ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 4, 1996 TAG: 9603040060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
ON APRIL 19, 1995, Randy Norfleet paid a visit to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He didn't count on that being a day that would change his life forever.
Randy Norfleet has told his story to network television stations, Newsweek magazine, London and Tokyo newspapers. It will appear in the April issue of Reader's Digest.
Sunday, he stood before the congregation of a small Baptist church in Huddleston, where his brother-in-law is pastor, and told it again.
"I tell it because I think it allows people to actually come to terms with it," he said.
Norfleet, 30, is a survivor of the Oklahoma City bombing.
"I think the bombing affected so many people across the nation that when I speak, when I'm able to talk about what happened to me, it allows closure for a lot of people."
Norfleet's story is wrapped in coincidences, what-ifs, luck and blessings. He calls his story "encompassing."
He was Capt. Randy Norfleet of the U.S. Marine Corps on April 19, 1995, a pilot who'd flown 35 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm. He was stationed in Stillwater, Okla., about an hour and a half northeast of Oklahoma City, as an "Officer Selection Officer" who recruited college students to become Marine Corps officers.
Norfleet got up about 4 a.m. on April 19. He was traveling to Oklahoma City that morning for a leadership prayer breakfast. His wife, Jamie, had noted how weary he was and suggested that perhaps he should skip it.
But he went and sat down to a breakfast of food and prayer with a group of men. After the breakfast, he decided to stop by to see his boss at the Marine recruiting office in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
Norfleet said he drove up to the northwest side of the building and stopped at a stop light before parking. He noticed a yellow Ryder truck in a loading zone.
"As I was sitting at the stop sign, it kind of struck me that it was weird for a truck to be in front of the building, in the loading zone, when there were plenty of empty parking spaces," Norfleet said. "That zone was usually empty."
He parked right in front of the Ryder truck. He walked into the building. The elevator door was open. He rode up to the sixth-floor Marine office.
As Norfleet walked in, he ran into a young sergeant, an operations clerk whom he'd been helping get into a Marine Corps officer training school in Quantico, Va. A commissioning selection board had met but hadn't yet posted the names of those who'd been accepted, Norfleet said.
He sat down at a desk and called the selection board's office in Washington. The line was busy.
Norfleet told the sergeant that he would call back in five minutes. Norfleet walked over to a cubicle about 10 feet away. Another Marine captain - Randy Guzman - sat down at the desk where Norfleet had been and used the same phone to make a call.
"At that time, the bomb went off," Norfleet said. "I hadn't been in the building two to three minutes.
"I was sitting in a chair facing the front of the building, which was made of glass. When the bomb went off, it sounded like a hurricane. I also heard a supersonic crack, like a rifle crack. What I saw was like putting your office in a blender and turning it on 'Whip.' Desks were flying everywhere. Chairs were flying everywhere."
Norfleet was thrown into a wall. He was knocked unconscious. He came to about the same time as others in the office. Most of the floor was intact, but the place in front of where he'd been sitting was gone.
"If I hadn't gotten blown out of the way, I'd have probably fallen into that pit and had floors crumble on top of me," Norfleet said.
Norfleet was injured, but he didn't realize how badly. Two Marines stretched him out him on top of a desk. One gave Norfleet his shirt to wrap around his bleeding head. They asked him to lie still. But Norfleet told them he wanted to get out of the building, he said.
They helped him down a back stairwell, put him in an ambulance and took him to a hospital a half-mile away. Norfleet said he "pretty much walked straight into surgery."
He has no idea how.
His blood pressure was 50/0. Glass had cut three major arteries - in his forehead, cheek and wrist. A shard of glass had split his right eye open. He had a fractured skill and broken nose. He had lost 50 percent of his blood in 10 minutes.
"If I'd stayed in the building, I would have died there. That's what my medical report showed," Norfleet said. "They brought me back to life with fluid resuscitation."
Norfleet was in the hospital for three days, in a room with windows shattered by the blast. He lost sight in his right eye.
Norfleet remembers the first questions he asked his wife: What had happened to his eye, and what had happened to the sergeant and Capt. Guzman?
Both the sergeant and Guzman were killed. Rescuers found Guzman four days after the bombing, still seated at the desk holding the phone.
Norfleet received a disability discharge from the Marines. "I was a pilot. And they need one-eyed pilots just about as much as they need one-eyed referees," he said.
Norfleet, his wife and three children have moved to Dallas, where he works for a telecommunications test-equipment company. He had been at the company's headquarters in Germantown, Md., and came down to Huddleston on Friday to spend the weekend with his sister and brother-in-law, Shawna Davis and the Rev. Daren Davis.
"Triumph through tragedy," was the message Norfleet gave to members of the Mentow Baptist Church.
"Is the glass half full or half empty?'' he said. "When life deals you lemons, do you make lemonade or do you fall apart? Am I unfortunate to be blind in my right eye, or am I lucky to be alive?''
"The tragedy that happened to me is no worse than tragedy that happens to others," said Norfleet, who will be a government witness at the bombing trial in Denver. "The only difference is we were on national television and it was an event that seared the nation's consciousness."
LENGTH: Long : 115 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/Staff. Randy Norfleet, a captain in the U.S.by CNBMarine Corps the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, tells a Baptist
congregation in Huddleston on Sunday that his experience was no more
harsh than the tragedy other Americans
encounter. color.