And having been here twice, it doesn't get any easier the more you go. On April 19, 1995, I was up at 4:30am to catch the Halliburton shuttle to Houston. When I got back to the plane that afternoon, word had reached us that a bomb had exploded in downtown Oklahoma City and it was most likely some kind of terrorist plot. We thought it had to be a mistake. Why would anyone bomb a building in Oklahoma? For most this is just flyover country and this Murrah building, who knew what that was.
The state motto of Oklahoma is Labor Omnia Vincit which translated means "labor conquers all things". There is nothing easy about living in Oklahoma and this tells it all. We all knew what to do when the tornados came or grapfruit sized hail or killer ice storms, but not how to deal with this.
I didn't know a single person killed in Oklahoma City, but the one thing I know is that these were simple, hard working people who had come to work that day like all of us Oklahomans. They went on, we stayed behind.
The chairs are the tough to view. 156 in all. One for each person killed. Then the hardest part. Little chairs for the children that died.
We went in the late evening, just as the sun was setting and the chairs lit up.
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