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Profile of McVeigh
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MCVEIGH was born in 1968 and raised Roman Catholic in a middle-class environment. His parents divorced when he was 16. He was brought up by his father in the rural town of Pendleton, New York, near the border with Canada.
A skinny and awkward teenager, undoubtedly bright, Timothy was nevertheless a mediocre student and failed to go to college.
But even at this early stage, he had developed a fascination with guns and survivalism, and after enduring a series of dead-end security guard jobs after high-school, he joined the army in 1988 and went on to serve in the Gulf War.
He returned, disillusioned with the United States, viewing its treatment of the Iraqi people as that of a schoolyard bully.
By all accounts, he was a platoon misfit, unable or unwilling to socialize with his comrades and boring them with his anti-government diatribes, according to the authors of "American Terrorist", the profile by Buffalo News reporters Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck published in May this year.
After quitting the service in 1991, he sank into a netherworld of would-be militants who shared his rising disgust with federal authorities, the book said.
His anger at the government's violent suppression of separatist groups found its clearest form of expression in his indignation over the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian complex in Waco, Texas.
Some 80 members of the cult died when the standoff between law enforcement and cult members ended in a conflagration of the compound.
"What the US Government did at Waco ... was dirty. And I gave dirty back to them at Oklahoma City," he told the reporters.
And it was in this state of mind that the 26-year-old former soldier conceived his plan to strike back at the government, singling out the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma.
McVeigh packed a rental truck with explosives, lit the fuses, parked it outside the Oklahoma City federal building and walked away without looking back.
According to Michel and Herbeck, his immediate reaction to the bomb was disappointment.
"Damn, I didn't knock the building down. I didn't take it down," Michel quoted McVeigh as saying.
And although McVeigh told them he might have reconsidered his target had he known about the children -- "That's a lot of collateral damage," -- he remained unrepentant about the remaining death toll.
"If I told the people I was sorry, I'd be lying," said the 33-year-old recently. "I did that for the larger good."
(SD-Agencies)
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