Vile Body: Where to Bury Tim McVeigh

The best predictor of behavior is previous behavior, not previous ideas or opinions. Hence, the major cause of violence is violence, not ideas, opinion or depictions of violence. Violence in domestic America shot up during the Vietnam War, not because of books and pictures about Vietnam but because of the violence itself. The enormity of this sanctioned violence turned American practice and public opinion back to capital punishment and the present specter of over 3,000 Dead Men Walking, enough for 20 Oklahoma bombings.

Timothy McVeigh was recruited by the American military. He was chosen, trained, advanced and then finally rejected as psychologically unsuitable for the elite echelon of killers. At his trial, at least in the penalty phase, I would have liked to hear testimony from his instructors in shooting and killing, most especially in explosives or special operations. I would have liked to see the books and instruction manuals used in his special military programs. I would have liked to know if, along with instruction in the handling of explosives, he had been shown vivid depictions of the victims, how they died or lived or were mutilated. Probably not. He was taught to inflict death. Not to review the consequences.

But instead, the prosecutors blamed the "Turner Diaries," and McVeigh's defense blamed Soldier of Fortune magazine. Incredibly, the intelligentsia jumped in and agreed that the "Turner Diaries" were to blame. (If McVeigh was turned into a crazy anti-Semite by the "Diaries," why did he target a WASP building in a WASP city and kill 150 Gentiles? Couldn't he at least have gone to Skokie, Ill., or Manhattan?) I couldn't find a word anywhere to suggest that the defense screwed up in the penalty phase by not concentrating more on McVeigh's experiences in the military.

The final chapter in this assiduous separation of McVeigh from the formative experience of his life -- training as a killer in the U.S. military -- takes the form of the comically macabre effort, headed by those gallant U.S. senators, Robert Torricelli of New Jersey and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, to deny Timmy a burial plot in a veterans cemetery.

Their proposed legislation should be named the Pontius Pilate Act after its original sponsor. This hand-washing ceremony is a significant milestone in the incorporation of the intelligentsia of America into utter servility to whatever hypocritical lunacy the politicians serve up.

To think that Tim McVeigh will be denied the honor of being buried beside Lt. Calley or Capt. Medina, veterans of the My Lai massacre in which over 500 Vietnamese civilians were methodically machine-gunned and dumped in a trench while the U.S. high command flew round and round the killing site; or beside the inventors of plastic shrapnel, which prevents X-rays from helping wounded civilians; or beside Gen. Curtis LeMay, architect of the Tokyo firestorm, which it was hoped would suck all oxygen from the city!

The problem of what to do with McVeigh's body remains at the very least in the middle distance. He's not even been formally sentenced to death and the appeals process hasn't begun. But what about all the thousands of other latent McVeighs? I don't mean the thousands of "Turner Diaries" readers or subscribers to Soldier of Fortune. I mean the thousands of trained killers that the military dumps back into civilian society when they go over the edge. Not made to register, not given therapy, deprogramming or heightened awareness that those wonderful military toys -- tanks zooming along in the recruitment ads or a B-52 with pretty Kelly Flinn standing beside it -- are connected not only with going to college and learning about electronics but with shattered bodies and lives.