Posted on 09/01/2002 10:37:10 PM PDT by glorygirl
THEIR EARS reverberating with the screams of the trapped and wounded begging them to stay, almost all the rescue workers called to the Alfred P. Murrah building raced off the disaster site in mid-rescue.
It's a decision that haunts firefighter Mel Hanson to this day, more than seven years after Timothy McVeigh's bomb killed 168 people at the downtown federal office building.
Inside the burning pile of rubble, minutes after the 9:02 a.m. explosion on April 19, 1995, Hanson had tagged on with a team trying to help Pricilla Salyers.
She was buried in the kneeling position and the rescuers were digging with their hands to loosen the debris around her legs.
"I had a cheap little pocket knife with a serrated blade, and we were using it to cut the telephone wires from around her legs," Hanson recalls.
"We didn't know how we were going to get her out."
At 10:28, someone grabbed him to say another car bomb had been found in the underground parking garage, and the order was to evacuate. It was the first of what turned out to be two false alarms; the second came at 1:48 p.m.
"We don't abandon people," Hanson remembers saying.
For a moment, he thought they could drag Salyers out. But she was buried too deep.
If he stayed, he thought, all he could do was die with her, abandoning his wife and children.
"I made the decision to leave. I went back to Pricilla and I kneeled down and I took her hand and held it in my hand and I said, `Pricilla, they've ordered us out of the building, and I've got to go.'
"She started bawling, and I started bawling, and I said, `I promise you, I'll be back.' She's wailing, `Please don't leave me, don't go, don't leave me in here.'"
It was the most difficult choice in his 26 years as a firefighter, he says.
Some rescue workers ignored the evacuation order. And when the all-clear was announced 54 minutes later, many of those who'd obeyed the order were not allowed to return.
Police had formed a perimeter by this time, and the fire department had organized shifts of 75 to minimize vibrations.
Hanson did go back, but another crew was working on Salyers.
Sixteen months later, he asked fire department chaplain Ted Wilson to arrange a meeting with the woman at the bomb site.
"It took me a long time to have the guts to face her," he says, adding that he knew she was also in pain. "Thank God she didn't confront me with it, because I probably would have killed myself."
Hanson is still being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He started having flashes of wanting to kill both himself and the fire chief a few months after the bombing.
He pulls out the printed, wallet-sized card Salyers gave him, which he always carries: "Blessed are those who have one hand held by God, the other hand held by a friend."
The bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil — until Sept. 11.
Unlike the assault on the World Trade Center, the terror battered a close-knit community. Many of the rescue workers, victims and survivors were acquainted before the tragedy.
The shock was communal.
"We've become such a family here, many of the family members, the survivors, the rescuers," says Diane Leonard, a bombing widow who has PTSD.
McVeigh's truck, loaded with 2,200 kilograms of ammonium nitrate fuel oil, killed almost half the occupants of the nine-storey structure.
Five victims died outside, including one rescue worker — a nurse who hastened to the site from a nearby medical convention. Hundreds were seriously injured.
Among the dead were 19 children: Fifteen were infants and toddlers from America's Kids Day Care Center and four were visitors. Only six of the children in the building survived.
Oklahoma City was unprepared for the mental-health consequences.
"There wasn't a lot of local expertise; we had to bring in a different group for training," says Gwen Allen, the government social worker asked to direct the state-run agency set up to deliver mental-health services to those affected.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) acted within weeks to fund Project Heartland, the first program of its kind in the United States.
The stress continued to be fuelled by the implosion of the unsafe building on May 6, which ended the 16-day search for survivors; the pulling out of the last three bodies 41 days later; and the years spent bringing McVeigh to justice, culminating with his execution on June 11, 2001, in Terra Haute, Ind.
Now, the state trial of accused accomplice Terry Nichols is pending.
In 1995, experts had predicted that 20 per cent — or 2,600 Oklahoma City rescue workers and volunteers — would need help with the psychological impact.
Project Heartland was a short-term gatekeeper, referring patrons who needed medicine or long-term treatment to community professionals.
It served tens of thousands of bomb-related clients in the 5 1/2 years before the state shut it down.
But rescue workers were reluctant to use it, says Allen. They became stressed by the very idea of stepping outside their circle.
The city's fire department hoped to help its own at-risk members by contracting a hospital to offer prepaid services. But over 12 months, only two firefighters took advantage of the opportunity.
People who are traumatized can set up a psychological defence system to insulate themselves against any further stress by shunning all except a tiny network of trusted people, according to one theory. This buffer zone, called the trauma membrane, ironically also shields them from offers of assistance.
Rescue workers tend to shut out all outsiders, relying on their own inner circle. Any link to a victim — a resemblance to someone in their own family or a pang of empathy — can risk triggering emotion and contaminating judgment.
In a disaster where victims' families, survivors and rescuers live and work together, called a "centripetal disaster," the community itself experiences the assault and the psychological defence system around each individual becomes fused around the community as a whole, sometimes making offers of assistance from within the community more acceptable, says Oklahoma City psychologist John Call.
Funded initially by private donations, a unique grassroots agency called Critical Incident Workshops zeroed in on this ease of access a year after the bombing by offering free three-day residential workshops, geared primarily to rescue workers but including families of victims and survivors so they can discuss their shared experiences.
Salyers and Leonard are on the group's board of directors.
So far, the workshops have served about 600 rescue workers out of 12,984 at the bomb site. Hanson attended one of them.
"We haven't even scratched the surface in six years," says retired Norman, Okla., police Lt. Jim Spearman, who as director has just secured another year of federal funding.
The group is attracting interest across the country, especially since Sept. 11, but still lives from hand to mouth, supported by a series of temporary federal grants after the first two years of private money.
Now, a state-run crisis hotline filters calls to Critical Incident Workshops' telephone number. Any bomb-related complaints are assessed and referred to community therapists, paid for by a charity-supported fund.
The money earmarked for rescue workers is not going to last much longer, even though many emergency services people who have never before sought help have come forward since the terrorist attacks in New York.
"Sept. 11 hit my people with a baseball bat," says chaplain Wilson. Some rescue workers are still attending the confidential residential workshops or seeing therapists subsidized by the local Red Cross.
And others are still meeting counsellors in a parking lot in the middle of the night, rather than letting anyone know they can't brush their teeth in the morning without re-experiencing the terror they felt hearing the explosion.
"This deal goes on and on and on," says Highway Patrol 2nd Lt. Terry Morris, "and Sept. 11 brought it up again."
On April 19, 1995, Morris was sent to search the nursery where the babies attended the day-care centre. Most of them were dead.
"I carried every one of them out that I dug up," he says.
"It'll always stay with me. When I'd be driving, I'd feel the dead babies in my arms. I did that for a long time.
"The hard part for me ...."
His eyes fill, his voice trembles and he sucks in a long sigh before continuing.
"Those babies didn't have anybody there for them. The ones I carried out, I told each one of them that I loved them like they were my own babies. At that moment, they were mine.
"They had set up an assembly line, but I couldn't give up my babies. I would carry each one of them out. I'd wipe off all the concrete. The dust. They were gritty little cold babies. I would wipe off all their faces, around their little mouth and nose. I told each one of them how much I loved them.
"I never knew who they were. That was the hard part. Not knowing who they were so I could go to that mama and daddy and say, `I held your baby. Your baby was loved.'"
But he never did.
Morris doesn't want to look in the bombing record book, which includes colour photos of the dead. "No, those are clean babies," is his excuse for fearing a real and present connection with the parents of "his babies."
Getting emotionally involved with families of victims is risky for rescue workers, trained to keep their distance so that they don't lose their composure.
It's also unfamiliar. In the usual course of their jobs, time is too short to be drawn into personal relationships. This was no usual course.
A year after the disaster, Morris was still so worked up that a friend "kicked his ass" into one of the residential workshops. He didn't last the first day.
Spearman had to be tricked into attending a workshop two years after the bombing.
Maj. Brian Stanaland, a firefighter, sought no help until his first workshop nine months ago.
"You know, I could start crying real easy, but I don't have to worry about that because I've got these two guys to take care of me," says Morris of Stanaland and Spearman, who came with him to our interview.
"That workshop didn't do me worth a twit because I didn't want to be there."
He signed up for another one four years after the first, but then he didn't go.
Finally, last year, his wife said he must do something.
"I was a nervous wreck," he says. "I couldn't take it any more."
Spearman says the bombing affects him more than all other events of his career put together.
For Stanaland, whose job at the site was removing concrete, it's the smell of wet concrete dust that still drives him insane.
"This is going to sound strange," he says, "but I wish I could have held the babies."
Neither Morris, Spearman nor Stanaland has been diagnosed with PTSD, but they all figure they have it.
Meanwhile, Oklahoma City professionals are hoping those working on post-Sept. 11 trauma in New York will learn from their mistakes.
Ill and off work for more than a year, Allen rues the long hours; all six of her core staffers are sick. But New York does not have enough staff to rotate.
Fire chaplain Wilson vows the city will insist on having a hand in decision-making next time rather than accepting a state-run federally funded agency.
Police chaplain Col. Jack Poe hopes New York has set long-term money aside.
"Who is going to take care of these people in three to five years because a lot of it won't surface for a while?" he asks.
The American Psychological Association's 1997 report on the bombing asked FEMA to change its short-term mandate. Yet Project Liberty in New York is state-run and federally funded only until March, 2003.
Poe isn't happy now with his police department's critical-incident stress-management debriefing after the implosion. It was too short and too soon.
"And we forced it. You can't force people to do that. When they came, they signed in, they shut up and left."
That's exactly what police Sgt. Alan Procop did.
He told no one he had kicked a ball when he entered the building that morning that turned out to be a head. Or that he had seen a child's hand moving.
"She had a little ring on, a little Christmas ring on because I remember — a little girl's hand. I held her hand. She squeezed my hand and I said, `Don't worry, we're going to get you out.'
"I held her hand for a couple of more minutes and I talked to her and she squeezed it a couple of times and then she quit squeezing and then her hand got cold and she didn't squeeze it any more."
Ordered out during the second bomb scare, he never went back.
He doesn't want to know who the little girl was.
"It's enough that I have to remember whenever I see somebody. Your hands weren't like hers, so it's okay. But every day, I'll see a hand, and it will take me back to that time."
Police asked him to comply with the request in 1997 of Brandon Denny's parents to meet. Procop had carried the child out two years earlier with a rock sticking out of the boy's forehead.
Procop does talk to the couple occasionally. But he doesn't need external reminders. Every night, the last thing he sees before sleep is bodies coming toward him out of the dust. They look like zombies, their wounds bleeding.
He sought private counselling seven years ago, and now retired, he's still in counselling.
Rescue workers are usually not on a job long enough to be tempted by the lives of the people they serve, says New York Emergency Services Unit police Det. Mike Hanson, who was in Oklahoma City for eight days in 1995 with one of the federal search and rescue teams.
Most don't want to go near close contact with families of victims, he says.
Or at least, they haven't, until recently.
Hanson, who was trained as a nurse, says he is different. He made good friends in Oklahoma City, returning many times for private visits and for three anniversaries.
On the fifth anniversary, he noticed someone wearing a button with a photo of Carrie Lenz, a 26-year-old pregnant mother Hanson had found buried in the rubble of the building.
"What shall I do?" he asked his wife.
"Follow your heart," she answered.
This is territory where most rescue workers have feared to tread.
But Doris Jones says she was hoping to eventually meet the person who touched her daughter where she died. Her family dines with the Hansons in Oklahoma City. She has visited him in New York, where he's now known as "Doris' Mike."
Not everyone has the coping mechanism for this kind of interaction, says Hanson, who worked shifts at Ground Zero for four months. Rescue workers must take care not to absorb the family's sorrow and become an active part of the grieving process.
"I am able to plug myself in as a participant in the support, but not in the grieving," Hanson says.
A few years ago, he took his family to the Oklahoma ranch of a woman he met in 1995 because he wanted his three daughters to understand the effect of a disaster on a family.
Now, they know it first-hand.
Oklahoma City psychologist Elinor Lottinville can describe the effect of a disaster on a family.
Although PTSD symptoms — nightmares, numbing, hyperarousal — never go away, they do gradually lift and become less intrusive, she says.
"You don't ever forget the past. But you actually can see a little hope for the future.
"Seven years out in Oklahoma, we are beginning to find what we call `a new normal.'"
But strangely, did not produce a crater on the ground beneath which it stood, commeasurate to the one it produced to a building some 50 feet away.
REsearchers attribute this to McVeigh's ability to suspend the laws of physics.
Yet no autopsy was done on Yeakey and his wounds according to a coroners report were consistent with murder. Browning complained strongly that the autopsy should have done and that the OKC police chief Gonzales and the FBI had covered up the circumstances of Yeakeys death.
Browning told me and others that the Police chaplain had betrayed the confidences (pretending to offer help but really trying to learn where to plug up the holes in the coverup) of many like Yeakey who had sought help but also complained of FBI agents being outside who had advanced knowledge when the bomb went off.
Yeakey had pulled ten men out of the building (four lived) and was the first oficer at the scene. The FBI and the police tried to spread a lie that Yeakey was unstable and had marriage problems to counter Yeakeys attempts to get the FBI and police chief in trouble for not trying to stop the bombing in advance. I challenged one of the men spreading these false stories (who said Yeaky was "weak" and coluld not cope) about Yeakey and told him that if Yeakey really had emotional problems before the bombing (and after) then why did not members of the police chiefs office get Yeakey help (they did not try to get him help because he complained too much to them about what they did wrong).
Yeakey even was pounding the desk and yelling at the OKC Councilman Mark Schwartz shortly before Yeakey was found murdered. Yeakey was demanding answers from Schwartz about the members of the City councuil, the Governor, the fire chief, the police chief and the FBI who had advance warning and met about the warning on Monday before the bombing.
Schwartz was rewarded by Clinton who gave Schwartz a cushy job at DOE legal department in DC in Dec 1998 (to help cover up Chinagate) even though Schwartz had no previous energy legal experience. And Chief Gonzales was rewarded for his part in covering up Yeakey’s death by being made head of Project Meggiddio and a liaison between the FBI and police departments around the country (federalization of police departments). Then There was the murder (curator of the OKC bomb museum was a close friend who says it was murder)in 1997 of Assistant Federal US Attorney (OKC) TEd Richardson who had been investigating Samir Khalil before the OKC bombing.
Khalil was the employer of the Iraqi suspect Hussaini and still is the local Hamas leader who squired Khalid Mohammed(mastermind of 9/11, 1993 WTC and OKLC bombings) around OKC while being protected by the FBI. Richardson was found with a gunshot wound to his chest near Khalis's home. ANd the DOJ took Richardson off the Khalil investigation days after the OKC bombing even though Richardson was preparing to submit evidence to a Grand Jury on Khalils HUD property scams and tax evasion schemes to reaise money to finance Hamas.
Richardson was found dead less than a month after Melvin Beall had visited and complained to Richardson for the fourth time about the OKC bombing. Beall was a 26 year veteran of the OKC PD who talked to and gave directions along with three other OG&E employees to McVeigh, Fortier, McVeigh’s sister and Fortier's wife, on April 1995. Beall complained that the FBI and later the County grand jury covered up and ignored his and the employees testimony.
Leah Moore was badly injured by the bombing. She had many surgeries, She was in the Federal witness protection program and had several small children, The FBI threatened and traumatized her because they did not want her not to talk to reporters with the LA Times shortly after the bombing. The FBI wanted to keep her silent about photos she had taken of the Ryder truck and the Brown Chevy truck (get away vehicle driven by FBI protected informant and provocateur AL Hussaini). The FBI was not concerned about Leah Moore's emotional or physical state, they made it worse to protect themselves.
Army recruiter LArry MArtin committed suicide by flying his plane into the ground near his church. MArtin was injured in the OKC bombing. He had tried to start his life over by becoming a teacher. But the burden of knowing his fellow recruiters like Arlene Blanchard had been threatened by the FBI 74 hours afer the bombing was too much for him to bear. The recruiters were threatened not to talk about the John Doe they had seen McVeigh with in the Murrah building. Like in the death of officer Yeakey, the FBI proclaimed that Martin had emotional problems with his girlfriend and was too "weak " to cope (they got him no help either).
The FBI and police Chief did not get help for people who complained about corruption relating to the bombing. They left them to twist emotionally in the wind since they were not "team" players in the coverup.
And let us not forget about the FBI agents who brow beat and traumatized (for six months) the witnesses at the Travelers aid to try to intimidate them into changing or forgetting their stories of seeing three John DOE FBI informants with McVeigh's car. The FBI did not get these witnesses any help. The FBI added to the witnesses suffering like they did with Leah Moore to protect the FBI.
And how about snack shop owner Danny Wilkerson who was dying of lung cancer. The FBI hounded him and tried to trick him (showed him false Ryder truck brochures)to change his story of seeing a John Doe in the Ryder truck a few minutes before the bombing. But have no fear, a wonderful (?), all caring (?)County DA attorney was dispatched to "twist" Wilkerson’s story way from the truth for the County grand Jury while Wilkerson was on his death bed.
The FBI, OKC Police Chief, governor, County DA's office, were all cruel to the victims and witnesses to the OKC bombing if they did not join the coverup "team."
I want justice for these people. We already have justice for McVeigh and Nichols. Now I want accountability and restitution from ME men and any US government men who terrorized these victims and witnesses by not stopping the bombing (when they could have) and by threatening them to keep them silent for all these years.
The wife of Governor Keating’s OK State Trooper body guard recently told me and my wife that We should stay out of this and let God handle it in the after life because FBI is too big and powerful The wife told me and my wife that the FBI ordered FBI agents' wives to lie about what they had told my wife about FBI foreknowledge and being tipped on the morning of the OKC bombing. My wife has suffered at the hands of FBI threats since 1995. The trooper wife reminded us that the FBI file on us would follow us wherever we moved. But she said she was very sorry for what she said she knew my wife had been put through. She asked us to understand that the FBI wives were like their husbands, just following orders (the Nuremberg defense). The troopers wife's misguided and warped compassion(?) sounded more like FBI threats.
A reporter close to the FBI (Mike Carpenter of KWTV News in OKC) told me once that I had better be concerned because I had "pissed Off" the FBI by my complaints over my wife's mistreatment by the FBI. My response was to ask the reporter to report back to the FBI and tell the FBI that the FBI had pissed me off and made My Father who Art in Heaven angry.
It takes a lot to get God angry. FBI, is a fearful thing to have God angry with you. It takes a lot of good to overcome a little evil. It takes more good than what the FBI has got left to overcome their monstrous evils and connivance in the OKC , 9/11, and 1993 WTC attacks.
The state trooper's wife like the FBI are sadly mistaken that they think they have the luxury of having all this sorted out by God in the after life rather than while they are still alive.
"Vengeance is mine says the Lord." " God says in the Bible that HE will avenge widows, widowers and orphans in this life who are called by His name. And God has said He will judge nations in this life and not in the after life.
And a chaplain who betrays suffering people has an extra accounting to be made with God.
But strangely, did not produce a crater on the ground beneath which it stood, commeasurate to the one it produced to a building some 50 feet away.
Researchers attribute this to McVeigh's ability to suspend the laws of physics.
He must've used the same device which caused part of Flight 800 to break off and rocket past it in an uncanny imitation of a missile.
Thank you for setting the record straight.
Most likely a percentage of that 20% will need psychological help because of what they have been asked to or told to keep silent about. There are numerous stories about doctors, firemen, and others who have had terrible things happen to them because they had a different story than the government bull.
The lamestream media suspended the laws of honest reporting!
I tried to send you a personal message, but I think you may not be here any more. I hope so much that that is not true. Anyhow, if you read this I have a question for you. Since you are THE expert on OKC, I was wondering this.
There is a guy going around named Bill Breshnahan (sp?) who wrote a book about WTC. In mentioning OKC, he stated emphatically, but without any documentation that 30% of the rescue workers at OKC committed suicide. I find this number very hard to believe. Do you (or anyone) have any info on this? I could understand some of those reactions, but not 30%!
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