Nothing could prepare you for it. The scenes in Omagh on Saturday afternoon were the worst I have ever witnessed during the Troubles. Wherever you looked, there was bloodshed and mutilation.
If even one of the tales of suffering had happened, it would have been horrific.
The pregnant woman blown to bits.
The 18-month-old baby killed.
The little boy who lost his legs.
The woman who lost a leg and an arm.
The staff in one shop who were virtually wiped out.
The mother and daughter out shopping who never came home. The Spanish tourists enjoying Irish hospitality blown away.
The teenager who left her mother and grandmother in the shop to see what all the commotion was about and never returned.
But for all these things to happen in one moment, in one day, in one town was beyond belief. No words could ever adequately describe it, could convey the pain and grief and suffering.
It was the very ordinariness of the day in Omagh before the bomb that was the most touching. The men in the pub watching the football. The teenage girls shopping for clothes and make-up. The women gossiping in the coffee shop. The mothers dragging reluctant children into town for school uniforms.
The awful thing was the innocence of the people. How those evacuated from High Street walked into Market Street thinking they were safe. How no one suspected they were walking into danger.
After 3.10 p.m. ordinary life in Omagh was blown into kingdom come. Survivors said there was a moment of silence and then screaming. Video footage shows those who could still move walking dazed through the street.
Young men in Celtic jerseys wandering around aimlessly. So great was the carnage that people did not even know where to begin to help. But they got themselves together and frantically searched through the rubble.
Human beings lay buried beneath huge slabs of concrete. It was the bravery of the injured that was most impressive. People with blood streaming down their faces refusing treatment, wanting to help those still trapped.
There were so many small cameos of dignity.
The dead were lifted to the side of the road - curtains, blankets and sheets placed lovingly over them.
But as one eyewitness said, it wasn't the sight of the dead which was most horrific, it was the sight of the living. The people whose limbs had been torn from them but who had somehow survived, their suffering only beginning.
It was pathetic watching men and women struggle in the face of the enormity of the carnage. The makeshift stretchers of car boots and doors which were so inadequate.
The hairdresser searching the streets for his clients. He had cut their hair that afternoon, surely they couldn't be dead?
The British army barracks turned into a temporary morgue.
The dead and dying lying on mattresses in the corridors of Tyrone County Hospital where Father John Gilmore administered the Last Rites.
The porters wiping the blood from the trollies only for them to be drenched red again in another few minutes.
The families in the hospital who could not find their loved ones and were trying to cling to hope, arguing that maybe such-and-such hadn't gone into town and they should ring home to see if he was there.
The rubble was littered with hands, arms and legs.
But it wasn't just the accounts of this which overpowered the emotions. It was the twisted and broken pram which sat in the middle of the road.
The packet of disposable nappies at the side of the street.
The pair of glasses in the debris.
The remnants of handbags women had dropped in panic or which had been blown from their hands. It was unimaginable to believe that these objects might have survived without their owners.
"Our wee town has become famous for all the wrong reasons," one man said. It is the worst atrocity in the history of the Troubles - 28 dead and more than 200 injured but even the statistics can't convey the full horror. It's still impossible to believe that this happened.
"I'm going home tonight to pray we will all waken tomorrow from this bad dream," one man said.