One of ours

by Richard A. Serrano

Abandoned by his mother as a child, betrayed by the army, enraged at the government's tactics at Waco, Timothy McVeigh undertook to avenge what the far right sees as the undoing of America. While the militias and fanatics ranted, McVeigh alone decided to act. He believed he was starting a revolution, but what he did was galvanize a nation against the very hatred he espoused. On April 19, 1995, terrorism struck the heartland of America: A cataclysmic explosion destroyed the Oklahoma City federal building, took the lives of 168 people, and injured more than 500 others. It was not the work of a secret foreign cabal or a maniacal suicide bomber. Instead, death drove a rented truck, and behind the wheel was a young white American male with the barest of knowledge at his fingertips--a driver's license to rent a van and a recipe for mixing farm fertilizer and fuel oil to make a bomb. Timothy McVeigh--son of the working class, an army hero, the kid next door--was about to become the worst mass