Timothy McVeigh - Post-military Life

Post-military Life

After leaving the army in 1992, McVeigh grew increasingly transient. At first he worked briefly near his hometown of Pendleton as a security guard, where he sounded off daily to his co-worker Carl Lebron, Jr. about his loathing for government. Deciding the Buffalo area was too liberal, he left his job and began driving around America, seeking out his old friends from the Army.

McVeigh wrote letters to local newspapers complaining about taxes:

Taxes are a joke. Regardless of what a political candidate "promises," they will increase. More taxes are always the answer to government mismanagement. They mess up. We suffer. Taxes are reaching cataclysmic levels, with no slowdown in sight. Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that. But it might.

McVeigh also wrote to Representative John J. LaFalce ((D) New York), complaining about the arrest of a woman for carrying mace:

It is a lie if we tell ourselves that the police can protect us everywhere at all times. Firearms restrictions are bad enough, but now a woman can't even carry Mace in her purse?

It is claimed that while visiting friends in Decker, Michigan, McVeigh complained that the Army had implanted a microchip into his buttocks so that the government could keep track of him.

The long hours in a dead-end job, the feeling that he did not have a home and his failure to establish a relationship with a woman brought McVeigh to the breaking point. He sought romance, but was rejected by a co-worker and still felt nervous around women. He felt he brought too much pain to his loved ones. He grew angry and frustrated at his difficulties in finding a girlfriend and took up obsessive gambling. Unable to pay back gambling debts, he took a cash advance and then defaulted on his repayments. He then began looking for a state without heavy government regulation or high taxes. He became enraged when the government informed him that he had been overpaid $1,058 while in the army and he would need to pay back the money. He wrote an angry letter to the government inviting them to:

Go ahead, take everything I own; take my dignity. Feel good as you grow fat and rich at my expense; sucking my tax dollars and property.

McVeigh introduced his sister to anti-government literature, but his father had little interest in these views. He moved out of his father's house and into an apartment that had no telephone, which had the advantage of making it impossible for his employer to contact him for overtime assignments. He also quit the NRA, viewing its stance on gun rights to be too weak.