TERROR IN OKLAHOMA CITY : PETER H. KING : Black Smoke and White Lies for Children Not Shrouded in Darkness

Let me start with something small that happened two Saturdays ago, not here, but in San Francisco. The car was filled with little kids. We were bound for the San Francisco Zoo, to pet baby goats and hear lions roar. On the Bay Bridge, traffic began to stall. Black smoke rose up ahead. Firetrucks, sirens blowing, hurried past.

“What is it?” my 6-year-old asked, eyes wide, afraid.

“Probably just a car fire,” I answered. This explanation did not satisfy. There followed many questions about how exactly a car could catch on fire, and what would happen to the occupants when it did, how would they get home, and on and on. Little minds were churning.

“Maybe,” my daughter volunteered, “a bad guy did it. Maybe he just ran up and flicked matches through the window at the people.”

No, I said. The world just doesn’t work that way. It is not full of bad guys looking to hurt people. That’s just television. Of course, I was lying.

*

Now we are in a hospital, half a nation away. It is late Friday afternoon. A nice young pediatrician sits in a conference room. At his feet is parked the big red wagon, a toy to amuse sick kids while their parents consult with doctors. The doctor is only 26 years old, fresh out of UCLA. The doctor loves working with sick children. The doctor also is tired, very tired.

He was on duty at Children’s Hospital on Wednesday when the building shook. As a native of Huntington Beach, Dr. Steve Buckingham’s first thought was: earthquake. Then someone came running in and announced the federal building had been bombed. The doctors and nurses were stunned, but they also figured there would be no need for pediatric specialists. Then someone else came running: “There’s a day-care center in that building. It’s right where the bomb went off.”

And so they went to work, and are working still, trying to patch together the few little children who somehow survived the initial blast. Buckingham’s attention has been focused on a single patient in the Intensive Care Unit, a 4-year-old. The doctor sighs. “Four-year-olds,” he says, “should be out riding tricycles and watching ‘Barney’ and eating Froot Loops at home. They should not be involved in. . . ,” he pauses, searching for a word, deciding he can’t find it. “They should not be involved in this thing .”

He is asked what he has told the children about what happened to them. He winces. “None have woken up yet,” he says. He does not know what is left of their brains, of their hearing, or of even their lives. “And so I haven’t had to explain to any child yet why someone would do something like this. I’m not sure I can explain it to myself.”

*

More than the appalling body count, more than the dramatic hunt for culprits, more than the unlikely heartland setting, it is the willy-nilly slaughter of children that makes the Oklahoma bombing seem so especially evil. The horror adults are capable of inflicting on adults is old news. But these were toddlers, some still in diapers--”innocents,” an emergency room nurse told me, “who did nothing to deserve any of this.”

And we prefer, in our society, to pretend that we can at least protect the children. We buckle them into car seats, squeeze them into bicycle helmets, run FBI background checks on all prospective baby-sitters, hold hands, bolt doors, lock away the cleansers and sweets, and flick off the television at the first sign of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, nightly newscasts, NHL hockey or similar carnivals of violence. What new measures will be required now to the parent wishing to feel fully protective of a child? Bomb-sniffing dogs?

Also, sometimes we tell the children, as I did two weeks ago on the bridge, little tales meant to fudge the truth about this wonderful world into which they have been drafted. Some experts won’t embrace this approach, but somehow sitting the kids down for a chat about fanatics and car bombs and mangled preschoolers doesn’t seem quite right either.

Not far from the bomb site Friday, I stopped to talk with a young mother loading three kids into the car. “They haven’t asked about it,” she said quietly, as the youngsters jabbered away. “They saw a picture on television and said, ‘Look, a smoke bomb.’ I don’t know. I think I’ll just leave it at that for now, you know?” I knew.

Soon enough, they’ll find out.