Man Was One of the Youngest Survivors of Bombing That Killed 168. His Wedding Vows Showcased His Vulnerable Side (Exclusive)

Christopher Nguyen, who was 5 when a bomb was detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, married the love of his life on March 28

NEED TO KNOW

• Christopher Nguyen, who was 5 at the time of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, reflected on his past while drafting his wedding vows, writing, “there may be an alternate universe where I didn’t survive”
• Nguyen has no memory of what happened, only knowing what he’s read and seen over the years — and to this day, sometimes the survivor’s guilt can be overwhelming
• “It’s always going to be a quiet but steady passenger in my life,” he tells PEOPLE. “It’s something I struggle with, to remember that it’s okay that I’m here”

The vows Christopher Nguyen drafted for his wedding last month drew upon the life he might have lost, at age 5, when a truck bomb was detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Among the 168 people killed, 19 were children — and many of those kids, including Nguyen, were inside a daycare center on the building's second floor.

“My fiancé prefers not to think about it, but there may be an alternate universe where I didn't survive the bombing,” Nguyen wrote. “A reality where I'm not standing here today — where I never got to marry the love of my life.”

“But that's not this reality,” he added, “and because of that I don't take a single moment of this life for granted.”

The words proved too emotionally weighty — and his nerves too overwhelming — for Nguyen, 36, a marketing executive at MidFirst Bank, to share them aloud.

So he rewrote his vows, leaning into his more playful side. He touched instead upon his joy of cooking, and the fact that he can slice an onion without crying, even though he doesn't shy away from tears. “It's messy, it's being vulnerable,” he said in the vows he ultimately did read to his bride. “Love is also messy, love is also being vulnerable, love is also the truest manifestation of how you feel. And that's why I love you.”

Lauren Berlingeri heard those words at their March 28 ceremony at The Baumberhof, a stone replica of a 400-year-old Bavarian barn on a private estate in the Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond. But her groom's vulnerable side was no surprise to her.

On their first date in November 2021, after the two connected on the dating app Hinge, Berlingeri walked up to the restaurant in a puffy-sleeved gray sweater, black jeans and rhinestone boots to meet him waiting outside. “I always want to be the best-dressed person in any room,” Nguyen says, so her style “already drew me to her.”

Seated inside, both confessed their anxiety — but also told the other they were unafraid to take risks or embarrass themselves. Then Nguyen proved it by dipping his finger into the purple foam atop their drinks and smearing it across his cheeks, like a football player applying eye black.

It made an impression. “He just had this energy and was so full of life,” says Berlingeri. “He wasn't afraid to be spontaneous.” By their third date, when Nguyen showed up for her birthday celebration to join her family and friends at a local pickleball emporium, she decided, “If he can handle all that, I'm sure we can handle a lot of things.”

Initially, Berlingeri, 29, an internal communications specialist at OU Health, didn't know Nguyen's connection to the bombing, which happened before she was born. (Bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001 for the antigovernment attack; his accomplice, Terry Nichols, is serving multiple life sentences.)

She learned it from her mom, Becky Hines, who was curious about this new guy her daughter was dating and discovered it on Facebook.

“I didn't want to mention it or look anything up until that was something he wanted to share,” says Berlingeri.

Five months after that first date, on the eve of the annual April 19 observance at the memorial site, he did.

“It started off as, ‘I just want to let you know I have the day off tomorrow, and every year I take this date off, and this is why,' ” she says. Then he added, “If you want to go with me, you can.”

She did, and for the first time they walked the somber grounds as a couple.

“He showed quiet reverence,” says Berlingeri. “In the years that followed, not once has Chris announced his arrival— who he is or the significance of why he's there. He never wants attention drawn to himself, but rather directed toward honoring his late friends and giving the utmost respect to other families whose loved ones are no longer with us.”

Nguyen has no memory of what happened. He knows only what he's read and seen in news clippings and on TV. But the bombing, and the media's interest in him, made Nguyen a public figure. It also turned him into a private man.

“The look on people's faces when I talk about the bombing is something I actively avoid,” he said in 2015 to PEOPLE, which gathered Nguyen and four of the other youngest survivors together at the memorial. “Even if the Murrah Building bombing comes up organically in conversation, I will not mention being a survivor.”

Today, he says, “There are times when I feel held back just because of the fact that other children didn't survive. I've made peace with that. There's nothing I could have done, or can do, about that.”

But the anniversary only makes those feelings more intense, he says.

“I think about other families who miss out on holidays, who missed out on their children's weddings, and I get so overwhelmed with guilt that I can't get out of bed sometimes.”  

“It's always going to be a quiet but steady passenger in my life,” he says. “It's almost like a trauma of feeling unworthy and having to prove my value constantly. It's something I struggle with, to remember that it's okay that I'm here.”

But, he adds, “When I do feel that way, I try to remember how lucky I am, because I'm surrounded by people that embrace me exactly for who I am with all my flaws, all my scars and everything. The fact that I'm surrounded by people that love me helps quiet the guilt.”

The wedding, like all the milestones so far in her son's life, triggered flashbacks for his mother Phuong Nguyen, 66.

“Not just Chris that day, but I'm thinking about all the children,” she says. “The other children that didn't have the chance that Chris has.”   

A downtown worker at the time, she put her son in daycare at the Murrah Building so she and a co-worker could walk over at lunchtime and watch their kids play outside from a distance. From several blocks away, the 9:02 a.m. explosion shook her building. Shattered glass littered the sidewalks as she raced, terrified, toward the blast site.

She talked her way past police to the edge of the yellow crime scene tape, where her little boy was the third child brought out to her. His eardrums were ruptured. A hard punch to his chest from a doorknob injured his lungs. Lacerations to the back of his head required 11 stitches, and left scars that refused to grow hair. When he later spotted the scars in a mirror after a trip to the barber and became upset, his quick-thinking mom lied, saying he'd bumped his head running at home.

“I didn't want him to feel any different or hear a thing about being a child who's been through that,” she says.

She and her husband hid news clippings and turned off the TV when their son entered the room. He grew up playing T-ball, then baseball, soccer and basketball, “just acting like a normal kid,” she says.

But the immediate aftermath for his mom remains vivid. She quit work and the entire family spent the next four months traveling back and forth to the children's hospital to address not just the boy's injuries, but the emotional scars affecting them all. When a psychologist asked her son to draw out his feelings, he created a first sketch showing a fireman holding a child. “That's me,” he said.

“It's a miracle,” says his mother. “And then I look at him, how he grew up. He set his goal.” He told her: “Mom, all those kids … I will bring the best out of me, and make it meaningful the reason why I'm still standing here.”   

Berlingeri sees that determination play out in Nguyen's countless small, quiet acts, from making sure the stray cats outside the gym are fed, to volunteering at an animal shelter, to spotting someone on a street corner and circling back with a case of bottled water. “I'm sure there's plenty more things like that he's done and he hasn't told me,” she says. “He just wants others to feel loved and cared for. Just because he doesn't talk about the bombing doesn't mean that in his actions, he isn't thinking of everyone.”

Nguyen proposed at a restaurant atop Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder, Colo. He'd scouted several engagement rings, but when he texted a friend of Berlingeri's for advice, the friend responded with a photo of a diamond sunburst ring Berlingeri had chosen for herself long before she had a boyfriend. Anticipating the photos that would follow, Nguyen then saw that one of Berlingeri's fake fingernails had snapped off the morning of his planned proposal. “I kept mentioning to her, ‘Hey, have you had a chance to put your fingernail back on? You should probably put your fingernail back on,'” he says. “And this was maybe, like, once an hour.”

Then, just before the moment as they stepped outside the restaurant and onto the terrace, he surreptitiously texted Berlingeri's mom. “It's happening now,” he wrote.

“I planned a little skit where Lauren's mom would call her to talk about something, and I would have Lauren turn around and I would be on my knee, and that way her mom could be present as I'm proposing,” says Nguyen. But when the FaceTime call came, Berlingeri responded: “Oh, I can call her back.”

No, said Nguyen, “you should really answer this.”

Says Berlingeri: “It was very sweet.”   

A fan of Art Deco and the Roaring ‘20s, Berlingeri was drawn to an off-the-rack dress with feathers and pearls by designer Alena Leena for her wedding day. Only later did she learn that Leena, who names her creations after flowers, had titled this particular dress Edelweiss, after the iconic alpine wildflower.

“It represents bravery, resilience and love,” says Berlingeri. “That represents our relationship. I'm like, what are the chances that I picked that dress without even knowing?”

Fashion-focused Nguyen went with a classic black tux with silk shawl collar and a green velvet bow tie.

Their “cake” was a six-flavored tower of macarons. Place cards for the seated reception were fashioned from acrylic luggage tags decorated with dried florals and flakes of gold, crafted by members of the bridal party and the two future mother-in-laws over Super Bowl weekend.

Table centerpieces showcased photos of the couple's travels to places such as Greece, India, Singapore and the Bahamas. Their summer honeymoon will take them to Italy, Spain and France, which made the Bavarian barn backdrop for their vows intentional. “Since we couldn't take everyone to Europe,” says Berlingeri, “we wanted to bring Europe to us.”

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But for now there is Oklahoma City and the annual memorial, which they will attend this year for the first time as husband and wife.

“I feel so safe and grounded and protected,” Berlingeri says of her life with Nguyen. “We don't take anything too seriously. We're always just trying to live in the moment, laugh together, a life full of joy. I couldn't ask for anything better.”

During the reception, as Nguyen's mother began a toast to the couple and her emotions overwhelmed her, Berlingeri strode forward to take the mother's hand and steady her. Then Nguyen joined them, and began acting “a little goofy,” he says. His mom “knows that's who I am, so I got her to smile and laugh a little bit. That kind of helped her pull back the tears, because if you're laughing, it's kind of hard to cry at the same time.”

“I'm very much a person about balance,” he says, “so to balance out the darkness with light, it's very cathartic for me.”   

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