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By Root 784 0

minutes later, an Oklahoma state trooper stopped McVeigh for driving without a licence plate. The trooper arrested him for that offence and for unlawful possession of a weapon. However, within days, McVeigh’s old army friend Terry Nichols was arrested, and both men were charged with the bombing. McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran with extreme right-wing views, was seriously screwed up about the federal government and was a member of a militia movement. I saw him interviewed after his trial and he expressed no regret about what he’d done. He’d timed the bomb to coincide with the second anniversary of the Waco siege, in which seventy-six people (including twenty-four Brits) died when the headquarters of the Branch Davidians, a weird Protestant sect, went up in flames. That tragedy, and an earlier incident at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which the FBI had besieged the home of another religious fanatic called Randy Weaver, had motivated McVeigh to seek revenge. He was executed by lethal injection on 11 June 2001. Nichols was sentenced to life in prison for acting as his accomplice.

The entire front was blown off the Alfred Murrah Building, which contained the offices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms – the body that had conducted the siege in Waco – as well as various other government departments, such as Social Security. In the aftermath of the attack, it was decided to demolish the building and replace it with a memorial to the victims. It’s now a simple, quiet and understated place, which makes it all the more moving. At its centre is a large reflection pool of shallow water on black granite, at either end of which are two large bronze gates. It’s quite beautiful. I spotted a bird standing in the pool and the water hardly came up to its ankles. At one end, the eastern gate is inscribed with ‘9:01’, which represents innocence – the last moments of peace before the bomb exploded a minute later. At the other end, the western gate is inscribed with ‘9:03’ to symbolise the first moments of recovery after the outrage.

It really is an extraordinarily powerful memorial to the 168 victims. The authorities encourage children to dip their hands in the water and then pat one of the gates to leave a handprint on the bronze. Eventually, the handprint will turn green and last for ever. I think that’s a very touching idea.

To the side of the reflecting pool, 168 empty chairs, hand-crafted in bronze, glass and stone, represent each of the dead. The nine rows of chairs, each inscribed with the name of a victim, represent the nine floors of the building. They’re laid out to correspond with where the victims were found, with the greatest number clustered in the most heavily damaged portion of the building. Nineteen of the chairs are smaller than the rest, representing the children who were killed in the bombing. Three unborn children also died; they are listed on their mothers’ chairs, beneath their mothers’ names. At the western edge of the field of chairs is a small column of five chairs representing the five people who died outside the building. At night, each chair’s glass name plate illuminates the darkness. This creates a kind of life for the victims that will never go out. Like the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, the abstract nature of the memorial seems to attract people, maybe because it allows them to distance themselves from the physical image of those who suffered and to concentrate instead on their memory.

I had seen pictures of the Oklahoma City National Memorial in a magazine and had been terribly moved by it, but of course it’s even more moving when you’re standing within it. I was struck by how quiet all the other visitors were. It was a very hushed place. Everyone lowered their voice when they had a conversation and took the time to take it all in. When they first opened it, there was a railing along the side of the field of empty chairs, but people were constantly stepping over it in order to place things on the chairs, in the same way as they leave messages and flowers at the Vietnam Memorial and on countless war memorials