From where I stood, outside the fence, I couldn’t see the ground floor of the Israeli building, which had in recent hours been blocked from view by large blue shields—perhaps bulletproof ones. A few people were visible in the doorway of 33 Connollystrasse (the quarters of Dahomey and Zambia), on our side of the shields, among them the mayor of the Olympic Village, Walter Troeger, who in that very morning’s community paper had lectured his constituents—in an item written before the Arab incursion—on the impropriety of inviting unauthorized visitors into the theoretically well-secured enclave. At 4:47 p.m., thirteen minutes short of the terrorists’ current time limit, ten men in variously colored sweatsuits appeared and ran around to the rear of the beleaguered Israeli building. They looked like athletes, but they were all carrying submachine guns. After a moment, two of them could be seen scrambling over the roof and the balconies of the Dahomey-Zambia building and then ducking into the rear of the crucial No. 31. It seemed reasonable to infer that if the Arabs began shooting hostages there would be quick retaliation. But nothing happened at five. I hung around the scene for a couple of hours longer, until sunset, and then, since nobody there seemed to know anything, and still nothing more had happened, I decided to return to the press center. Along the way, I saw another ten men, sweatsuited and unarmed, jogging around a practice track, while, not far beyond them, a cluster of Germans with tickets to a volleyball game in their hands were arguing with a door tender, who was trying to explain to them that the game would not be played as scheduled and that it really wasn’t his fault. Back at the press center, I noticed that during the tense afternoon someone had posted a notice on a bulletin board informing me that although I had lost out on a drawing for a boxing ticket, I did have one for the basketball semifinals.

Willi Daume, the head of the German Olympic Committee, stopped by the center shortly after nine to tell us a little, but not much, about the delicate negotiations. “The Olympic movement should not surrender to terrorists,” he said. He couldn’t answer any questions, because he had to rush off to an emergency meeting of the International Olympic Committee. The Soviet Union issued a statement condemning acts of terrorism.

I returned to the Olympic Village vantage point a few minutes after ten, just in time to see three helicopters whirl into the black sky on their ill-fated hop to the Fürstenfeldbruck military airfield. At ten-forty-eight, back at the press center, Hans Klein, whose unenviable task it had been all along to handle the world’s press, told us, ashen-faced, that there had been shooting at Fürstenfeldbruck. For the next two hours, Klein periodically reported what he knew, or thought he knew—that all the Arabs were dead; that all the hostages had escaped; and, at twelve-twenty-five, that the earlier news had been too optimistic. Then be revealed that one policeman and three terrorists were dead, one helicopter was aflame, the fate of the hostages was unknown, and—it was now twelve-fifty, and a speaker for the Bavarian State Government was on television—there were people lying beneath one helicopter or another, identity unclear. Everything unclear. I went to bed, and learned the stark news by radio at seven the next morning. Just who killed whom and why remains unclear sixty hours later, but yesterday afternoon two officials of the German government and the head of the Munich police tried to straighten things out by holding a press conference, at which they conceded that German sharpshooters at the airfield had opened fire first, on the order of the Munich police, and that the German authorities would never have considered letting the terrorists take their hostages off to an unknown destination and seemingly certain death. Whoever was at fault in the botched rescue effort, it will not help much to be able to assign the blame, if any, for the death of eleven more Jews in Germany.

With a memorial service originally planned for only one or two dead, a lot of people here believed that cancellation of the Games would be the most suitable response to the death of twelve—or, including the terrorists, seventeen—men. But one could understand, even if one did not sympathize with, the arguments to the contrary: The Olympics must not yield to fanatics; good is bigger than evil; and, on a more practical level, the West Germans had all this money invested in the Games, and all these tourists had bought tickets, and, whereas rowing and swimming and gymnastics were over, the poor archers and Greco-Roman wrestlers had not yet begun and why discriminate against them? And then there was Mr. Brundage’s holy devotion to his cause. I have no idea what the majority feeling is, but a German who had watched a man-in-the-street television-interview program yesterday told me that most of the Germans questioned thought that the Games should have been called off out of respect for the Israelis, and that most of the Americans who were questioned thought that they should go on, because otherwise all their carefully-made travel plans would have to be changed.

I arrived at the big stadium early for Wednesday’s 10 a.m. memorial service, after passing en route a number of basketball players working out on a practice court. The Duke of Edinburgh had arrived early, too, I learned. About two thousand chairs had been set up in the field for athletes, though there were four times that number of athletes within walking distance of the spot. The flags, of course, were at half staff—they remained that way for a mere twenty-four hours—but the Olympic torch had not been dimmed, and the big question on many minds was: With the flame already extinguished figuratively, would Brundage and his I.O.C. douse it literally and end the competitions? The only sign of sport in the stadium was one steeplechase hurdle, at the water hazard over which the sensational Kenyan runner Kipchoge Keino had blithely glided to win a gold medal on Monday, which seemed aeons ago. The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra was on hand to open the proceedings with the Funeral March from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony. At nine-thirty-five, the athletes began to appear—wearing their team blazers but without flags or other national symbols—some marching in formation, some drifting in casually. Soon all the seats reserved for them were filled; what was left of the Israeli team sat up forward, directly in front of the speakers’ stand. The Israelis were easy to spot, because of their white yarmulkes, but it was hard to identify many of the others. The electronic scoreboards were blank; their computers had not been programmed for this kind of happening. (So inflexible are these swift machines, we learned yesterday, that the names of the Israeli athletes who were killed will nonetheless appear on future starting lists of competitors—with “Not Present” after them. Klein’s office has explained, “We ask you to accept this as a technical necessity, and not as a lack of reverence.” When you can’t remove dead men from a lineup, there must be something wrong with the system.) In the absence of announcements or flags, many of the athletes could not be assigned national origins, and at this moment of woe that was a tiny blessing; the competitors had fleetingly lost their territorial and ideological separateness. It became known afterward that, understandably, none of the Arab athletes were present—nor, puzzlingly, were any of the Russians. Of the nearly five hundred members of the United States team, probably no more than a quarter turned out. The banned Rhodesians were there, though, black and white together; it was their only chance to appear in uniform on the stadium turf. While I was trying to see who was who, I heard a sports columnist behind me say to a confrere, “I don’t care what happens, I’m still going to be on the Monday plane. I got football next weekend.”