All-American boy and decorated war hero who turned his hate to carnage

The opening lines of The Turner Diaries by former American Nazi Party official William Pierce could be an epitaph for Timothy McVeigh.

"Today it finally began. After all these years of talking - and nothing but talking - we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the System and it is no longer a war of words."

McVeigh would like that. The hero of this virulently racist, apocalyptic novel describes how he is proud to be going out to sacrifice himself for the white revolution in an attack that assures him of "immortality".

But McVeigh, who used to hawk The Turner Diaries around the gun shows of the US, will find no such solace. Few will grieve for his passing, scheduled for next Wednesday but postponed until June 11th to allow his lawyers consider the relevance, if any, of some documents which the FBI failed to give them at the time of his trial.

Ultimately, however, McVeigh seems certain to be put to death, by his hated Federal Government. The polls show that of those who oppose the death penalty, 38 per cent think the US's most prolific murderer should be executed.

Six years after he planted the bomb at Oklahoma's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people, the then fertile ground of survivalism, separatism and militias, armed gangs preparing themselves for the coming onslaught on freedom from a malign communist inspired state, is a barren soil.

The number of active militia groups has plummeted from 858 in 1996 to 194 last year. The number of active militia groups quadrupled in the year after the Oklahoma bomb, with Time Magazine estimating then that upwards of 12 million Americans "respond to the patriot rhetoric about a sinister, out-of-control federal bureaucracy".

The 33-year-old McVeigh epitomised that fanatical upswing, and today, in its ebb, his extremism is all the more inexplicable to a country whose majority genuinely believes it has all the answers. How could this very ordinary, all-American, decorated Gulf War hero turn on them so treacherously?

The McVeighs are Irish-American, Catholic, solid working-class stock from northern New York State near Buffalo. Bill McVeigh worked for General Motors, while his wife, Mickey, supplemented the meagre family income as a travel agent.

The couple, who produced two daughters and a son, Timothy, had an uneasy marriage which Mickey walked out on twice, finally when her son was 16. She took the girls while he stayed with his father, with whom he had an awkward relationship, preferring the company of his grandfather, Ed.

It was a dysfunctional family, but no more so than many. Tim coped by retreating into fantasy, nurturing his growing interest in guns and survivalism. He is intelligent, but a local college scholarship was of no interest, and after working as a security guard he joined the army in 1988, where he shone. A model soldier and crack shot, he often used his spare time to enhance his fitness and drill.

Many of his bewildered fellow soldiers would later pay tribute to him at his trial. He saved the life of one comrade in combat, was the most skilled Bradley (an armoured personnel carrier) gunner in the unit, was decorated several times and promoted to sergeant faster than most. But McVeigh's cherished hope to join the elite Green Berets special forces was dashed when he returned from the Gulf War too exhausted and unfit to pass their demanding test.

Disappointment blended with a growing conviction that the state was intrinsically evil and was preparing to deprive him of his Second Amendment rights, the right to bear arms. Survivalist stories of a world conspiracy, orchestrated by the UN, to create global government and a single world currency began to take hold. Disillusioned, he quit the army in 1991, hoping that his decorated service record would open doors to work, but it was not to be. From then until his arrest McVeigh would live largely off the proceeds of some security work and selling at the many gun fairs his anti-state Tshirts, stickers and books.

His growing rage against the system turned to a determination to do something about it following the shooting dead by the FBI of the wife and son of Randy Weaver, a separatist, in a siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992.

A year later he would travel to Waco in Texas to watch the siege of the farm of the Branch Davidians and their leader, David Koresh. When the building was stormed a fire killed 80 people, 22 of them children.

The raid horrified the far right, confirming their worst fears about the state, and McVeigh pledged, in the words of his favourite song Bad Company, to return "dirty for dirty".

He picked the Oklahoma federal building as his target carefully, rejecting alternatives of assassination of either the attorney general, Janet Reno, or individual FBI or ATF agents. The Murrah building housed a crosssection of state agencies. The body count would be higher.

"I didn't define the rules of engagement in this conflict," he would say later, controversially describing the deaths of children as collateral damage. He has never apologised, nor will he, despite the recent entreaty from his distraught father. John R. Smith, a psychiatrist who examined McVeigh for 25 hours in 1995, insists he is not mad though deeply depressed and singularly focused.

"I'm sorry, but he is not evil," he told the Washington Post, speaking with McVeigh's consent. "This was an isolated incident which occurred because he was an idealistic young man. He was determined to broadcast to the world his belief that the federal government had become excessively oppressive and deceitful."

But he insists that McVeigh does not suffer from "cognitive defects or psychiatric illness".

Smith links McVeigh's actions to his growing isolation, first from family, then from army, drifting directionless around the country. "It became easier to act because he had nothing. He needed an enemy. This whole project was his antidepressant."

However, part of the McVeigh enigma is the deeply American willingness, as the Queen tells Alice, to believe six impossible things before breakfast, whether that be the infallibility of the US or its antithesis, believed with a black and white certainty. In December McVeigh ended all legal attempts to avoid the death penalty.

As he awaits his execution he sits in his cell, reading newspaper clippings, writing letters and watching a small television. He has instructed his lawyers to say nothing about his final days or final wishes until after his death.

He has selected five of his permitted six witnesses. They include two lawyers, his biographer, Lou Michel, and the writer Gore Vidal, an ardent opponent of the death penalty who will describe the execution in Vanity Fair. No priest or family will be present.

There is no doubt he will be remembered. But it will not be as he wished.