Oklahoma's Hallowed Ground

It was the morning time stopped in Oklahoma City.

CBS News Correspondent Bob McNamara looks back on that fateful day.

"I don't know what happened. Just a blast," one man said at the time.

A truck bomb tore the nine-story Murrah Federal Building in half.

"It seemed like the whole world ended," a victim said.

Lives, and American illusions of security, were shattered.

Survivor Brian Espy asked in the blast's immediate aftermath, "If somebody did this, what could be their motive with that many innocent people?"

There were 168 people killed, including 19 children in the building's day care center.

Ordinary Americans, who'd gone to work that day as always, never got home again.

And the survivors, especially the children, were scarred by the mindless mayhem, for the rest of their lives.

"P.J.'s condition was so severe that he couldn't be moved," recalls Delores Watson, grandmother of toddler P.J. Allen. He suffered permanent lung damage, third-degree burns, and broken bones.

"It was a long, difficult struggle," Watson adds.

But the little boy, who left the hospital after 45 days, is today an honor student in math and science, who loves bowling and golf, and his grandmother.

"He influences me to tell him there's nothing he can't do, because he does it. He does it," Watson exclaims.Timothy McVeigh was convicted and executed for the bombing. His accomplice, Terry Nichols, is serving life in prison without parole.

And today, inside the Oklahoma City Bombing National Museum, details of that deadly day replay from an audio tape of a nearby meeting that April morning. A woman is heard saying, "receive information regarding…" Then, she's interrupted by a loud, terrible explosion.

In the clock-stopping terror and chaos that followed, lives were altered instantly.

Patti Hall faced 18 surgeries and a decade of therapy after her legs were crushed in the bombing.

Her body is still fragile, but her heart stayed strong as steel.

"It's like my grandmother used to say," she told McNamara. " 'You get yourself up and you get to shining.' So I do."

At the Oklahoma City National Memorial, bronze gates mark the minute before the bombing, and the minute after. Chairs, 168 of them, honor the men, women and children killed that Monday morning at 9:02.

Visitors are invited to leave their own impressions on the bronze gates.

But for many, it's more than a national memorial. It's an acre of heartbreak -- Oklahoma's hallowed ground.