Sunrise came over the desert, and a feeling of complete and utter weirdness hung with it. Was it the bum weed we’d scored the night before outside a spiritless whorehouse in the cold desert mountains? I was convinced it was laced with Ajax or bathroom incense. My nose was burning and my innards were rumbling and there wasn’t a tree or a port-o-john in sight as we rolled past a platoon of obese revolutionaries parked along the shoulder of the bridge spanning the Virgin River. They were sitting in lawn chairs, their RVs festooned with flags and signage decrying Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Alamo!
Maybe it was the sniper at the top of the ridge that gave me the jitters, watching with binoculars from a foxhole fortified with sandstone, the barrel of his long arm glinting in the sun. We drove across the bridge, and there was another sentinel, an intimidating guy with a mustache and assault rifle, dressed in an olive jumpsuit, flak jacket, and beret, blocking the access road to Cliven Bundy’s complex.
There wasn’t a badge in sight, since all the cops and federal agents and sheriff’s deputies had been run off a few days earlier by armed militiamen and ranchers on horseback, cheered on by the bored suburbanites who had come out to watch the good old-fashioned range war and were now having a breakfast of Doritos with ranch dressing on the side of the road. ¡Viva la revolución! And this new no-drip spout on the ranch is a marvel of human ingenuity too!
We had a few hours to kill before our semi-sorta-arranged meeting with Bundy, the leader of this whole deal, who had been at war with the federal government for twenty years over his self-proclaimed right to graze his livestock on public lands for free and had now decided to bring it to a head. Better not to fuck with this guy in the beret, I thought. Instead, we decided to pull into a militia camp near the fork in the road to the Bundy ranch and wait for the call.
Play it cool, I told my cameraman Bob, who was wearing an American flag bandanna to protect his bald, speckled head against the sun. Move too fast and someone might get the wrong idea, mistake us for feds, narcs, friends of the court. Bob also likes guns very much and gets overly excited when he’s in proximity to them. Mix that with a bunk weed hangover, and I figured it was better to take it nice and slow for everybody’s sake. I leaned against the quarter panel and lit my cigarette. That’s when I heard the familiar western drawl.
Goddamn! I’ll be goddamned! Charlie, is that you?
I’ll be goddamned. It was Lil Dog. He was unmistakable: potbellied, silver-bearded, bare-chested, with boots, khaki shorts, and slouch hat. An Army veteran and retired fisherman. At sixty-five years old, he was a rumbling, sloshing vat of chaos and conspiracies, a citizen-soldier of numerous domestic campaigns against government tyranny, federal overreach, border intrusion, and the general spiritual pussification of the American man. He had founded a militia based in the Southwest known as the Mountain Minutemen, and I’d met him about eight years earlier, when I was a newspaper reporter—the first time he’d made a national spectacle of himself.
Back then, he was standing sentry on the California–Mexico border and had plopped himself on a hill directly in a cartel smuggling route, even though nobody had asked him to. He had fancied himself a twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week “scout.” He flew a large American flag from a makeshift thirty-foot pole, carried a .45 in his waistband, and lived in relative luxury in an RV with a toilet. I wrote a newspaper story about him and his war—not with illegal immigrants, none of whom he ever seemed to apprehend, but with Patch, a one-eyed Vietnam vet keeping vigil on the next hill over.
War often has its root in the most inane and inconsequential of incidents. These two men, once friends and residents of the same hill, broke into war over the well-being of a puppy. The misunderstanding devolved into words. Then insults. Patch moved to another hill. Lil Dog baited him as a phony war hero, comparing him to male genitalia and rifling off an email message to CNN calling him a swine who lived in a cat box. This led to fisticuffs on the main street of the border town, when the men happened to come off their hilltops at the same time for water and supplies. Patch, a vigorous, leathery specimen of a man, gave Lil Dog four chances to take back the insults, which Lil Dog refused to do, resulting in the breakage of Lil Dog’s eyeglasses.
Since then, Lil Dog had kept himself in the news, narrating a grainy “snuff” film of himself shooting dead a migrant who was illegally traversing the border. “This video shows how to keep a Home Depot parking lot empty,” he wrote to sympathizers in an email. Under withering pressure from the internet and law enforcement, Lil Dog admitted the video was a fake, that it was he himself acting as the murdered migrant.
And so here he was again at the latest media spectacle. He wasn’t doing much at the minute, he admitted. Throughout his life, there’d been a couple of tax liens, a string of petty controversies in previous judicial jurisdictions, but he was living now, he said, with a new old lady—a Mexican American no less—in a walled-in neighborhood somewhere near Vegas.
Lil Dog told me he came charging up Interstate 15 a few days earlier, after he’d seen one of Bundy’s sons get Tasered on cable TV. By that time, the old man’s compound had been surrounded by armed federal agents, who began confiscating the family cattle at gunpoint.
Bundy had been making the novel argument that the federal government had no jurisdiction over the federal land he’d been squatting on for the past two decades to feed and water his cattle. His argument was twofold: He had ancestral rights to use the land dating back to his grandfather, and he, Bundy, was a sovereign citizen of the Great State of Nevada, but not the United States of America, and the land belonged to Nevada. By that reckoning, there could be no way he owed the government $1 million.
The federal Bureau of Land Management saw it differently. It argued Bundy was a fraud, a mooch, a deadbeat who’d made millions from livestock sales while the rest of us paid taxes to improve the land he used. The federal courts agreed with the federal government, quite naturally. And so federal agents came in force to garnish Bundy’s livestock. That’s when a few-hundred-strong army of private citizens arrived with their long arms, stood the government down, and freed the cattle.
Tyranny! Lil Dog shouted shrilly, the voice of a half dozen Lil Dogs echoing off the valley walls in agreement. They have no right to take the man’s cattle, he declared. Tyranny!
Well, it is the public’s land, I reminded him. Mine, yours, ours. Somebody’s got to pay to keep the land in order. Why do I have to pay for Bundy?
That launched Lil Dog into a litany of complaints: unemployment, homeless veterans scrounging through garbage pails in the alleys of the big cities, welfare for illegal immigrants and their children, cash distributions to foreign countries. We’re not giving a shit about people in our own country, he barked. It’s a travesty!
What all this had to do with scofflaw cows, I couldn’t say. But bovinity notwithstanding, you would know what Lil Dog was trying to get at if you’d been anywhere in America over the past decade besides the Hollywood Hills, Manhattan, or D.C. People were put out. Put out of their houses. Put out of their jobs. Put out on their asses. Losing ground. A good lot of them were veterans, many recently returned from tours in Iraq or Afghanistan, or both. Men and women who had gone off to war while the well-heeled of the nation went to the shopping mall. And they returned to a nation divided. Now they were living in crappy suburban apartments somewhere, their prospects bleak, wondering where their piece of the American pie had gone. What had they fought for? Rage became the companion of confusion. Like the kid in the ghetto of Detroit: rage.
And who speaks to the veterans’ frustrations? Who appreciates their service? The empty trope of “thank you for your service” means 10 percent off at Arby’s and the honor of being the first to get on a plane. No one’s hiring. Too many are strung out and they’re taking their own lives. Thank you for your service.
Most soldiers take it stoically and get on with the business of living. But others turn on the television and damn! There’s a guy who gets it! There’s a man with answers! Water rights? Grazing allotments? I’m driving an Uber, but this sounds like tyranny to me! Forward ho! To the Bundy compound!
Lil Dog was now drawing a pretty good crowd. Our camera was like an enema for a constipated frustration. The boys and I set up a soapbox, wrapped the microphone in an American flag, and invited public comment. The patriots came like flies to a cowhide. One unemployed Army vet from Phoenix got up to say he was there in the name of the individual’s liberties, as enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Pressed to enumerate those rights, he stumbled a bit.
Okay, he said haltingly, wait a minute. Right to free speech (shoot your mouth) and the right to bear arms (shoot your gun). Thou shall not . . . Oh, wait a minute . . . Sorry, yeah, I’m drawing a blank here.
Sprinkle that in with a catalog of gripes ranging from Obamacare to the desert tortoise, illegals bum-rushing the border to the cost of gasoline, fiat currency, the Chinese plan to colonize Mars, and you pretty much get the picture.
Lil Dog invited us under his canopy for a Dr Pepper. Somebody had lunch cooking in a skillet. Beans and bacon. In a skillet. This is really too goddamned much, I told Lil Dog. It’s like a fucking Mel Brooks movie, except you’re all armed.
And we’ll fucking use them if we gotta, he proclaimed. Fucking feds come over that hill with their weapons, and see if I’m kidding. Hahahahaha!
He pointed out a portable outhouse, and I went to avail myself of it. It hadn’t been cleaned out and was near overflowing like a gigantic overstuffed pastry bag. Ah! These must be the sights and smells of liberty, I thought to myself. Apparently, toilet attendants don’t show up for work during the revolution.
Returning to Lil Dog’s camp, I was thinking it was time to break camp before something went wrong. Passions were running high and I told Lil Dog we were just going to take our chances and head up to Old Man Bundy’s compound, phone call or no.
We’re just going to drive right on past that sniper guy in the beret and sunglasses over there, I said. Do you know him? You don’t? Just if something goes wrong, you understand?
I promised Lil Dog we would be back later with some beer and booze, but it was a promise I had no intention of keeping. The only thing that gives Bob a bigger boner than firearms is firewater. Put them together and you have a very volatile situation, hombre. I wasn’t looking to instigate an unintentional fiasco of violence here in the High Kingdom of Cliven. Better to just drive way. Nice and slow.
We pulled out of the militia camp, took a hard left, and kicked up a cloud of dust that billowed over the sniper in sunglasses. He didn’t move, didn’t motion us to stop. Unlike the paid goon at the Mercedes plant down in Alabama, this old boy seemed to understand that the public has a right to public roads, God bless him. Liberty!
It was a beautiful country of scrub oak and sage and dark red soil. As the road buckled and dipped, the valley opened up for a moment and we could see the rippling Virgin River, the only natural-looking tributary I’d ever seen in this part of Nevada. A Bundy cow and a calf were watering at the bank, others grazing on the grass along the tributary. A few days earlier, these same cows had been captives of the U.S. government. Now the cowboys were betting they’d won. It wasn’t a wager I was willing to make.
Nevada senator Harry Reid had gone on TV calling Bundy and his supporters domestic terrorists. And when Harry calls you out, you know you’ve got trouble. Reid, the Senate minority leader, was the most powerful man in Nevada, if not the country. The guy ran the Mob out of Vegas when he was head of the Nevada Gaming Commission, for heaven’s sake, and if Harry wants your cows off the river, dagnabit, your cows are going to be off that river, come hell or high water.
Water is power in the West. Water is the wellspring of money. And money is the wellspring of politics. Water is necessary to lubricate the gargantuan casinos of Las Vegas, just as it’s necessary for the gigantic development being built just twenty miles west of the Virgin River, a forty-three-thousand-acre city of the future with golf courses and swimming pools in the deepest bowels of the desert. Ironically, the development was on temporary mothballs as the power broker behind it was preparing to make his new home in the federal penitentiary for illegally funneling campaign money to . . . Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, himself the son of a failed gold miner.
Maybe this whole range war was about water, maybe it was about gold, maybe it was just the government wanting its money. But it wasn’t lost on many in the area that the man charged with running Bundy off the river, the director of the federal Bureau of Land Management, was a thirty-seven-year-old snot nose named Neil Kornze who had once been a gofer in the Senate office of . . . Harry Reid.
So it was easy to see why Harry wasn’t much appreciated in these parts.
When we arrived at the Bundy ranch, we were stopped at the main gate by another man, shaped like a bowling ball decorated in bad tattoos, a Kevlar vest, a holstered sidearm, one-way shades, and a checkered scarf, the kind favored by Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat. It was a little accoutrement picked up during his tours in the Middle East, the sentry said.
Yes, yes. I’ve been there, I told him. It’s called a keffiyeh. Very useful in the heat and sand.
Anyway, you can’t be too careful out here, the sentry counseled. If the elements don’t get you, the snipers will. The feds sent drones. The BLM killed some cattle. There’s no telling where they’ll stop. No telling who’s a snitch.
Not wanting to be taken for a rat, I showed him my bupkis press badge. Says it right there: NEWS MEDIA PRESS OFFICIAL IDENTIFICATION.
Satisfied, he radioed down to the ranch. It’s Buddha, he spat into the walkie-talkie. We got some media up here. Over.
Buddha, huh? Is that how you write it on your tax forms?
It’s BOOD-a. No “h.”
What do you do for a living, bro? I asked.
A crackle returned from the radio. A disembodied voice: Booda, come on. Over.
Booda tells me he’s a United States Marine. A special forces sniper and former mercenary for the Blackwater contracting company. Then, into the radio: You got Booda. Over. Booda says he did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You say you got media up there? Over.
Booda says he took an oath to defend the United States Constitution, and that’s what he’s doing here: protecting the man who is leading a well-regulated militia to battle a tyrannical government.
I didn’t know the Marine Corps gave leave for that sort of thing, I said.
Yeah, we got media up here, he replied to the radio. They say they got an appointment. Over.
Then Booda said to me: I can’t give you any more detail than that, you understand? Classified. Heavy stuff, see what I’m getting at? Crazy as hell over there. I can tell you that.
Okay, the voice came back over the radio, go ahead and escort them down. The boss is just finishing up with some people. Taking a few selfies. Over.
Roger that, Booda replied before leading us on.
Bundy’s home was nice and well kept, small and unassuming, made smaller still by the gaggle of hangers-on buzzing in his orbit. There was the wagon wheel entrance, potted plants hanging near the door, flowers standing in the window, a horseshoe, a wood carving of a mustachioed cowboy, all made dreamlike by the flesh-and-blood buckaroo leaning against a timber joist. Bundy was tall and potbellied and, unlike his security squadron, carried an air of hospitality.
I follow all the laws of Nevada, Bundy explained to me after shaking hands, but I don’t even recognize the United States government as existing.
That’s an interesting point of view, sir, I responded, considering those American and Marine Corps flags tacked to that post there. The Supreme Court has ruled that these are federal lands and you’re trespassing. That’s the law. That’s the state law. That’s the federal law. Their authorities are vested by the Constitution.
Mebbe. But I’m a-saying that I have ancestral claims to this land. My grandfather worked these lands.
I reminded him that the red man was living here long before the white man, long before his granddaddy, and that his granddaddy was able to take the land in the first place with the aid and abettal of the United States government.
Well, I think I was treated even worse than the Indian, Bundy said. The federal government has treated me with force and cruelty.
And there was the rub. A government that once assisted the white man was now turning on the white man’s grandson. Now that there was something the government wanted from him, it was treating him like an Indian, at least in Bundy’s mind, running him off his rightful place. And when that happens, well, men like him don’t recognize the government as legitimate anymore. Conspiracies baked in half-truths tend to balloon like bread dough. Cherry-picked passages of the Constitution are recited with a reverence reserved for psalms.
The fact that Bundy was claiming ancestral rights was, not surprisingly, stirring up feelings among the Indian peoples in these parts. Treaties are part of the supreme law of the land, and treaties between the United States and Indian people have long been violated and outright ignored. The Shoshone hold claim to two-thirds of Nevada, and if the government was going to enforce its own laws, not only would it have to vacate, but so would men like Bundy.
That is a legitimate question, Bundy agreed. He might consider giving it back to the Indians, but he vowed that he sure as heck wasn’t going to submit to the United States government.
I told him I knew some Indians who would be willing to help him pack up his belongings. In fact, the whole tribe could be here within the hour with a U-Haul. Bundy’s armed sycophants soughed through their noses. Booda, he of the classified war stories, was standing next to a guy in an ill-fitting Stetson filming us filming. It seemed like a bad omen. There was something unnerving about these hangers-on, something celluloid about the straw hats, something store-bought in their tattoos, masking perhaps a lack of real scars, authentic and earned.
Bundy had his beef, that was true enough, however shifting and spurious his arguments may have been. And his followers had succeeded in running the federal government off federal land. But Uncle Sam would be back, whether it be a week, a month, a year, or a century. The government takes what the government desires, ancestral rights or no. Just ask the modern-day Geronimo eking it out four hundred miles away in a high-desert valley of the Cortez Range.