By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

"THIS ISN'T AMERICA, this can't be America," Sam Gwynne remembers thinking as he arrived in Oklahoma City on the afternoon of its darkest day. But it was, and Gwynne, Time's Austin bureau chief, was the first of six Time correspondents converging on Oklahoma City from all parts of the country (backed by two dozen others elsewhere) to report this week's unusually disturbing cover package. All had seen death before; each was nonetheless shaken by the enormity of the Oklahoma tragedy. Says correspondent Ann Simmons: "You can't become inured to suffering on this scale."

Sam Allis, our Boston bureau chief, examined the atrocity's wider repercussions: "It was not until a Muslim student at Oklahoma University told me he feared for his life that I realized the bombing would hurt different people in different ways." Correspondent Ed Barnes' hunch that the terrorists might this time prove to be American was cinched when he learned the birth date that was cited on the fake driver's license used to rent the bomber's truck: April 19. Barnes recognized the date as one that is near talismanic to the survivalist fringe he had observed while reporting on the Michigan Militia, a group we wrote about in our Dec. 19 issue last year. In fact, the subjects of the FBI's investigation turned out to have links to that very group. Barnes, who spent time with the Irish Republican Army bomb crafters in 1986, notes that for all the death the I.R.A. sowed, "there was nothing like this."

Correspondent Pat Cole obtained one of only two interviews granted by the family of Baylee Almon, the one-year-old infant whose picture, taken as she lay cradled in a fireman's arms, has become an icon of national trauma. Cole, who usually reports for Time out of Los Angeles, has interviewed survivors of earthquake, fire and anarchy. "The only way to talk to people in that state is to let them know you have total sympathy for them," he says. "In this case, believe me, it wasn't hard."