McVeigh decided to leave the Army and was honorably discharged in 1991.
(meta data) TITLE: McVEIGH'S MIND - A special report. - Oklahoma Bombing Suspect - Unraveling of a Frayed Life - NYTimes.com 51 captures 27 Aug 2009 - 02 Jan 2022 About this capture COLLECTED BY Organization: Alexa Crawls Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. Collection: Alexa Crawls Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20161218104536/http://www.nytimes.com:80/1995/12/31/us/mcveigh-s-mind-special-report-oklahoma-bombing-suspect-unraveling-frayed-life.html Log In Register Now Home Page Today's Paper Most Popular Edition: U.S. / Global Search All NYTimes.com ## U.S. N.Y. / Region Real Estate # McVEIGH'S MIND: A special report.;Oklahoma Bombing Suspect: Unraveling of a Frayed Life ###### By JOHN KIFNER ###### Published: December 31, 1995 He rented movies, playing one about a Colorado football team over and over. He wore a favorite T-shirt with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson. He once changed cheap motels so he could watch the X-rated Spice Channel. He always washed the dishes. These seemingly ordinary activities are little pieces of the puzzle that is the greatest remaining mystery of the case charging Timothy J. McVeigh with blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people: Why would he do it? The movie is "Red Dawn," a cult classic of the far right, in which the football "Wolverines" take to the mountains as guerrillas to battle invading Soviet paratroopers. The T-shirt declared, "The tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." And the solitary motel room and neatly stacked dishes were just part of a compulsive, lonely life marked by frustration, an obsession with guns and a growing anger at the Federal Government that finally led him, prosecutors say, to pack a rented truck with more than two tons of explosives and set it off last April 19, a strange guerrilla in his own land. The main outlines of Mr. McVeigh's life -- his obsession with weapons, his failure to become an Army Green Beret, his rage at a Federal raid that left some 80 Branch Davidians dead in Waco, Tex. -- became known in the days after he was charged with the worst terrorist act in American history. But the story that is now emerging -- based on interviews with his former Army buddies, Federal investigators and others involved in the case, as well as people who met him along his tortured path -- is a psychological portrait of his deterioration through the years, stoked by his increasing immersion not only in the outlaw world of the far right, but also in an alienated strand of popular culture. The interviews and a detailed reconstruction of events suggest that his wrath evolved from three sources: First there was Mr. McVeigh's own stunted personality and immediate frustrations. He was never able to overcome a sense of abandonment by his mother, who left the family when he was a boy; nor could he ever find a home outside the Army. Second was his overwhelming obsession with guns, blending into far-right politics that saw the Government trying to disarm and betray its citizenry, fueled by a radical new information network of videotapes, short wave radio, computer networks, newsletters and, perhaps above all, a venomous novel called "The Turner Diaries." Even mainstream movies fed his angry politics. And, as the first two factors converged, he saw a series of events in the real world that, in his isolated, self-reinforcing world, served to confirm his apocalyptic vision. He was not alone in his political development. In the two and a half years between Mr. McVeigh's Army discharge and the Oklahoma bombing, three seminal events -- the Federal raid on a white supremacist's cabin at Ruby Ridge in Idaho, the Waco raid, and the passage of the Brady gun control bill -- spurred a flurry of activity on the far right. This spawned an armed paramilitary movement in February 1994, only seven months before Mr. McVeigh began carrying out his bomb plot, the authorities said. The paramilitary movement vowed to resist the Government and publish manuals on forming underground guerrilla squads. Mr. McVeigh was just a little ahead of the curve. A reconstruction of the events leading up to the bombing suggests that Mr. McVeigh's demons finally became unbearable in late August 1994 after Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Bill, outlawing 19 types of semiautomatic assault weapons. "What will it take?" he wrote in exasperation to his former Army buddy, Michael Fortier, in an effort to spur him to action. Within weeks, Mr. McVeigh and another Army friend, Terry L. Nichols, embarked on a flurry of activity that prosecutors said included stealing dynamite and detonator caps from a Kansas quarry, buying fertilizer for explosives, renting storage lockers under false names and robbing an Arkansas gun dealer at shotgun point -- accusations that form the core of the Government's indictment of both men. Mr. McVeigh and Mr. Nichols have pleaded not guilty; their trial is expected to take place in the spring. At first glance Mr. McVeigh, whom prosecutors say is the masterind, seemed utterly ordinary. At Star Point Central High School in upstate Lockport, N.Y., he was so withdrawn that his classmates sarcastically voted him "most talkative" in the yearbook and former teachers did not remember him. Everybody who met him described him the same: quiet, polite, neat. Yet, as commonplace as this seems, criminologists say, these traits are often the stuff of serial killers, terrorists and other solitary murderers. "There are the same kind of characteristics," said John Douglas, recently retired as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's psychological profile unit. "Asocial, asexual, a loner, withdrawn, from a family with problems, strong feelings of inadequacy from early in life, an underachiever." There was one thing: Guns. Next Page > #### Inside NYTimes.com ###### Health » ###### Too Hot to Handle ###### Arts » ###### The Harmony of Liberty ###### Opinion » ### Should Beach Privatization Be Allowed? Room for Debate asks whether shorefront homeowners should have to open their land to all comers. ###### Sports » ###### A Woman's Leadership May Steady Murray ###### Opinion » ###### Menagerie: Streaming Eagles ###### U.S. » ###### Curlers' Aim: Sweep to a Win Over the Heat
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Timothy McVeigh
Military life.
He was a top-scoring gunner with the 25mm cannon of the Bradley Fighting Vehicles used by his 1st Infantry Division and was eventually promoted to sergeant. After being promoted to sergeant, McVeigh earned a reputation of assigning undesirable work to black servicemen and frequently used racial slurs against them. He was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, before being deployed on Operation Desert Storm. 
 Speaking of his experience in Kuwait in an interview before his execution, documented in McVeigh's authorized biography "American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Tragedy at Oklahoma City", he stated he decapitated an Iraqi soldier with cannon fire on his first day in the war and celebrated. He said he was later shocked to be ordered to execute surrendering prisoners and to see carnage on the road leaving Kuwait City after U.S. troops routed the Iraqi army. McVeigh received several service awards, including the Bronze Star Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Southwest Asia Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, and the Kuwaiti Liberation Medal. McVeigh aspired to join the United States Army Special Forces (SF). After returning from the Gulf War, he entered the selection program, but washed out on the second day of the 21-day assessment and selection course for the Special Forces.