Oklahoma City: The Blood of Innocents

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Outside the building other doctors and paramedics had set up triage stations, including four surgical units in a nearby warehouse, to assess the injuries and get help for the most grievously wounded. Area hospitals meanwhile launched their emergency plans, clearing out as many patients as they could to make room for the casualties. Within hours 100 volunteer doctors had shown up at St. Anthony, the hospital closest to the scene. Fifteen members of Boy Scout Troop 120 arrived to help with blood collection.

Many of the injuries were "soft tissue" cuts from flying glass. "When you see what it does, you can't believe it," said Nurse Moser. "It's as though you filled a shotgun shell with slivers of glass and shot it at someone." One man was pierced in 100 places; there were slashed throats, punctured lungs. Dr. Richard Crook treated patients with "blast trauma." "We saw ruptured eyeballs and rib fractures," he said. "One man was driving by the building when the bomb went off and had his window open. It ruptured his eardrums."

The waiting rooms filled quickly with desperate friends and families. Thu Nguyen rocked back and forth in his chair in the lobby of Children's Hospital of Oklahoma. "I was at work in Norman," said Nguyen, 40, who works for a company that makes air conditioners in that town 18 miles south of Oklahoma City. When a friend told him about the explosion, Nguyen went numb. His five-year-old son Christopher was in the day-care center. "I didn't want to believe it," Nguyen said. "When I got to the messy streets of Oklahoma City, I had an empty feeling. I didn't know where my baby was or where my wife was." After two hours of searching, he found Christopher in the emergency room at Children's. They moved him to intensive care, and then Nguyen and his wife, like so many others, could only sit and wait. And seethe. "I've seen war, O.K.? I've seen soldiers I fought with in Vietnam cut this way, cut in half, heads cut off. That was war. These are children. This is not a war. This is a crime."

For those sad, waiting parents, the terror was not over. Children's Hospital received a bomb threat. They faced the awful decision: evacuate, or hope it was the cruelest of hoaxes. Parents who were stunned and grateful to learn their babies had survived the disaster were unwilling to leave them again. When hospital officials ordered evacuation, the most seriously injured children and the doctors and nurses caring for them remained behind.

As the search dragged on into the night Wednesday, floodlights made the plaza shine like noon, and the crews kept pressing deeper into the rubble. The effort proceeded an inch at a time, on hands and knees, with crowbars and axes. Rescue workers were on two-hour shifts and were ordered to visit counselors to help them cope with what they were seeing. But many wanted only to get back inside the building while there was still some hope that someone might still be alive in there.

Time.com

Oklahoma City: The Blood of Innocents

IN THE BOMB'S AFTERMATH, TALES OF HORROR AND HEROISM