Photo via AP
When the Oklahoma City Bombing occurred back in 1995, I was 9 years old — too young to fully understand what was happening and generally not interested enough in digging deeper into the news to find out more about it. There was limited internet access to me back then and so the only photos I remember seeing were those that covered the Miami Herald’s front page and the ones that flashed on the evening news for several weeks on end.
This explains the shocking nature of the photos that Captured posted today. I hadn’t really seen many images from the blast area and coming across these photos today really changed my perspective of just how devastating the event was for the nation. It’s a weird experience to come across different photo angles of an event that you have concrete images of from your childhood memories. Not sure if that makes sense to you all…
My wife was a reporter for the AP when that happened and was on the scene within minutes. She spent the day walking around the building, in shoes not designed for walking on shattered glass and debris. She had to sprint down the street at least once when they thought there was a second bomb. I can tell you, it was a bad day for her, though she didn’t lose a child or a husband that day. [I was in the military, on high alert, stuck at Tinker AFB while was down there. I couldn't call her; phone/cell lines were swamped.]
While she was down there, her AP bosses were obsessed with getting the story. They’d phone her with instructions, like, find the morgue. They wanted her to get the horrible details, stick microphones in the faces of people who were walking around like zombies, dust-covered and bloody, just becoming aware that their children were in that building, in the “pancake area.” A reporter from another service put on a white coat and ran toward the building with a team of doctors, when the police were only letting medical people in 10-at-a-time. That person later won an award.
My wife didn’t stay in journalism for long after that, and she hasn’t enjoyed many Aprils since 1995.
Some of her work:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-156860338.html
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1876&dat=19950421&id=SNUpAAAAIBAJ&sjid=T88EAAAAIBAJ&pg=2653,951948