April 19, 1995

By Amanda Ripley

No one noticed the smoke seeping from the windows of the rental truck as Timothy McVeigh pulled up to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that gray morning. McVeigh had lit two fuses to the 7,000-lb. fertilizer bomb in the truck and then parked beside the building's day-care center. The explosion vaporized the front of the building, leaving a yawning cross-section of oozing cable and smoke. The dead would number 168, including 19 children. (At least six people who survived or lost loved ones have since killed themselves.) When McVeigh was executed in 2001, he remained convinced that he had punished the U.S. government for its 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.

For America, the bombing was an introduction to mass-casualty terrorism. The enemy was no longer uniformed platoons but lone extremists in our midst. They could not be easily ferreted out--or understood. But Oklahoma City also wrote the book on recovery. The survivors have become indispensable companions for the families of 9/11 victims. And the memorial to the tragedy shows that traumatized cities can unite, as author Edward Linenthal puts it, "to protest the anonymity of mass death." --By Amanda Ripley