I was a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, walking to my morning class when I heard what sounded like a sonic boom off in the distance...towards the city. At the time - I thought nothing of it and very few folks had cell phones then, so it wasn't until after class that I started hearing rumors that there had been an explosion in Oklahoma City.
I walked through the doors of the Wesley Foundation (campus ministry) to see a crowd of people standing around the TV. No one was talking. Everyone just stood there in disbelief as we watched the news coverage unveil the unfathomable. A bomb had just been detonated at the Federal building in downtown OKC. I was in shock.
Someone asked me what my blood type was. "O-positive" I replied. "You need to go give blood at the Chi Omega house." They said. "They're calling for anyone with type O blood." So we walked to the sorority house and found over 300 students waiting around for their number to be called so they could give blood. There was a low murmur, but everyone seemed to be in their own world as we each tried to process what was happening.
The news stations called for donations of bottled water, hard hats, work boots, knee pads, etc. The organization Feed The Children was organizing the collections and donations, so many of us from Wesley went to their warehouse that afternoon to help sort, organize, pack, and load boxes into semi-trailers headed to ground zero.
As the rescue efforts continued, more and more bodies were discovered and there quickly became a large need for pastors & chaplains to assist on site. The pastor of the Wesley foundation - Brad - was one of the pastors called to assist. He was put on the 8pm-8am shift. I'm not certain exactly how it happened, but myself & a couple of other students managed to get FBI clearance and were assigned to the ground zero command post (which was located in a parking garage) during the same shift as brad. We (the students) primarily assisted by being gophers for whoever needed anything. If an emergency worker needed something, they'd come to us. We'd then go to the Feed The Children tent which looked like a Wal-Mart by the amount of stuff that had been donated. Bandages, flashlights, duct tape, gloves, blankets, anything anyone needed, we would get it for them....well, anything except answers.
I will never forget the first night I went to ground zero. When I saw with my own eyes what had been all over the news. It was dark. There were armed military personnel everywhere. But the thing I remember the most was the smell. It was a smell that was foreign to me. I don't think I have the words to describe it, but I just knew that it was the smell of death.
There wasn't a lot of noise during the night hours. It seemed eerily quiet. This was when the gravity of what was happening would weigh heaviest. Emergency workers would come into the command center and sit down at a table. You could just see their shoulders slump as if in defeat, constantly being robbed of any type of hope when they thought they might have found a survivor, but then quickly realizing that instead of going to the triage tent, they would have to take the dreaded, more common route, which led to the morgue.
They all showed the signs. FBI, ATF, Police, Fire, EMT. They were all tired and possibly suffering from depression. I can't imagine the pain they felt. You see pictures like the one below and you begin to wonder how any human being could make themselves function amidst such an act of violence.
But something amazing started to happen. Even though we were all in shock and experiencing varied levels of pain and depression, something started to happen that would begin to pull our city, our state, and even our country together. The mail started to arrive. Hundreds and thousands of letters started to arrive, simply addressed: Oklahoma City Emergency Workers. Thats it. No address or zip code. They came by the truck load from people all around the country. The most came from children in elementary schools drawing encouraging notes for the workers. But many others came from random people writing long notes of encouragement to anyone who would read it. Some even contained checks and cash for the rescue effort. There was so much mail that it had to be divided among many different places to be able to sort through it. Some went to the television networks, some went to the hospitals, some went to the local churches, and a lot of it came to the command center.
So during the midnight hours of the days following, we would open mail, sort it, and then we would take the letters from the children and hand them out to the workers. We would walk from security checkpoint to checkpoint, handing out these hand-drawn pictures & letters to tired and weary women & men who at first had a very hardened look & demeanor. But as soon as we gave them some of those letters, we would see the despair start to fade away and would sometimes get a glimmer of the hope that would remain.
It did, you know...remain. There is a survivor that continues to stand up for the fact that even amidst this horrific act of terrorism, this city, this state, and this country came together as one community. We looked past our differences and instead of allowing this act to divide us, it actually ended up uniting us in a very real way. And this survivor stands for the hope that we all have in humanity, that there is good in the world that has not been silenced, that in each of us there is the ability to put others' needs before our own, and that the capacity for love can be found in all of us. The survivor I mention is a tree, an Elm tree, that showed the amazing resilience and strength to endure. This tree will not forget what happened. It will always bear the marks from its' wounds of that day 13 years ago. But still it stands...and so will we.
