Karl Gude

“No way this is a natural gas explosion, right?,” I asked.

The live TV helicopter footage of the burning Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City stunned all of us in the Associated Press graphics department. As AP’s graphics director I decided that I should get out there, fast.

Being on-site would streamline the process of making graphics by preventing us from having to beg our small and about-to-be swamped OKC bureau for content. The AP served hundreds of newspapers around the world and that meant that someone, somewhere, was on deadline at all times. On big stories like this our phone banks would light up with desperate newspapers pleading for graphics early so that they could close their pages. Sometimes, the questions just took up our valuable time, ones like:

“So, are you guys doing anything on that Oklahoma City blast?”

“No, we thought we’d all go home instead.”

And besides, I’m more competitive than hogs at suppertime and I wasn’t about to let the other wire services beat me on this story, whatever it was.

I rushed to New York’s LaGuardia airport without even a toothbrush. The plane was packed with journalists. Some jerk broadcast guy in a suit was acting all self-important and cornered the only phone on the plane for most of the flight so the rest of us weren’t able to find out what caused the explosion until we had amolst landed. Luckily, I arrived in Oklahoma City early enough to get a rental car and my own hotel room. Within hours, they were all taken.

I drove around trying to find the building with my absurdly vague Avis map and was becoming frustrated. Roads were blocked and police were diverting traffic. Suddenly, after turning a corner, there it was, and I was a whole lot closer than I thought I would be.

It was a startling, and emotional, sight. The force of the blast had been colossal. The clear evening was a beautiful blue-black and brilliant lights lit up the massive building like an unreal movie set. There was smoke, but no movement. It looked like a giant had taken a huge bite out of the building. The air smelled like someone was burning trash and I could clearly see details on every floor: twisted desks and chairs, filing cabinets and other furniture teetering on the raggedy edge looking like they would fall, tilted paintings on colored walls and jillions of pieces of paper. Morbidly, I squinted because I worried that my eyes would stumble across dead people, or parts of them.

“Please don’t let me see dead people,” I thought.

When I’m covering a tragic story from the scene, and I haven’t covered many of them that way, I get all business-like and focus on the task at hand. It’s all about the chase, and that’s the way it was in OKC, at first. I fought for sources with everyone else. Connie Chung only had to wave her mike to get sources to come running over to her, but I had to throw Tootsie Rolls at them. The fire dept. spokesman, who I had finally nabbed, was in the middle of locating things for me on a drawing when he just stopped and walked off after spotting some TV cameras looking for someone to interview. With me he was impatient. With them, he was all swagger. He had a tough job, though. The media can get ugly in situations like this.

At the bureau I sifted through hundreds of grisly photos, most of which wouldn’t make the wire: the dead, a panicked young girl pinned under rubble whose leg was later amputated; scores of injured. I studied with fascination and sadness the images of the fireman holding the doll-like dead girl with the scrape on her head after a policeman handed her to him.

The policeman was standing off to the side when the photo was cropped down to the Pieta-like image we all know. The following day I spotted the officer in dress blues standing unrecognized behind the yellow tape barrier, the cameras trained elsewhere. I asked him how he was. Politely, he came over and chatted. He was a soft-spoken man of few words and I think he was there because he was told to be. Later I saw him buried mercilessly under a half-dozen television cameras.

I held my emotions together until the silliest thing changed all that. Exhausted, I was driving from the bureau to the scene in my now coffee-cup and donut-crumb-filled rental car several days after I had arrived on the scene and I heard the country singer Barbara Mandrel, who was from OKC, on the radio from Nashville telling people that she wished she could be there with them to share their pain and that she would “say a prayer for all those little baby souls up in heaven.” This was a reference to the daycare center that was just feet away from the Ryder truck when it blew up and all of the children evaporated.

Then it happened. It began as a rumbling in my heart at the words “baby souls.” I burst into tears so fiercely that I had to pull the car over. It was like trying to drive in a downpour on a sunny day. Fathers, mothers, daughters and sons were all buried in that rubble.

I don’t understand how journalists can go through this sort of thing all the time, and I think it’s particularly rough on photographers. As Robert Capa said, "If your images aren't good enough, you're not close enough.” Photojournalists witness a lot of the ugliness in this world.

CHAPTER TWO

While working for United Press International in 1984 I was trying to get a young photographer to transmit scene-setting pictures of a mass murder and hostage situation at a MacDonald’s restaurant near San Diego. The photos were vital to me as reference for drawing my news diagram of the situation. Several calls and several promises had netted only pictures of police, ambulances and, of course, the dead, all useless to me. On my final call to him I was frustrated and expressed my impatience.

That pushed him over the edge. The photographer broke down and sobbed into the phone. He apologized for not fulfilling my request, and said that he definitely would this time around. He described horrid things he’d seen, like a river of blood pouring out the front door of the restaurant and spilling over a curb into the parking lot. Shocked by his heart-rending display of emotion and furious at myself for not realizing what he must have been going through, I told him to forget about my needs until he was ready.

After we hung up I went over to the picture receiver and studied the horrors that he was experiencing. Still vivid in my mind is the photo of a dead boy and his sting-ray bicycle sprawled outside the front door of the restaurant. The child lay there for hours unable to be retrieved because the killer was just inside. By the time the gunman was shot and killed by a police sniper, he had killed 21 people, including five children and six teenagers. I never did get my reference pictures, but from television footage I was able to piece together something simple.

I lay awake in bed that night hearing that photographer’s sobs and seeing, through his nightmarish pictures, what he had seen.

CHAPTER THREE

“Hi Karl. I’m sorry to wake you, but it looks like Alexia was on the plane.”

With those words a news story that I had been covering, the kind of story that had always happened to other people, became intensely real and emotional.

Alexia Tsairis, a photography major, had been our summer intern in 1988. She was murdered on Pan Am flight 103 that was blown up by a terrorist’s bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland. She was one of the many Syracuse University students on the large 747 aircraft returning home from Europe for Christmas and the holidays. The fields around the wreckage were strewn with wrapped gifts that had been in the cargo hold when the bomb blew up.

All of us in the department had covered our share of plane crashes during our careers and when this story broke we dove on it with a vengeance. We worked late into the night and I finally popped over to a nearby hotel to grab a few hours sleep. The phone rang shortly afterward when AP artist Cynthia Greer called with the news about Alexia.

As I lay there in the darkness feeling stunned and grief-stricken itt was impossible to ignore the agonizing image of sweet, brilliant Alexia, so animated and full of life, sitting on that evil plane enjoying her friends and thinking of home and then to wonder what she had seen and felt when the blast occurred. I prayed that she didn’t know what hit her.

http://www.alexiafoundation.org/us.html

Alexia’s mother, Aphrodite, founded the Alexia Foundation to help student photographers make it in this world. She wrote me this year to ask if I would like to attend a student photography exhibit put on by the foundation at the United Nations. We had never met nor communicated before. Her letter began,

“Dear Karl, perhaps you remember my daughter, Alexia…”

I gasped when I read this and felt a squeezing in my chest. Remember her? My head flooded with memories and sadness. I wrote Aphrodite a long letter filled with vivid recollections of Alexia during her summer at AP, describing wonderful moments like when Alexia would plop into a chair in my cubicle, swing her feet confidently up onto my desk and then chat up a storm about her weekend playing volleyball. I tracked down some other people who knew her at AP and they also shared their memories with Aphrodite, too.

Alexia’s mom responded much later, saying in an emotional letter that our memories had shaken her because they had brought Alexia back to her after 18 years. She said that they were a treasured gift because she had never known anything about the professional side of Alexia, the Alexia who worked in an office with grown-ups.

Aphrodite only knew her as her little girl. It’s pretty much the way I knew her, too.

And, I will always remember.