APRIL 19, 1995

Assistant Fire Chief Jon Hansen was one of the first to arrive. The center of downtown Oklahoma City was like a scene from Dresden, like a page from a Berlin Diary. Thick black smoke mushroomed skyward. Flames filled the corner of Fifth and Harvey streets. Cars next to city parking meters exploded. The bleeding and the dying lay on the scorched pavement. In some cases, people literally held their torn faces and broken heads together as they waited for help from paramedics. -- Hansen, a career firefighter helping to direct the rescue effort, stepped up to a small knot of television cameras and radio mikes. Along with the shattered glass and chunks of concrete, the horror of what had happened hung in the air. The front facade of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building had been ripped off, the top stories crashing down nine flights to the ground. Everyone was suddenly aware that there was a children’s day-care center on the second floor. “This isn’t supposed to happen in the heartland,” said a trembling Hansen. -- The total killed in the tick of a clock at 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, was 168 people, including a nurse, Rebecca Anderson, who, trying to save others, was struck in the head by a piece of falling concrete. For four days she lingered near death; when she was gone, her heart and kidneys went immediately to others awaiting transplants. -- The oldest victim was 73; the youngest, 4 months. -- Florence Rogers was holding a staff meeting in her federal credit union office when the third floor gave way and the eight employees sitting around her desk dropped into the pit below. She was the chief executive officer of the credit union; in all, she lost 18 staff members. -- For days, weeks even, snapshot profiles of those who had died broke the heart of the nation. They were normal lives going through their daily routines, and all now were gone forever.

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* Marine Corps Sgt. Benjamin L. Davis, 29, eagerly awaiting word of his acceptance to officers’ training school. He would have heard the news had his captain not gotten a busy signal when he called the Murrah Building’s recruiting station just before 9 a.m.

* Alan Whicher, 40, a Secret Service assistant special agent assigned to the building’s field office. Known as a Type A personality, he was a devout Catholic who gave up drinking beer every Lent. Twenty minutes before the blast, he’d phoned his wife, Pam, and wished her well on a Bible-study speech she was to give that morning.

* Brenda Daniels, 42, a day-care center teacher whom the children called their “big grandma.” She loved to teach them to sing the blues, and when she was buried, mourners placed in her casket cassettes of her beloved B. B. King and Bobby “Blue” Bland.

Indeed, 19 of the dead were children from that nursery. They became the lost angels, the city’s innocents. Little Jaci Rae Coyne, for instance, was just 14 months old. Her father, Scott Coyne, remembered her as his baby girl who always laughed and giggled, who liked lights and tabletops and loved to eat green beans out of the can. “She really never had a bad day,” he said.

But the most searing image of that morning was the photograph of firefighter Chris Fields, cradling the lifeless body of Baylee Almon, age 1 year and 1 day.

More than 500 were injured, some suffering severe wounds, losing a limb or an eye or coming away from the blast with their faces and arms so scarred that their lives would be far from normal ever again. Others, lucky to scrape by with a cut or a bruise, would grapple with the psychological trauma that rises up when they hear a car backfire or awaken sweating in their blankets. The pain for so many for so long would be unbearable. Paul Heath, a psychologist in the Veterans Affairs office, would spend months picking tiny bits of paint and glass out of his hair and skin.

And then there were the orphans. Ten children lost both parents that morning. Others, the children of split families, endured the death of the only parent in their lives. A total of more than 150 young people under the age of 23 lost a parent in the bombing.

In one instant the people of Oklahoma City became a community wrenched by grief. Nearly 40% of local residents knew at least one person killed or injured in the blast. Everyone else surely saw or heard it, and no one truly escaped its impact. The force of the explosion was so powerful that people living in outlying towns like Guthrie and Chandler mistook the noise for a sonic boom. Some were confused about why lightning had just struck on a clear, sunny day. In a meeting across the street in the state Water Resources Board building, where two people were killed, some thought a gas main had erupted.

Authorities would estimate that the first wave of super-hot gas flashed at a speed of at least 8,000 feet per second. Those standing out front were slammed with a force equal to 37 tons. One man, they said, who was taking a cigarette break outdoors, was vaporized into the wall. In a half-second, the gas dissipated and the air was whipped by an equally violent vacuum. Oxygen was sucked out of the air. The ground shook as if it were being tossed by a full-scale earthquake. The north face of the building buckled, the structure rose up and the beams swung back and forth. The front of the building then fell into itself, with huge sections of the concrete and mortar thundering down into a 30-foot-wide, 81/2-foot-deep crater.

From the outset, officials insisted that they were conducting a rescue effort, not a recovery of bodies, and they promised not to falter in their search for anyone still possibly trapped under the rubble. It was good, stubborn Midwestern determination. But the odds were far too high. Because after the initial search-and-rescue attempts, no one would come out alive. By the evening of the first day, all of the survivors had been found.

But the rescue workers could not know that. So they worked on. Feverishly. Aided by rescue groups from around the country, by cranes overhead, by helicopter spotters in the air and giant spotlights at night, they moved heaven and the shaken earth in a search for life. Into the second day and night, and the third, too, they continued, carefully removing what pieces they could, carrying on when only bodies--and pieces of bodies--were coming out of the bomb debris. On the fourth day, Saturday, it rained. By the afternoon, it poured. Still they kept at it. On Sunday, when the president of the United States and other government figures from Washington and around the nation, and religious leaders, too, assembled for a prayer service at the State Fairgrounds Arena, a mile from the site of the wreckage--even then, the rescue workers pushed on.

The arena was full. Victims and their families wore ribbons. Parents cradled teddy bears for their lost children.

“We pledge to do all we can to help you heal the injured,” said President Clinton, “to rebuild this city and to bring to justice those who did this evil.”

“That blast was like a violent explosion ripping at the heart of America,” said the Rev. Billy Graham, “Long after the rubble is cleared and the rebuilding begins, the scars of this senseless and evil outrage will remain.”

Those in the arena joined hands and sang “God Bless America.” But at Fifth and Harvey streets, the jackhammers and the cranes played their own mournful music as the men and women of Oklahoma City continued to dig through the wreckage. That day, the official death count stood only--if only is the word--at 72.

Hospitals were overcrowded. Blood banks were lined with volunteers. At a downtown church turned into a family notification center, relatives packed in to learn the grimmest of news. Lists were posted; families waited to be called. Throughout the city, funeral directors were planning multiple services. The backs of gravediggers were straining. Still, the rescue work went on.

Clinton and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno dedicated all of the government’s resources to make arrests. They pledged “swift” justice, they promised “severe” punishment. The death penalty, they said, awaits those responsible.

Across the country, Americans assumed the blast was the work of foreign terrorists. A Jordanian American from Oklahoma City, en route to visit relatives that day in the Middle East, was stopped, searched and detained. Arab immigrants living in Oklahoma and Texas were rounded up for questioning, and some were deported. The nation’s newspapers decried foreign despots and warned that a world of car bombings, hijackings and international terrorism had finally descended upon America’s shores. Before the week was out, though, the FBI released composite sketches and all-points-bulletins for two white American males.

Later, even as arrests were made and the first court hearings were held at an El Reno, Okla., prison cafeteria made to resemble a courtroom, the hard hats and demolition experts continued to probe through the rubble. Local police stripped black bands across their badges in memory of the eight federal law-enforcement agents killed in the explosion. One patrolman took a bar of soap and scrawled a message on the rear window of his police car. “We will never forget,” it said. A new billboard went up, “God Bless Oklahoma City.” A chain-link fence around the perimeter of the site was covered in flowers and ribbons and teddy bears and homemade signs. “Pins, $5,” advertised one cardboard sign. “Proceeds to YMCA kids.” In a newspaper cartoon, two rescue workers stood in front of the blown-out building. “How many hurt?” asked one. “260 million Americans,” said the other.

The rescue ended a little more than a month after it was begun. On the morning of May 23, 150 pounds of dynamite, placed at strategic spots around the building shell, imploded the structure. Now the shovels were put away; the men and women who had worked so hard to save the lives of their neighbors went home. But even then, their work truly was not finished. Still buried in the 30-foot heap of metal and concrete were parts of human remains never recovered. Safety concerns, and exhaustion, had put an end to the all-day, all-night madness of digging for a miracle.

With the building leveled, the American public for the first time was allowed to view up close what horror had visited this place. They saw a flattened ground, and next to it a brick wall. Painted on that wall in dark, red, angry words was a warning from members of Rescue Team 5. It said:

“4-19-95.

“We Search for the Truth.

“We Seek Justice.

“The Courts Require It.

“The Victims Cry for It.

“And GOD Demands It!”