OKLAHOMA CITY -- The open eyes of Timothy McVeigh bother a lot of people in Oklahoma City, but not Paul Howell.

He likes to think that the man who blew up 168 people more than seven years ago -- 19 of them children -- is doomed for eternity to see what his twisted thinking wrought and to know that not only did it not work but made those most affected, like Mr. Howell himself, stronger for the experience.

April 19, 1995, was the day the United States of America learned the true power of terrorism, that a massive, unexpected strike can take place any where at any time, even on a fine spring morning in a place many barely knew existed. It was in Oklahoma City where they also learned that weapons of destruction can seem almost as senseless -- a rented truck filled with fertilizer here, box cutters and airline schedules one year ago in New York and Washington -- as the devastation itself.

Paul Howell believes he watched his daughter Karan, an angel-faced 27-year-old banker with two young daughters, die on television.

He was at home, 120 blocks north and five kilometres west, at 9:02 that morning when Timothy McVeigh, a 32-year-old veteran of the Persian Gulf war, set off an explosion in the back of the rented Ryder truck he had parked in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building where Karan Howell Shepherd worked.

Mr. Howell felt the explosion, but so, too, did people 80 kilometres away. He watched on television as the first images rolled in from a news helicopter and, as he says, "I knew, I just knew."

Six years later, on June 11, 2001, Mr. Howell watched in person as Timothy McVeigh died. He was among 10 survivors and family members selected to witness the execution at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., and stood at the window as Mr. McVeigh was given a lethal injection that prison authorities had assured the witnesses -- including another 232 watching on closed-circuit television back in Oklahoma City -- would cause the convicted terrorist quietly to fall asleep and slip away.

It didn't work. Mr. McVeigh had been defiant from the beginning -- never apologizing -- and remained defiant even beyond the end. He willed himself to scan the windows, even staring at one point into the camera carrying his image back to Oklahoma, and died, eerily, with his eyes wide open.

Mr. Howell had stared back through eyes as clear and blue as the morning of April 19, 1995, had seemed before Mr. McVeigh lit the fuse, inserted earplugs and calmly walked away from the Murrah Building. If Mr. McVeigh could see him, Mr. Howell wanted the murderer to know there was one other tough character in the room, as well.

With his shaved head, pit-bull build and 35 years of army and air force service behind him, Mr. Howell certainly looked the part. Still, he was deeply troubled by the fact that Mr. McVeigh, too, was a military man. "I still can't get over that," he says. "He was brought up in our values."

Mr. McVeigh, in fact, believed himself the ultimate patriot. The right-wing extremist had walked away from his twisted mission wearing a T-shirt with a Thomas Jefferson quote on the back: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

He once told his book collaborator that, as far as he was concerned, the score was "168 to 1" and therefore he was the victor.

He dismissed the 19 children killed as "collateral damage."

"I don't like to see anyone killed," Mr. Howell says.

"But McVeigh was continually in the press saying things like, 'Get over it' and I eventually came to the conclusion that the only way we could get peace and quiet was if we shut him up."

The execution helped, Mr. Howell says, but he found no personal "peace and harmony" until he began volunteer work at the museum that is part of the National Memorial in Oklahoma City. There he is able spend his days surrounded by the trees and reflecting pond that sit where the Murrah Building once stood.

On the lawn sit 168 empty chairs, 19 of them small, with the victim's name carved into the front of each. Three carry two names, signaling women so far along in their pregnancies that they had already named their unborn child.

Sometimes Mr. Howell will step over the small fence and make his way to Karan's chair, where he will simply put his arms around it and hold on for a while.

"She's not here, I know that," he says. "But in a way she will always be here."

He is not alone in feeling this way. The walls are covered in small mementos left by visitors, everything from student cards to licence plates to dream catchers, and survivors' families often come down to sit around the pool and remember. Those who lost children come here to celebrate birthdays that can never be.

National Parks guide Lisa Conard, who has been there from the opening, says the emotions are at times so intense that guides suffer from "compassion fatigue."

She herself was on duty last Oct. 10 when the Kennedy family came down to celebrate Blake's eighth birthday by tying a single small balloon to his small chair. He was two years old when Timothy McVeigh declared him little more than "collateral damage."

"I just lost it," Ms. Conard remembers. Last Sept. 11 Ms. Conard was on a plane about to take off when, suddenly, the airport was closed after the attacks on the World Trade Center. The first person to reach her by cellphone was a survivor of the Oklahoma bombing.

"Let's meet at the memorial," they agreed. By the time they got there, other survivors were already there, and someone was organizing a blood bank for the New York victims. The connection runs deep, even if Mr. McVeigh was a "domestic" terrorist and the Sept. 11 attacks an international assault. The Oklahoma Memorial now includes a special exhibition on Sept. 11 called "A Shared Experience.

Mr. Howell has already travelled four times to New York to help families there come to terms with their tragedy, and he is determined to be there again, Sept. 11.

What he would like the victims of New York, Washington and Pennsylvania to know is that there was no final victory for Mr. McVeigh, and that the lesson that comes out of Oklahoma City is, in fact, quite the reverse of what Mr. McVeigh had intended.

"People need to understand that no matter how terrible the devastation, you have to carry on," he says. "Something like this makes you stronger, not weaker. If you can handle this, you can handle more. I'm stronger this day than I was the day it happened, and that is because he taught us that the most important day of your lives is today, the day you are living. Not tomorrow, not the past -- but today."

And one more thing he would like people to know.

That Timothy McVeigh blinked first.

"There was a tear in one of his eyes," Mr. Howell says. "I was close enough to see.

"And I want people to know that he wasn't nearly as tough as he thought he was."