20th anniversary of the OKC Bombing

I probably won't get this posted before midnight, but it seems worth the effort.

My memories of finding out about that awful day are foggy.

I know that I was under water that month (-ish). Part of me thinks that we just found out about it through a regular weekly news update. But I don't ever remember getting one of those. I think that I probably found out in a letter from my Mom, dropped off when we surfaced to deal with a crew member who'd gone crazy or gotten injured.

I think the letter boiled down to "Someone blew up the building where your Uncle Bill works. He's OK--he had to go out in the field because someone else called in sick." Or something along those lines.

But the brain's funny. I think I remember finding out about it while we were out at sea, but that isn't the way things work. Complete and total isolation and boredom is vital if you ever have to do that job. You have to be cut off from your humanity before you can participate in massive carnage.

I know that I learned the details that I've managed to pick up in bits and pieces.

Lots of people died. My uncle was OK. My mostly-deaf grandmother heard the explosion in her home miles away.

I might be able to dredge up more details from that time, but I'm glad that my brain has shuffled those details into the discard pile.

The big thing that I remember from that day is laughing at the idea that killing 168 people (possibly including a relative who was at the top of my parents' will to take custody if they died too young) was a big deal.

We spent our days drilling for the day we needed to make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like sock hops.

Thankfully, that day has not arrived. I pray that it never will. If it ever had, I took solace in the basic fact that a retaliatory strike was almost guaranteed to kill us so we wouldn't have to live with what we'd done.

I don't have an ending here. Just memories that I wish would go away.