Military recruiters make promises they can’t keep. Timothy McVeigh, it seems, was assured he could pursue a position in Special Forces as a career. It is conceivable that a recruiter lied, they do that. Or maybe he did make Special Forces, after all. He told his sister he did.
Timothy McVeigh is an unreliable narrator by choice. He likes to walk through mazes of narrative “what if?” games, he enjoys the puzzle making of untruthfulness. The McVeigh story gets wild when it becomes clear how easily so many of his details and variations could be true.
Timothy McVeigh has told every possible version of his own story as the truth at some point or another. He contradicted and reinvented himself shamelessly. He contaminated every narrative surrounding the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Everything we have ever heard about McVeigh or his crimes has been both recounted as fact and denounced as lies by McVeigh himself.
According to Wendy S. Painting’s book Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh, it was misinformation deployed during recruiting that landed McVeigh in an experimental unit. Known as Cohesion Operational Readiness Training (COHORT), this unit kept the same recruits together from basic training throughout the following three-year enlistment cycle.
Years later, McVeigh will tell his biographers that he knew he was being conditioned and brainwashed. He claims that he was called to attention twenty times a day to chant “blood makes the grass grow. KILL, KILL, KILL.”
McVeigh is an unreliable narrator, that’s true. It is also true that both Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier were members of COHORT alongside McVeigh. Those are two names that come up often when looking into the chain of events that led to the bombing attack on April 19th, 1995 in Oklahoma City.
Fortier and Nichols are protected by the state. Their involvement with McVeigh and events of that day are part of the trial record. There are witness accounts that describe a man who could have been Nichols with McVeigh on the day of the bombing. The McVeigh story veers into surreal territory at times and the closer you look the details, the wider the view becomes.
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