Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

by Wendy S. Painting

Mark Hamm, criminologist at Indiana State University and former consultant for the Jones Team, wrote that the Army’s COHORT experiment provided the “mechanism” and “most important source of indirect support for the terrorism that would later occur in Oklahoma.” In fact, he said, the conspiracy to bomb the Murrah building could not have gotten off to a better start had it been orchestrated by the “best and brightest at the Pentagon.” In Hamm’s opinion, “there would have been no conspiracy” without the COHORT program, for it was in Basic Training that Timothy McVeigh met Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, who would become Tim’s closest friends and, later, his co-conspirators.2 All three had enlisted on the same day in different states: McVeigh in New York, Nichols in Michigan, Fortier in Arizona; they were assigned to the COHORT Unit and placed together in a six-man squad.