A whiff of conspiracy had infiltrated the camp. Booda, the chief of security, had disappeared into the night.
The group of armed militiamen were muttering guardedly among themselves while I, the media, listened in on every word.
Snitch was the whisper around the fire.
The men who had heretofore been strangers bonded in their mutual paranoia. A twenty-four-hour sentry would have to be posted in the fire lookout tower. The feds, possibly armed with inside information, could come in guns a-blazing at any time. A militia-operated drone would be needed to surveil the open white expanse. Aerial reconnaissance was a matter of life and death.
We might be compromised.
Definitely.
Be vigilant, brother.
Oohrah.
I was back among the Bundy militia, but things weren’t going as smoothly as they had in Nevada, the sense of purpose there replaced by deprivation and paranoia.
Shouting matches had erupted throughout the day, one accusing the other of being an informant for the FBI. They were low on underpants and cheese slices and coffee creamer and had called on supporters across the nation to mail these necessities to a P.O. box or bring them directly, along with their guns, to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. One of the militiamen had stolen the money donated by supporters and had gone off to town on a bender.
So when the strangers, cold, agitated, and cranky, turned to me for whiskey, I could offer none, as drinks were a corporate no-no. Besides, none could have helped.
These self-styled patriots, who had initially come to this barren, snow-covered corner of the Pacific Northwest to show support for a family of ranchers destined for prison after setting clearing fires to federal lands, ended up seizing the 187,000-acre bird sanctuary administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from, well . . . nobody, really. It was the deep freeze of winter—off-season for migratory fowl watchers. And now they were stuck with no graceful way out.
The move was the latest in an ongoing range war brought on by antigovernment activists operating on the philosophy that Washington had no right to hold any lands. There were three dozen men and women here, no more, but they had brought heavy firepower: pistols, semiautomatic assault rifles, shotguns, two-way radios, binoculars.
The media too had seen their call to arms, put out via Facebook, and they arrived in gaggles, accounting for a bigger presence than the occupiers themselves. There were the satellite trucks and telescopic microphone poles, makeup kits and daily noon press briefings. I couldn’t help but feel that many of the press members were secretly hoping for another Waco or Ruby Ridge.
It was a Bundy ranch homecoming and a coming-out party all at once. The leader of the occupiers was Ammon Bundy, who had come to prominence after leading the armed standoff against federal agents at his father’s Nevada ranch in 2014.
But Ammon wasn’t from Oregon. He lived in suburban Phoenix. Even his daddy, Cliven, wondered aloud on public radio what business his son had taking over a bird rookery in Oregon. Defending your own home was one thing; invading another man’s town was another matter altogether.
His blood father notwithstanding, Ammon believed he was being guided by the Divine Father who he believed intended these lands to be held and worked by good Christian people. And many of the old crew, emboldened by the victorious Nevada standoff, were there with him. LaVoy Finicum, the group’s spokesman, wrapped in a blue tarp, rifle scabbarded across his waist, was daring someone, anyone, to come try and arrest him. There was Ryan Payne, the tense, brooding Iraq War veteran and self-proclaimed leader of the sniper corps at the Bundy ranch confrontation.
And then there was Booda, aka Brian Cavalier, the security chief, who had oozed such menace and mystery during our first encounter in Nevada. Something had happened to him. He wasn’t the same braggadocious warrior—the battle-hardened Marine veteran—I’d met at the Bundy ranch. Perhaps it was the recent report by an enterprising newspaperman who had dug up Booda’s military record. There was, in fact, no military record. The only citations Booda ever earned, it seemed, were for petty theft and extreme DUI. He was a fraud.
And now Booda had slipped away in the dark, either having abandoned his post or out there executing some secret maneuvers. The men around the campfire believed him to be an informant. I figured he was just an embarrassment. He wasn’t a special ops sniper; he wasn’t even a Buddhist. He was just an overweight bullshit artist with bad tattoos and an inability to spell.
There was a new man in the Bundy circle: Jon Ritzheimer, an antagonistic, high-strung ex-Marine from Arizona with a shaved head. He wandered around the campfire quoting Thomas Paine, instructing the others about a nefarious and subliminal plot to make sharia the supreme law in America.
Ritzheimer, thirty-two, had become something of a YouTube phenom after posting a misty-eyed video from here to his daughters, apologizing for missing Christmas because he was in Oregon defending the United States Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It was a cinematic tour de force complete with a pocket-size Constitution, tears, breathy shudders, and dramatic pauses.
It wasn’t the first time Ritzheimer had become a social media spectacle. In the past, he had posted video of himself holding armed, anti-Islam rallies at a mosque in Phoenix. There he was at a Trump rally in Mesa, Arizona, spewing anti-Islamic scatology as Trump had proposed a Muslim ban in America. There he was again, threatening to arrest a U.S. senator who voted in favor of the Iran nuclear deal. His additional credits included appearances on CNN and The Today Show as he drove across America brandishing a pistol as he posed for photos in front of mosques.
Ritzheimer continued to post copiously from the Oregon Occupation, including one rant against the jokers who mailed him a bag of gummy bear penis candies in lieu of the cheese slice rations he’d requested.
What the feds were dealing with in Ritzheimer, it seemed to me, was a gun-toting, pot-smoking, self-styled savant of theology, constitutional jurisprudence, and federal land management policies. Adding to his résumé was the fact that the Marine Corps had trained Ritzheimer to kill.
Ritzheimer was among the first to follow Ammon Bundy’s call to the federal sanctuary. Bundy, who had grown a beard and swapped his white hat for dark, was demanding that the federal government turn over to local jurisdiction not only the bird refuge but the entire half of the western United States that was under its control. He also insisted that the county sheriff provide sanctuary to the local ranchers being sent to prison for arson of public land. When the sheriff refused, the Bundy militia declared him an enemy of the people.
Most townsfolk in nearby Burns had been wary of the strangers from the get-go, but now the shit really hit the fan. The schools were shuttered. Police presence was beefed up because gun-toting ideologues were questioning people in grocery stores and parking lots. Unfamiliar men with assault rifles milled about outside the sheriff’s department and courthouse. Locals, in turn, began carrying their own weapons. Signs were hung. A letter was drafted to the occupiers: Go Home. The militiamen never asked the Paiute Indians how they felt. If they had, they would have heard the same: Go Home.
Suddenly, Ritzheimer, who had ingratiated himself with the militia by carrying out the dual duties of security detail and sandwich gofer, found he wasn’t so welcome at the local post office or pizza parlor anymore. It was brutally cold and increasingly boring. His babies were at home. His wife was back in Phoenix earning the bread while he was up here, collecting a military disability check (PTSD and a bad back) and defending townspeople who didn’t want his help. For this, he’d missed Christmas, Advent, and Martin Luther King Day.
We sat in his truck, where he’d filmed his teary-eyed Christmas message, the heat turned up full.
I miss my kids, he said.
Why don’t you go home?
I have a duty to be here.
What duty?
The people need help to stand up to the tyranny of the federal government.
But you’re not even from here and they don’t want you.
I wouldn’t want to abandon my brothers and sisters.
Why not? Booda did. You could go home for a little vacation. Kiss the kids. Have a late Christmas, maybe. Come back if you want.
Yeah, maybe.
They don’t want you here, dude.
He looked like he could use a stiff drink, but I wasn’t going to pay for it. Corporate rules and all.
These were bizarre times in America, Matt said back at the motel. We’d seen immigrants rushing the Texas border to get into a country that was poisoning its own people and pushing them off their own street corners and ranch lands. These neurotic self-professed patriots like Ritzheimer were running around looking for a reason to be, searching for an enemy that had no real face. They told boring and often untrue war stories. They tossed around snatches of misapplied constitutional quotation. They muttered around the campfire about secret government designs to seize people’s guns and forcibly relocate citizens to the cities. It was cold and they’d run out of socks and hand moisturizer.
These were dangerous men, no doubt, bigoted, grandiose. Half of them were broke, had few prospects beyond bankruptcy or foreclosure on the horizon. Perhaps there was another Timothy McVeigh among them. Maybe I had been sitting in the truck with him, or around the campfire.
Unhinged violence can come from any corner of America, and it often does. While anger and distrust toward the federal government is very real in the West, this crew didn’t seem to me to be the vanguard of a violent “white” revolution any more than the Klan in Carolina did. These were half-boiled potatoes sitting around a fire fueled with stolen wood. But man, they made good TV.
I don’t know if my advice had any effect, but Ritzheimer drove home less than two weeks later around the same time a humiliated Booda skulked back to the camp. Good timing for Johnny. Bad timing for Booda. The very day Ritzheimer left, the feds received word from a government informant who had infiltrated the inner circle at the refuge that Bundy, Booda, Finicum, and others were driving in two trucks and on the move. The group was arrested at a rural highway roadblock—except for LaVoy Finicum, the tarp man, who jumped out of his truck shouting: You’re gonna have to put a bullet through me.
The cops obliged, shooting him dead.