I always enjoy visiting the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum. On this trip, I spent time in the museum on two sequential days - July 4 and 5. I could relive the experience I had dealing with the terrorist bomb 27 years ago, while peering into displays of artifacts from the attack, as well as an intriguing path through the investigation and trial. A million hours of investigation were used to put a detailed puzzle of what happened.
Before we connected with students across the nation to tell them about the property, our home base was the STEM lab, where student groups can attend classes that challenge their abilities to process information, find conclusions, and create solutions. There were artifacts in the classroom I had not seen on the main museum tour. Two of these were a piece of the siding from the Ryder truck that Timothy McVeigh used to transport the bomb. The other was a Ford emblem from the same truck, and its evidence tag for the court was still attached. These were not behind glass, but were easily appreciated without the glare of lights reflecting from a protective shield, allowing somebody like myself to come along and reach for them. These two artifacts (with a blue background at the end of the second-to-last row above). Being able to touch something that was directly involved in the tragic deaths of 168 people provided a closer connection to the history that I never expected would ever present itself to me.
