On the morning after the Atlanta Olympic bombing, I walked in a warm drizzle from the old newspaper building on Marietta Street to the Five Points MARTA station to see for myself.
I’d been up all night working to get out the paper bearing the awful news. In the harsh fluorescent hum of the newsroom, I had watched the TV images of the explosion and the chaos that followed. Just a short walk from my desk, Centennial Olympic Park was stained with blood.
The park was the single greatest gift of the Atlanta Olympics. It was inspired by the broad open plazas of Barcelona, which filled with jubilant people during the ’92 Games. The park had become the heart of our Olympics. So, where else would a terrorist strike?
In the hours after the bombing, everyone wondered whether the Games would, or should, go on. More darkly, they wondered if life would go on in the same way.
In the weeks since the Boston bombing I’ve been thinking a lot about those days in the summer of 1996. Boston was a shocking echo of Atlanta: Someone had planted bombs meant to kill innocent people gathered to celebrate one of life’s great triumphs.
What terrorists never seem to learn is that life resumes. People carry on. I’ve seen this time and time again.
Two years after the Atlanta bombing, I was dispatched to a sweet little village in Northern Ireland called Omagh. Earlier in the day, a bright summer market day, a 450-pound car bomb exploded, injuring 220 and killing 29, including a woman who was pregnant with twins. At the time I was based in London, where I was the European correspondent for the Cox Newspapers chain. The Omagh terrorists also seemed bent on maiming or killing as many ordinary people as possible.
Early the next day, a Sunday, I wandered the town assessing the damage and looking for people to interview. The dust and smoke had already been pierced by rays of defiance as the townsfolk made their way to church. In an instant, it was clear Omagh would carry on.
A few months after 9/11, I went to New York as a tourist and toured the still smoldering World Trade Center site by water. The guide recalled the horrible days when his boat and others were suddenly employed as rescue crafts. The deck was silent as he recounted the dreadful and heroic service. The Broadway shows my family and I attended that weekend were filled with audiences that seemed to perform some shared, unspoken duty.
I wonder what the men who commandeered American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 would make of those audiences?
And in 2005 I flew from Atlanta to cover the terrorist strike on the London Underground. Once again, the response was defiance. I keep thinking of Lucy Bailey, the 83-year-old pensioner who was riding the Tube in the days after the bombing. She recalled 1940, when German planes rained incendiary bombs on the city. “I think about that every time I board the Underground,” she told me, serenely, almost sweetly. “Mr. Churchill said we would have business as usual in London, business as usual,” she said. “It was a way of fighting back, wasn’t it?”
Yes. That’s what you do after these things. You fight back by carrying on. We all know that now. In Boston, we can expect next year’s marathon to be the biggest and most glorious ever.
But in the summer of 1996, terrorism was still a shapeless monster to most of us. I’m not sure we had yet comprehended its utter futility.
Before dawn, Olympics officials said the Games would go on. But would the people return?
Less than eight hours after the bombing, I waited outside the Five Points station. The rain paused.
Eventually, at the crest of the escalator railing, I saw the tip of a ball cap. A couple of men stepped off. Behind them, a young family — parents and three small children, one in a stroller — heading toward the Olympic stadium (now the Ted) for track-and-field events.
I wouldn’t have blamed them if they had stayed home, but here they were, ordinary people carrying on in an act of quiet defiance, even courage. I hope they were at the stadium to see American Gail Devers and Canadian Donovan Bailey win their gold medals.
And I hope that Eric Rudolph, Atlanta’s terrorist coward, was sitting in front of a TV somewhere, taking it all in.
