Ten Minutes on Hallowed Ground
Erasing thirty years in Oklahoma City
I was in my final year at the University of Missouri, which meant I spent the morning interning at the educational video production studio on campus. Spring was springing, and despite the early hour, I was feeling good. I was working with my favorite video producer, Claudia. I always remember her last name as Schiffer, which is wrong. Claudia Schiffer was a supermodel. This Claudia, who also had a German last name that began with Sch, was an average-looking northern Illinois woman, not much older than me, who was obsessed with Pearl Jam.
That morning her mood was a good as mine. We were supposed to be striking a set—a kitchen decorated with Holstein cows that we’d built for a library science program. It was a good day for destruction. Screaming along with Pearl Jam’s “Vitalogy” album, we demolished the cow kitchen with ample mosh breaks.
After an hour or so, while flipping my head up to its normal upright position after having a moment with “Not for You,” something on the muted studio monitor tuned to CNN caught my eye. A bombed-out building, probably in Bosnia or Somalia.
But then I read the caption: Oklahoma City. Maybe a tornado, since it was April.
When we learned that it wasn’t a tornado, but a bomb, we turned the music off, stopped tearing down cows, and watched in silence as the news anchors began to piece together what was happening. Someone had driven a box truck full of fertilizer and racing fuel into the garage under the daycare of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, lit a fuse, and left it to explode.
That night, with one of my 2,908 free AOL accounts, I did something I had never done: I shared a tragedy online in real time with strangers around the country.
By the time I started going to Oklahoma regularly, 17 years later, the right-wing terrorist bombing, the worst act of terror committed on American soil by an American, was barely a blip on my radar. It was so long ago, overshadowed by 9/11. Small potatoes, losing 168 people compared to the 3,000-ish lost on 9/11, which was done by people from other countries. Surely they were the real enemies, right?
After spending the afternoon with Paul Juhasz, I had two stops before heading back to Tulsa for the night: the Wheeler Ferris Wheel, because I never see stuff with my last name (I didn’t expect Paul to sympathize), and the Oklahoma City National Memorial. Both had been on my mind since my brief visit two weeks prior.
I knew it would be an emotional visit. I’m an emotional person, and even though many of the details of that day have slipped away during the ensuing thirty years, I knew I’d likely shed a few tears.
I was wrong. I started sobbing when I drove past and got my first glimpse of the Gates of Time. Located at opposite ends of the site, one is marked 9:01, representing the last moment of peace. The other marked 9:03, the first minute of recovery. The truck bomb detonated at 9:02 that morning, a moment frozen between the gates.
In the early evening light, the bronze of the gates and the 168 empty bronze chairs glowed. I couldn’t bring myself to get very close, because I could not control my crying. Before I walked through the gate, I started sobbing, the kind that wracks the body and rattles the organs.
Most of my ten or so minutes at the memorial, I leaned against the hot bronze of the 9:03 gate so I wouldn’t collapse from this grief I had no idea I’d been carrying in me.
I got nowhere near the 19 small chairs. Paul had warned me that he didn’t expect them, and they hit hard. I’d said I knew about them and was prepared. I was not. Just seeing them in the distance was too much, and they left me breathless.
Miss Baylee Almon, the daughter of a 20-year-old single mom, celebrated her first birthday on April 18, 1995. The next day, the image of her final moments, with her bloodied head and her little limp legs draped over firefighter Chris Fields’ arms as he cradled her, became imprinted on my memory, as I’m sure it did many others. Maybe the primary thing most of us remember about that day. Her chair is located with those of the other people who died on the second floor.
Fields suffered for years with PTSD, depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation after April 19, 1995. Retired from the force, he’s dedicated his life to helping first responders and military personnel get assistance for the effects of the trauma sustained in their lines of work. He remains friends with Aren, Baylee’s mother, to this day.
The chair closest to me memorializes Rebecca Needham Anderson. Do you recognize her name? I didn’t. She wasn’t in the building during the explosion. Instead, the nurse and mom of four saw the bombing on TV from her Midwest City, Oklahoma home on her day off and rushed there to help. She was gravely injured by falling debris, passing away four days later.
She ran into the rubble to help. She didn’t have to. But she did.
We’re going to need a lot more Rebeccas in our country.
How many people have we lost in the United States—worldwide—in the name of hate in the last 30 years alone?
The perpetrators of this horrific act of terror hated the U.S. government. That’s why they targeted a federal building. Do you know what’s in such buildings? Your city’s Social Security office. IRS taxpayer assistance offices. U.S. immigration offices. Military recruiting offices. Federal government services that aren’t lining the pockets of the rich and powerful, but are designed to help U.S. citizens and residents who might otherwise get left behind.
This is going to happen again.
It’s already happening. In Los Angeles. Florida. Your small town. My city. Gaza. Maybe not in ways that shake the earth like a truck bomb, but in ways that will leave far too many more empty chairs in the name of right-wing extremist violence aimed at the weakest among us.
I could only handle about ten minutes at the memorial before I got concerned that my out-of-control crying would likely lead me to throwing up if I didn’t get it together. I left, but sat on a bench outside the 9:03 gate with a view of a statue on the corner across the street. “And Jesus Wept” stands on the corner by St. Joseph’s Old Cathedral. It’s a white statue of Jesus, right hand over his weeping face, with his back to where the Murrah Building stood.
The statue annoyed me. Not because I’m a spiritual heathen, but because of the unintended, I’m assuming, message of Christ turning his back where he was needed the most.
While I don’t identify as a Christian, I’m pretty good at only getting angry at the abusive factions of the religion. But this brought up every bit of agnostic-leaning-atheist rage in me. How can a just and loving god allow this to happen? Not only what happened on April 19, 1995, but what’s happening now. Where is the patron saint of kidnapped innocent prisoners being trafficked, beaten, and worse in the name of American greatness? Or the god of purposefully starving children? Who are the Christians fighting against the hate that Jesus preached against?
I know who they are, since I know plenty of Christians who are just as appalled, angry, and frightened as I am about the current state of humanity. My Granny Viv was the model Christ-like Christian who, in her dying days, spoke of how she just loved everyone she encountered. I know she’s not the only one, but damn if they’re not drowned out by people who are Christians in name only, in it for the perks, not to run into shattered buildings to save people.
From where I sat, feeling like I wanted to scream, “WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU?!!?” at the statue, I could see the message inscribed on the outside of both gates:
We come here to remember Those who were killed, those who survived and those who changed forever. May all who leave here know the impact of violence. May this memorial offer comfort, strength, peace, hope and serenity.
”May all who leave here know the impact of violence.”
The world is an astoundingly violent place right now. It was violent in 1995.
The message is not registering. No matter how many holy teardrops fall.