HARVARD'S HERO

Every American who heard about the April 19 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oaklahoma City reacted differently. Some people cried and prayed. Others shook their heads at the senselessness of the violence.

Thirty-year-old Andrew James Kluttz did something more.

A Harvard security guard and former marine, Kluttz was at home when he first heard the news of the bombing. For a while he sat transfixed by the continuous images of horror that came into his living room via CNN.

Nothing Kluttz had seen in his military or security careers--not even the 1983 terrorist attack on marines in Beirut--had been as terrible as the Oklahoma disaster.

"Around 1 a.m., after watching CNN, I thought: I was going," Kluttz recalls. "I was so moved. I saw the video footage. It was just too much to do nothing, to go about my business like nothing, to go about my business like nothing had happened."

Believing that his knowledge of CPR and first-aid would allow him to contribute to the rescue effort, Kluttz headed for Logan International Airport.

Kluttz says he was also motivated by the memory of the bombing of the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut that occurred while he was stationed off-shore there on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John F. Kennedy. Two hundred and forty-one U.S. service personnel were killed in the October 1983 blast.

"Being a Beirut veteran, I thought my country was calling," he says.

Following Instinct

The morning following the Oklahoma explosion, Kluttz went to Logan Airport and bought a ticket on United for the next flight to Oklahoma City. He was to become one of the volunteers flying in from all over the world to help the search effort.

Kluttz says he never called ahead to see if volunteers were needed. He just followed his instinct.

"I was just winging it. I had a lot of faith that I'd be taken care of," he says.

At the airport in Oklahoma City, Kluttz hailed an airport express van. The shuttle driver drove him to the devastated building. Despite the security checks around the area and the fact that prior clearance, Kluttz was allowed to go directly to the Red Cross area.

Despair and Hope

In the shadow of the bombed-out building disaster, Kluttz describes what he called a scene of heart-warming humanitarian gestures.

He recounts a story of one woman who was working on the search effort while a relative was missing. After she found out her relative was dead, she continued to aid in the effort.

"The next day she showed up again," Kluttz says. "Who can't be inspired by that?"

But Kluttz also talked of many heart-wrenching stories from his work in Oklahoma.

On Sunday, Kluttz says he visited some family members of the missing at St. Luke's Church. He brought stuffed animals to some of the younger members to console them.

To one particular 15-year old girl, he gave a stuffed Fozzy Bear doll.

"As I was leaving, she came running over and she said `Good luck finding my mother." All I could say was `I'll try."

Logistics Duty

Kluttz was assigned to work at the Red Cross command center for logistics located only three blocks from the bombed out building.

"Within hours of [my] arriving, they just handed me a clipboard," Kluttz said. "They told me to go on the news and make pleas to the nation for supplies. I couldn't even finish the interview without people calling in."

Kluttz says he worked at a warehouse through which all supplies for the relief effort went.

"Everything from the nation and around the world was coming to our warehouse," Kluttz says. "I knew if we messed this up, it would either slow or halt the operation."

While the job of talking to reporters that Kluttz assumed at times might seem glamorous, in return for being able to make his plea on TV, he says he constantly had to answer the same two questions.

"They all asked: `Has morale died?' and `Have you given up hope of finding people alive?'" he says.

Kluttz says he got sick of answering the same questions so many times so he wrote his answer on his rain coat.

"I wrote on my rain jacket, `Hope springs eternal,'" Kluttz says.

When yet another reporter asked him the same questions, Kluttz said "look at my jacket, read it and report it. This is what we feel about that."

The reporter turned to the camera and said "There you have it folks. Hope springs eternal here in Oklahoma City."

In spite of the help they gave in the pleas for supplies, Kluttz criticized hordes of media that converged on Oklahoma City.

"It's like these people are disaster groupies who aren't doing productive stuff. They're like the Partridge family," Kluttz says. "Sometimes I'd just lean over and say `Didn't I see you at O.J.'"

Having been at the scene of the disaster, Kluttz says he hopes officials do not release video footage of the nursery when rescue workers reach it. Officials announced yesterday that they had begun work at excavating the nursery and social security office, some of the areas most devastated by the blast.

Eerie quiet

Kluttz said one of the most unsettling aspects of the whole rescue effort in Oklahoma City was its remarkable quiet.

"There's an eerie silence. You don't really talk much because there's work to do," he recounts.

The silence, however, was not all that surprising considering the monumentally morbid task at hand.

According to Kluttz, the ordeal rescue workers faced was so traumatic that many would not go into the mass of steel and concrete without a chaplain.

Kluttz says he was particularly struck by the gruesome process of identifying the bodies, especially those of children. Since in many cases rescuers could find only pieces of bodies, some had to go to homes to do things like lift finger prints off of cribs so that identifications could be made.

According to Kluttz the rescue work was draining, even for search and rescue dogs.

"They are under psychologica: duress. They come out just wanting to lick everyone like puppies," he says of the usually ferocious canines. "Once they sensed that they didn't find what they were looking for, they felt like they had failed their owners. [The owners] would enact phony successful rescues to try to cheer them up."

The rescue exacted a physical toll on the dogs as well as they needed bandaging on their paws from the glass, concrete and nails they climbed over, Kluttz said.

Financial Considerations

Unlike some airlines, United was not allowing rescuers to fly for free. While good Samaritans flying on Southwest and other airlines got free tickets, Kluttz paid for his full fare.

Sandra Campbell, a spokesperson for United Airlines said that free plane rides were being given out according to the Red Cross' needs.

"United is participating through the local Red Cross. You'll have to talk to them to find out specifics," she said.

Vita Poole, a representative of the local Red Cross chapter, said that they were not giving people free plane rides to Oklahoma because they had not been asked for volunteers.

"The way it works is the local Red Cross chapter makes an assessment of what their needs are from the other chapters," she said. "In the case we were not asked to provide volunteers."

In order to become a volunteer, Kluttz needed time off from his job at Harvard.

He departed at 6:15 a.m. Thursday morning. He had Thursday and Friday off from his job as a University guard and called his supervisor at Harvard, Deanno Bavarro, Friday afternoon to ask if he could take of the weekend without pay. Bavarro allowed him the time off and told him to tell the director of security, Calvin Cantor, on Monday.

Cantor did not return repeated calls yesterday and no information could be obtained on whether the guard would actually be docked the two days pay.

According to Kluttz, though, the department has been very supportive of his decision.

"When I showed up on Monday everybody knew," Kluttz says. "This is a police department. They knew exactly what I was doing."

If money had not been an issue, however, Kluttz says he would have stayed as long as he could be of service.

Now, Kluttz is back at work and has resumed his daily routine. Still, he says, his life will never be the same.

"I don't know whether I'll be able to deal with this in the long run," Kluttz says.

As emotionally trying as the work in Oklahoma City was, Kluttz said leaving was even harder.

"If I didn't have to come back here and pay my rent, I never would have left," he says. "I'm sorry that I had to leave."

"By the time on I got to Chicago [a stop on his Sunday return trip to Boston], I couldn't even look at little children. Everything felt like I was on another planet," Kluttz says.

And since he got home, he said dealing with his time in Oklahoma City has not gotten any easier.

"I've had a very hard time turning it on the TV for any length of time. The only reason I turn it on is that I hope to see they found someone alive."