THE south shore of Long Island used to be Indian country but now there is just a small Shinnecock reservation, safely screened from the Great Gatsby style mansions looking over the ocean and the westward flight path from Kennedy Airport.
It's a fun place in the summer around the Moriches and the Ramptons where people laze on the beach, sail, fish and dance the nights away. And then TWA flight 800 exploded one evening two weeks ago and shattered the summer dreams.
As the editorial in the local South Shore Press put it this week, local people were unsuspecting, for who could imagine a transcontinental jet exploding right over our heads, killing so many people, especially in America, where terrorism is not supposed to exist?"
This July has seen the American people painfully emerge from a state of denial about the threat of terrorism. As the country grieved over the 230 victims of flight 800, a crude pipe bomb marred what was to be a glorious celebration of the centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, "the city too busy to hate".
Even as the broken bodies continued to be dragged from the depths off Moriches by divers who described it like "being lowered into hell", the trial of Ramzi Yousef in nearby New York for plotting to blow up American passenger planes over the Pacific entered its eighth week. The blind Sheikh Oman Abdel Rahman is serving life in a New Jersey prison for plotting to blow up the New York Trade Centre and the UN headquarters.
More than 20 US military personnel have been killed in the past year by terrorist bombs in Saudi Arabia, which they are protecting against Iraqi aggression. US diplomats say anti American feeling is running at frightening levels in parts of the Middle East.
Americans, like those out in Long Island, want to be loved. Now there are faceless foreigners who hate them and have the means to strike. "Who wishes us ill?" asked Time magazine in an article on terrorism, and then went on to list them.
This threat from international terrorism is unsettling enough, but Americans are also trying to come to terms with the threat from within. The bomb in Oklahoma city which killed 183 people last year was not planted by the foreign enemies of the US but the internal ones.
Timothy McVeigh, a member of one of the proliferating "patriot" militias is facing trial for the bombing.
Meanwhile, Ted Kaczynski is on trial, accused of being the "Unabomer" involved in murderous parcel bomb attacks.
And in Atlanta the FBI, apparently egged on by an unstoppable media frenzy, has been searching the apartment and holiday cabin of a suspect for the Atlanta bombing there who is none other than the security guard "hero" who raised the alarm over the device.
How are Americans reacting to these assaults? A CNN/Gallup poll this week showed that 90 per cent believe it is "very likely or somewhat likely" that bombings or similar acts of violence will "occur elsewhere in the United States in the near future". But 53 per cent oppose "radical changes in everyday life" if that is what is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks.
When thousands flocked to the Centennial Park in Atlanta for its re opening after the bomb which killed two people and injured more than 100, a distinguished native son, Andrew Young, said they were there "not to wallow in tragedy but to celebrate a triumph of the human spirit". A gospel choir sang The Power Of The Dream.
So the American dream still survives, but it has been more like a nightmare for the relatives of the flight 800 victims who gathered at the Ramada Hotel at Kennedy Airport over the past few weeks waiting for news of the bodies of their loved ones. An Irishwoman and her daughter were among the victims. As the strains grew, the relatives' situation was described in one headline as a "circle in a second ring of hell" as they were thrown together for days and nights, reading media accounts of the horrific last moments of the victims falling from 13,000 feet.
TWA was criticised for delaying the release of passenger names. The Long Island pathologist was attacked for the slow pace of identification. The government agencies were accused of being more interested in recovering wreckage than bodies as the FBI all but announced there had been sabotage.
The FBI assistant director and Vietnam veteran, Jim Kallstrom, is the man who retrieved the Duchess of York's jewels when they went missing between New York and London. Now he searches bodies and aircraft parts for signs of the criminal act he seems certain was committed.
Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, both Republican party politicians, rushed to the Ramada to assure the relatives that the recovery of their loved ones was the priority. Extra resources appeared.
PRESIDENT Clinton, the acknowledged master of consoling the grief stricken, flew to New York with his wife Hillary and spoke healing words to the relatives, who were genuinely touched. At Kennedy Airport he announced new security measures for US airlines and airports despite an absence of conclusive evidence that the TWA crash bad been sabotaged.
After the Atlanta bombing, the president called for the revival of anti terrorist measures which the Republican majority in Congress had earlier opposed, particularly the tagging of explosives to allow them to be traced and wider telephone tapping powers for the police.
The powerful gun lobby, the National Rifle Association, had boasted how it had successfully stopped the tagging proposal. It claimed the tagging would have endangered gun owners who like to make their own bullets because the identification tags could make the explosives unstable.
The wider phone tapping powers were opposed by both civil libertarians and conservative groups. The eternal debate about how far you should go to limit freedom and how much expense is justified to combat the terrorist, re surfaced in the editorial columns.
The conservative USA Today commented: "Congress just recognised that you can only spend so much money and sacrifice so much freedom before you defeat yourself. In a free society you cannot anticipate the actions of every lunatic. You must try of course."
The newspaper concluded that "Inevitably, the war against terrorism will be won not by wiretaps and appropriations but by the people who reject terrorism's cruel intimidations. Like the people of Atlanta."
The liberal New York Times acknowledged that "we seem to be back in a storm surge of violence" and referred to Northern Ireland and the Middle East as well as domestic examples. President Clinton also pondered aloud about developments in Northern Ireland at one of his engagements.
Speaking to disabled veterans just after the Atlanta bombing, Clinton speculated about the root causes of terrorism around the world - Bosnia, Burundi, Middle East and Northern Ireland - where people get up each day "defining themselves in terms of who they can hate, who they can look down on, who they can hurt".
He pointed to Northern Ireland, where there had been peace for 17 months, to illustrate his point. "When Hillary and I went there, we were mobbed by Catholic and Irish [sic] young people alike, saying, `We love peace; we don't want to go back to war'."
"What happened?" the president asked. "Because throughout history there has been an atrocious tendency among human beings to give in to racial, ethnic, religious and tribal hatred."
Whatever the cause, for the small town of Montoursville in rural Pennsylvania, the TWA crash was a cruel blow. The local school's French club had sent 16 teenagers with five adult chaperones to Paris for an educational tour, the pupils saving for the trip by doing odd jobs and holding sales of work. They have been coming back in coffins and the small community will probably never fully recover from the trauma.
For the relatives of victims whose bodies have not yet been recovered and may never be there is further anguish. As Max Dadi, brother of the French musician Marcel who died in the crash, protested: "We don't care about what caused everything. We want our bodies."
There will be no recovery of loved ones for the relatives of 49 of the 110 people killed in the horrific Everglades crash on May 11th. This week, unidentified remains were divided among 46 coffins and given a communal burial as mourners caressed each casket in hopes of saying goodbye to their relative.
The Everglades crash was caused not by terrorism but by an explosion of oxygen canisters carried as cargo, but the continual TV images of funeral services and coffins of crash victims are disturbing in a country where flying is part of everyday life for so many.
False bomb scares have been disrupting rail journeys as well as flights which are being forced to turn back for searching. There is an edginess in American airports which extra security cannot erase.
The director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, testified on Thursday to a Congressional committee about terrorism. He offered no comfort. US interests at home and abroad would "continue to be under attack", he said. This "does not augur well for the future".