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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The third key element in McVeigh's life was his experience in the Army. McVeigh was a super soldier, the ultimate gung ho warrior, so dedicated that he bought an entire second set of gear which he kept spotless for inspection. "Any captain or lieutenant would gladly take a hundred Timothy McVeighs in their platoon," his roommate said. He was a deadly shot: a gunner on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, he scored 998 points out of a possible 1,000 using its mounted 25 mm cannon. Of the three guns mounted on the Bradley, the versatile cannon was McVeigh's favorite weapon. According to a fellow soldier, it "could really get your adrenaline pumping ... Each round is a little more powerful than a stick of dynamite, and you're able to fire ten of those in a second." For a man as obsessed with weapons as McVeigh, having his finger on the trigger of that cannon must have been the ultimate rush -- or the near-ultimate.
During the Gulf War, McVeigh was given the opportunity to try out the weapon on live targets. His lieutenant saw a dug-in enemy machine gun nest. "It was more than a mile away, but Rodriguez knew McVeigh could hit it. He gave the order to fire ... An Iraqi soldier popped up his head for a split second. From his position roughly 19 football fields away, McVeigh fired, hitting the soldier in the chest. The man's upper body exploded. 'His head just disappeared ... I saw everything above the shoulders just disappear, like in a red mist,' McVeigh recalls."
But McVeigh was not bloodthirsty. His commanding officer ordered him to keep firing, but McVeigh surreptitiously disobeyed, seeing only surrendering Iraqis: to placate the lieutenant, he fired a few more rounds harmlessly into the desert. McVeigh received a medal for his deed, but "the would-be Rambo was emotionally torn about what he had done ... as he reflected on his actions, McVeigh found that his first taste of killing left him angry and uncomfortable. The carnage and sadness he saw in the hundred-hour war left him with a feeling of sorrow for the Iraqis." It was too easy: McVeigh, who according to the authors always hated bullies, felt like one himself. In an extraordinary quote, he says, "'What made me feel bad was, number one, I didn't kill them in self-defense. When I took a human life, it taught me these were human beings, even though they speak a different language and have different customs. The truth is, we all have the same dreams, the same desires, the same care for our children and our family. These people were humans, like me, at the core.'"
It's not easy to know what to make of this quote, which sounds like it could have been uttered by "All Quiet on the Western Front" author Erich Maria Remarque. How could the man who claims to feel no remorse after killing 168 people, including many children, suffer such conscience pangs over the killing of two enemy soldiers? But his feelings become more comprehensible when we consider that McVeigh had grave doubts about the war in the first place, because Iraq was not directly threatening the U.S. and because he was serving as part of a U.N. force "that, he feared, was eventually planning to take over the world." In any case, if we assume his statement is sincere, it becomes more difficult to picture him as an unfeeling sociopath.
McVeigh himself commented that the Army taught him how to turn off his emotions and become a killing machine. Combined with his icy temperament and apocalyptic ideology, this programming proved deadly. There are certain people -- some of the military's best soldiers probably -- who should not receive military training.
The event that coincided with (although, according to the authors, did not cause) McVeigh's descent into fanaticism was his leaving the Army. The downhill slide began when he washed out of the Special Forces. McVeigh applied to become a Green Beret, but entered its grueling training camp too soon after the Gulf War. He wasn't in shape and was unable to keep up, and withdrew. When he returned to the regular Army, something didn't feel right. His "gung-ho attitude was slowly giving way to bitterness, anger and a desire for isolation." He became more and more obsessed with guns, had an ugly run-in with black GIs (he was convinced they got special treatment) and briefly joined the KKK, although he didn't renew his membership, turned off by their almost exclusively racist ideology. "McVeigh's enemies weren't blacks, they were the politicians who were pushing more gun laws."
Above all, he was increasingly bitter about his combat experience, the lies he had been told by the top brass, the entire mission. "Much more than his failure to make Special Forces, his war experience had soured him on the military. The more he thought about it, the worse he felt about the killing he had done for the American government. He no longer felt comfortable serving a government that, in his opinion, pushed the values of political correctness at the expense of individual rights. McVeigh felt he could no longer stomach being part of a government that fought so hard against the sacred Second Amendment rights of gun owners. He no longer wanted to work for a government he was beginning to hate."
The man who emerged from his 43 months in the Army was a ticking time bomb: someone with the rigid, precise mindset of a soldier but who had dropped out of its safe cocoon and, reduced to a level just above the lumpenproletariat, was consumed with ideological bitterness. With no home to tether him, for the rest of McVeigh's life until April 19, 1995, he would drift from place to place, following gun shows, driving across country and crashing with other weird, brooding losers, in a chaotic narrative that reads like a grotesque parody of Kerouacean freedom.
