THE LOSER:
For many years, McVeigh’s struggled to find a place that would accept
him. When his associate college, Bryant and Stratton, forced him to
add liberal arts to his computer studies, he dropped out to return to
his job at Burger King. When neighbors complained about noise from
his frequent target practice in his father’s back yard, he bought a
plot of land in rural southwest New York so he could have some peace.
His comfort with the structure and rules of Army life morphed into
betrayal when he discovered the politics that governed so much of
armed service. His sense of place in rural Arizona, which stoked his
survivalist interests, was scuttled by his marijuana- and
methamphetamine-laced respite with Army buddy and eventual accomplice
Michael Fortier.
In the end he determined, as he told his biographers from his
prison cell, “This world just doesn’t hold anything for me.”
A GROWING HATRED
McVeigh was born in the town of Pendleton, N.Y.; his mother
Mickey and father Bill tried to provide a stable middle-class home
for their three children. But the marriage soured and McVeigh’s
adolescence was marked by the strife of his parents’ divorce.
His hatred of bullies from childhood on became a rage as he
witnessed the overwhelming force of allied troops during his Gulf War
service and wondered why the United States seemed so unconcerned with
the impact of the war on regular people. That same revulsion of
abuses of power sparked his disgust with the assault on separatist
Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the 1993 Waco siege on David
Koresh and the Branch Davidians — and made him feel retaliation was
his responsibility.
“Once you bloody the bully’s nose, and he knows he’s going to
be punched again, he’s not coming back around,” he told his
biographers.
June 11 — NBC anchor Tom Brokaw reflects on McVeigh’s execution and
says there is still so much we don’t know about the Oklahoma City
bomber.
Yet he couldn’t see, even at the end, how his treacherous
act was the ultimate in bullying. Even Randy Weaver, who lost his
wife and child in Ruby Ridge and told the Washington Post McVeigh was
just “trying to make a point,” distanced himself from the
heartlessness of the Oklahoma City blast. In a nasty jag of irony,
McVeigh’s intended message about the government was all but lost amid
the sheer horror of what he wrought.
A HARDENED WORLD VIEW
As he said he would, McVeigh ended up offering as a final
statement Henley’s “Invictus.” Like Henley, McVeigh was a staunch
agnostic. But Henley wrote the poem as a triumph over his
tuberculosis and personal anguish.
Even as he admitted regret in letters just a day before his
death, he maintained the hard thoughts he so often associated with
the military he loved, then came to loathe. “It’s understood going in
what the human toll will be,” he wrote.
He insisted he had no fear of death. He said he
would “improvise, adapt and overcome” if it turned out that there was
an afterlife.
“If I am going to hell,” he wrote, “I’m gonna have a lot of
company.”
NBC News’ Pete Williams and John Baiata; and The Associated
Press contributed to this report.
-- Anonymous, June 11, 2001