsion, as he and his cohorts were given such violent-tinged slogans like, "Kill them all! Kill! Kill!! Kill!!!" Was this what the miitary was all about? Turning oneself into a murdering machine, ready at all times and at all costs to do in the enemy before he did them in. I gathered, from the book, that McVeigh wasn't anticipating ever going to war or having to actually kill someone---his sights were set on joining the elite Green Berets. I am now convinced that, had their been no Gulf war and if McVeigh could have been successful in achieving his lofty goal, then Oklahoma City would never have happened. This was the first in a series of events that primed Tim McVeigh for mass anhilation. More volatile ingredients were to follow as Tim gradually learned the sad truth that life held little or nothing for him, save the eventual unleashing of the killing beast, a beast that had been simmering away at a slow boil ever since McVeigh suffered the burning humiliation of letting his father down on the Little League baseball team.
