"None of us fired" – Early morning April 19, 1993 Waco, Texas
Federal law enforcement officer Curtis (pseudonym) looked nervously at the mountain in front of him, in the past fifty days of armed confrontation, four comrades have been killed, more than a month of confrontation is physically and mentally exhausting, even if they cut off the power on the building, at night with strong light searchlights to illuminate the house, and play high decibel music, slaughter rabbit screams to pressure the people in the building, the opposite side did not look like surrender, but fortunately, all this is soon coming to an end.
Siege of Waco
The roar of the engines of the two combat engineering vehicles echoed in the valley, a rare internal use of heavy weapons in the United States since MacArthur used tanks to crush veterans in Washington in 1932, and looking at the two combat engineering vehicles, Curtis thought about it, and he understood that it was necessary to move.
At six o'clock in the morning, two combat engineering vehicles took their place and began to chisel through the walls and fire tear gas into the house, the megaphone on the car shouted the order to "surrender", and after firing six rounds of tear gas, the huge combat engineering vehicle began to charge with force, the wall of the building was knocked down, and the roof was thrown off a corner. But no one ever came out.
Suddenly, a fire broke out in the building, and the flames illuminated half the sky.
In the midst of the flames, no one noticed the departure of a middle-aged man who had come to protest the siege.
In the end, only nine people escaped, and the remaining seventy-four people were buried in the fire, including twenty children.
Although this was a siege of "heretics", in the eyes of many people, this was the first time that the federal government had targeted ordinary citizens (due to the news blockade in the United States, most people at that time did not know about the massacre that occurred in Washington in 1932), which was a naked "massacre".
The U.S. Department of Justice claimed that FBI agents did not fire a single shot or set the fire that day.
McVeigh, a veteran in front of the television, smashed the bottle against the television, and he was so angry that he drove to the city of Waco, leaving only a ruin and a "no entry" cordon.
The flames of anger burned in his heart: they must be made to pay the price!
McVeigh believed that the federal government was deliberately killing women and children, and that he wanted to make his claims known, and he wanted to carry out his "justice."
As a former American soldier who fought in the Gulf War, McVer was very good at "killing", McVeigh initially only intended to destroy a federal building, but then he changed his mind, he felt that blowing up only one building was not enough to prove his will, he wanted to create a bigger event.
In the end, he chose the Alfred P. Mera Federal Building. (The building contains 14 federal agencies including the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Alcohol, Gun, and Explosives Administration, the Social Security Administration, and recruitment offices for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps.)
McVeigh chose the building first because of the glass doors and floor-to-ceiling windows in front of it, which were expected to shatter under the impact of the bomb and cause as much damage as possible, and because the building was adjacent to a vast and open parking lot that could absorb and dissipate some of the power of the explosion and protect those in the nearby non-federal buildings.
In addition, McVeigh also believes that the vast space around the building can make it more convenient for people to take pictures, so that the publicity effect of the event will be better. He planned the attack on April 19, 1995, which was both the second anniversary of the Waco massacre and the 220th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord.
Because of his actions, 168 people died and more than 680 were injured.
"Rent a truck – $250. Fertilizers are about... Or $250, or $500. Nitromethane is expensive, possibly $1500. Actually, let me do the math, 900, 2700... Ah, a total of 3500 ... And then let's add it up. I'm just telling you the main spending, about $5,000... It's $5,000, right? ” —Timothy McVeigh on the cost of raw bombs.
As a soldier who had fought in the war and received awards, making improvised explosives was no difficult for McVeigh, and on September 30, 1994, he and his former comrade-in-arms Nichols bought 40 packs of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, each weighing 22.68 kilograms, at the Kansas Cooperative, and in October 1994, McVeigh disguised himself as a motorcycle racer and obtained three barrels of nitromethane, about 208.2 liters each, under the guise that he and some of his racing counterparts needed to get fuel.
McVeigh then rented a storage room in which he stored 7 crates of 45.7 cm long hydro-glue explosive rolls, 88 spool shock tubes, and 500 electrical detonator tubes that he and Nichols had stolen from a quarry in Marion County, Kansas.
Subsequently, in order to test the power of the bomb, he also made a prototype bomb and drove it to detonate it in the desert where no one found it, and he was very satisfied with the power of the bomb.
On April 17, 1995, McVeyn and Nichols loaded the finished bombs into a van, each filled with explosive barrels weighing nearly 227 kilograms, and in order to avoid mistakes, he also placed a number of explosive barrels in the driver's room, so that if anything uncontrollable occurred, he could at least shoot the barrels of explosives with a pistol to detonate, although he would die, but he did not care.
Militarily adept, he also cleverly exploited the Monroe Effect to increase his power and leave a "j" symbol.
The Monroe effect is also known as the energy gathering effect. The English name: gathering energy effect (munroe effect) is derived from the law discovered by the American Charles e. Munroe in 1888 in the explosives test. That is, after the explosives explode, the explosive products are basically scattered outwards along the normal direction of the explosive surface under high temperature and pressure. Therefore, after the detonation of the charging with grooves, a converged, high velocity and pressure explosion will appear on the groove axis, and the chemical energy released by the explosive explosion will be concentrated within a certain range.
Everything is ready for only $5,000.
McVeigh was always convinced that he was doing the right thing, and later, when confronted by the judge, he insisted that his actions were the same as the atomic bombs fired on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that although they were killings, they were for a nobler goal.
Dawn on April 19, 1995
McVeigh drove the truck to the Merla Federal Building.
He carries an envelope containing pages of "The Turner diaries," a fictional story of a white supremacist who blew up FBI headquarters with a truck bomb at 9:15 a.m. to spark a revolution.
He wore a tattoo of the Virginia slogan "sic semper tyrannis" (Latin for "overthrow the autocratic monarch forever", which Marcus Junius Brutus is said to have been the first to utter in the assassination of Julius Caesar, and which John Wilkes Booth also shouted immediately after the assassination of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln) and Thomas Jefferson's famous saying that "the tree of freedom must always be watered with the blood of patriots and dictators." Printed T-shirt with the lettering.
He also carried another envelope with another famous quote from Thomas Jefferson: "When the government fears the people, there is liberty." When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.) He also wrote below: "Maybe from now on there will be freedom!" There is also a handwritten copy of John Locke's famous quote, claiming that man has the right to kill those who have taken his liberty.
At 9 a.m., when most of the staff had begun to sit at their desks, trucks containing more than 4,000 kilograms of ammonium nitrate explosives, a mixture of nitromethane and diesel fuel exploded on the north side of the building, violently exploding a crater 9.1 metres wide and 2.4 metres deep, and, as McVeigh had previously examined, damaged or destroyed 324 buildings within a 16-block radius and shattered the glass of 258 nearby buildings.
Broken glass alone killed 5 percent of those killed, and 69 percent of those injured outside the Mehra Federation Building were caused by flying glass shards, while the violent explosion could be heard and felt from 89 kilometers away. The Oklahoma Science Museum and Norman seismometers, 26 kilometers away, both recorded the explosion, which was as strong as three magnitudes of a quake on the Richter scale, and caused at least $700 million in damage.
"In the military, you learn how to deal with killing people, I can face the consequences, and you have to learn to accept them." —Timothy McVeigh
The blast killed 168 people and injured more than 680, including three pregnant women and 19 children, the youngest being just 3 months old.
After his arrest, McVeigh defended the children he killed in the explosion with these words: "The rules of engagement in this conflict are not set by me, these rules are set by the aggressor, but they are not written down." It's cruel and unscrupulous. Women and children have also been killed in waco, the result of government-planted causes. ”
After McVeigh's arrest, he enjoyed the most "luxurious" task force treatment in the United States since the assassination of President Kennedy, surrounded by nearly 900 federal investigators, criminologists, National Guard, and police officers.
On June 2, 1997, McVeigh was convicted of all 11 counts of murder and conspiracy, and McVeigh was sentenced to death.
This was the first time since 1963 that the U.S. federal government resumed executions of death row inmates.
On June 11, 2001, 33-year-old McVey was executed by federal lethal injection. Before the execution, McVeigh ordered only a mint chocolate ice cream. In addition to this mint chocolate ice cream, he invited a musician to play a requiem for him. Maybe it was too much sin, and he hoped to find some stability on his way to hell.
The Oklahoma City bombing is considered one of the worst acts of "terrorism" in the United States before 9/11.