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Doyel Shamley hiking at the 2014 Skills and Research Conference
Doyel Shamley and I were riding west on Arizona 260 in his pickup with the battering ram attached to the front bumper, when he told me about his “epiphany,” one of many he had while he was fighting for his country as a member of the Third Armored Division during Operation Desert Storm.
“We were moving fifty, sixty miles a day. No army ever went that fast, because of our technology. We were blowing shit off the map, busting up these T-72s, the supposed invincible ‘battle tank of Mother Russia.’ We’d just blow them up and paint upside-down V’s on them, like a calling card. We’d take them for joyrides, play bumper cars. Half the turrets didn’t even turn . . . It was incredible to me. I’d read that we had really built up the Soviet military, taking over truck factories to make tanks. Now I get inside the T-72 and I see the data plate—every tank’s got one—and its in English. Not Russian, not Arabic. English. All you can say is ‘holy shit.’
“We were heading for Basra in the south. They’d been telling us about the Revolutionary Guard, who were supposed to be Saddam’s elite forces, badass, for real. Everyone in there had been fighting for ten years, against Iran and whoever else. Here they are, seasoned, in their own backyard, while we had to get acclimated, and we’re just cleaning their asses. We killed like twenty-six thousand the first day and lost maybe forty men.
“We knew from our briefings that Saddam had three bunkers. Two of them had already been cleared; the only one left was Basra. We were the spearhead of the ground war; we wanted to get there first.
“Then, we’re fifty miles outside the city, moving through these Bedouin villages with the heat rising off the sand, and we hear there’s a cease-fire. No one believed it. We thought it was one of those Tokyo Rose deals, so we’re still killing the fuck out of these poor bastards. Everyone was doing it, right up to colonel level, that was our training.
“It was a fucking mess. All these dead bodies. Huge black clouds. You have to remember I was pretty well read. I’m looking around, firing at these fucks, and thinking of The Divine Comedy, the Inferno portion, because I’d actually read these works, unlike most GIs.
“Then these generals started flying in, putting down in the middle of nowhere in Black Hawk helicopters, threatening individual units with court-martials. That’s when we knew they were serious.
“So we’re just sitting there, pondering. We were supposed to get this bad guy, we’re fifty miles from his last bunker, and they’re calling off the war?
“Nobody knew what happened. Even when I got home, my dad was saying: What the hell? You hear all these explanations, like how Saddam wouldn’t go along with the IMF and the World Bank, so that was the reason for the invasion . . . there are plenty of stories.
“But we weren’t thinking anything like that back in the desert. We just looked at each other and we knew. ‘We’re going to be back here again,’ someone said. Ten years later, there we were again, with a whole bunch of new recruits.
“After I came home, it was hard for me to concentrate,” Doyel said. “I tried picking up the cello again, but I didn’t have the patience for it. I thought about going to school, but I didn’t want to do that either. I stayed in the military, in the reserves. But mostly it was a lot of nothing.”
Doyel had always been up on the patriot literature, starting off with Gary Allen’s None Dare Call It Conspiracy. “I saw it and my father said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a classic.’ From there I read the whole library. I read through Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley, which has got something like twelve hundred pages, in like a day. I collected all this stuff about the Brotherhood of the Snake. I also did a lot of sitting around listening to the radio.
“It was the heyday of what was called the Patriot Radio Wars. There were a lot of shows on. I listened to WWCR, picked up Joyce Riley, Tom Valentine, there were a lot of them.” By the middle 1990s, Doyel was running a patriot lecture series at the VFW hall in his Portersville, California, hometown. “My dad told me it was getting so I was to the right of Attila the Hun, but it was kind of fun. We had a lot of speakers. Colonel Bo Gritz, Fritz Springmeier. We had John Quade several times. He was an actor, always playing the bad biker in Clint Eastwood movies. He became pretty militant. Then it came up that we should have Bill.
“People said ‘you can’t just call up Bill Cooper,’ like he was such a big deal. He had a reputation for being hard to deal with. A real prima donna. Fuck that, I said. I called him and made him an offer. He was charging so much by then, he’d just about priced himself out of the market. He wanted crazy percentages of the door. But we came to an agreement.
“Then I said, ‘Okay, that’s good, but you can’t act like a complete asshole.’
“‘Who said I was an asshole?’ Cooper demanded to know.
“‘Just about everyone I ever talked to. It’s pretty much common knowledge if you don’t know’ . . . I suppose he could have hung up right there. But he just laughed because he knew it was true.”
Cooper hated to fly. It made him break out into sweats, not that he let on. He said he didn’t fly because he never knew when his enemies would try to take him out. If they blew up his plane, then he’d be endangering the lives of innocent passengers, he said. So he drove the seven hundred miles from Eagar with Annie and the kids and gave a presentation that lasted nearly eleven straight hours. The whole speech, given the summer of 1997, remains available on HOTT under the title “Bill Cooper in California—The Porterville Presentation.”
“Bill always said it was his best work,” Doyel remarked, and aside from the lighting miscues that render Cooper’s head a featureless silhouette for long stretches, it might be. It includes one of Cooper’s more striking riffs. A few hours into the lecture, Cooper was trashing global warming, not yet to the point of division it would become. Not only wasn’t the Earth heating up, Cooper said, but the fact was “an ice age is on the way, and it will occur quickly.”
Then Cooper turned to the fate of the nation.
“A lot of Americans have been spending a lot of time trying to figure out who in the hell is destroying this country,” Cooper said. “Well, if you’ve been spending all that time—what’s your answer? The answer is you still don’t know, isn’t that correct? You look around for the enemy, but you can’t find the enemy.”
Cooper paused a moment. “You know, ladies and gentlemen, I have spent my entire life trying to find the Devil.” This was so. Cooper had sought the Evil One in outer space, tried to track him down in the priestly sanctums of secret religions, searched the endless corridors of government. “But now I’ve finally found him. You know where he is?”
Cooper thumped his palm on his beefy chest. “Right here. He doesn’t exist anywhere else.”
That’s what it came down to, Cooper told the Portersville audience, the Devil was inside you. “I can let him take over or I can cast him out.” Everyone had that choice.
Doyel and Cooper hit it off. “We just got into these long conversations. We’d argue all the time, but we knew what side we were on.”
“I just made up my mind. I was a staff sergeant and had a chance of making sergeant major, highest you could go as an enlisted man. Officers don’t say boo to sergeant majors. But I’d had it. I didn’t want to be in the Army anymore. I didn’t want to be in California. I walked into my CO’s office, resigned my commission, turned in my stuff, and went down to Arizona. A couple of days later I moved in with Bill and his family in Eagar.”
We were driving on Arizona 373, heading toward Greer, a small mountain resort town. Cubby, Doyel’s black, curly-haired Lhasa Apso had his front paws up on the dashboard, peering out the gravel-pocked windshield like a watchful sentry. Barely a foot long, Cubby is Doyel’s “service dog.” When people think it’s funny that he has an eight-pound service dog, Doyel smiles and says, “You have no idea how many people’s lives have been saved because of this dog.”
We hadn’t gone very far before the dead, burned-out trees began appearing, charred stumps halfway up the mountain on either side of the road. This was the site of the Wallow Fire, which began in May 2011 and raged out of control for weeks, burning 538,000 acres, the biggest, most-destructive blaze in Arizona history. Several local towns had to be evacuated, Eagar and Springerville among them.
Along with most every able person in the area, Doyel volunteered to fight the fire, working twelve-hour shifts, sometimes around the clock. It was an exhausting, wrenching job, not all that different from Desert Storm, with giant DC-10 VLATs (for Very Large Air Tankers) flying in at low altitude and dropping great plumes of orange-colored fire retardant on the burning treetops.
Three years later, new growth had come up, big swaths of goldenrods and a few spindly aspens shooting up among the blackened spikes of Douglas fir and ponderosa pine. Eventually, the two idiots who didn’t stamp out their campfire were hit with a $3.7 million judgment, but Doyel, along with many like-minded locals, knew who the real culprits were.
“The feds, Forest Service, National Fish and Wildlife, all of them,” Doyel said. It wasn’t just the 538,000 acres. “It was the seven million animals killed, the birds, the elk, bears, deer, antelopes, snails, frogs, and fish. The entire watershed. You could just feel the place dying around you.” For Doyel, Wallow was another epiphany. It was something he used to talk about with Cooper, a kind of obsession. Everything was about jurisdiction. Who has power over what? Who owns what? Who has responsibility to decide what’s best for the community? When he had some time, Doyel said, he was planning on writing a book called Jurisdiction for Dummies; he was certain it would sell.
The federal government and the environmental movement failed the people of Apache County long before the Wallow Fire, Doyel said, ticking off the instances of alleged mismanagement and sheer arrogance. The Feds’ one-size-fits-all notions of preservation apparently did not include maintaining the forest road system that would have helped firefighters get around. Worse was the refusal to thin the forest, or even clear away the dead, fallen trees that provided the fuel for huge blazes. Often, the Christmas tree for the federal building in Phoenix comes from the White Mountain area. After the Wallow Fire, several Round Valley residents brought another tree to the state capital: It was the burned trunk of a giant pine. It seemed a fitting gesture.
“Do you have any idea how much of New York State is owned by the federal government?” Doyel asked. “Less than 1 percent.” The feds owned barely 4 percent east of the Mississippi River. Out here, it was different. The feds controlled 38 percent of Arizona; in Idaho it was 60 percent; Nevada was over 80 percent. There were a lot of reasons for that, mostly owing to the sheer size of western space. But what if you lived next door to a federal land holding, say the 2.76-million-acre portion of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, where much of the Wallow Fire took place? The national forest was a fiefdom that lived by its own rules, enforced by its own cops, which might be fine until your own little paradise got burned down.
Then there was the spotted owl. With a decided soft spot for the sharp-eyed, proficient predators of nature’s great scheme, Doyel had nothing against owls. Except that the spotted owl was no longer flesh and feathers. It was a pawn in the great game of land-use rights. If the spotted owl needed protecting, well, who could be trusted to do that? Certainly not the untidy rednecks of eastern Arizona. Only a Washington bureaucrat could do that. It insulted your intelligence, Doyel said.
“Man is supposed to be steward of the land. Their stewardship of the forest was totally fucked. What kind of habitat protection is that, wiping out the entire forest?” Doyel said, adding the sad moral of the tale: “They loved the spotted owl. They loved it to death.”
“Bet you can’t do this back in Brooklyn,” Doyel said, after placing a tight bunching of .223 bullets into a plastic laundry detergent bottle about 100 yards away.
That was right. In Brooklyn you couldn’t get in your truck, drive a couple miles down the highway, pull into a cinder pit, and exercise your Second Amendment rights by blowing the fuck out of the first thing you saw. In Brooklyn, you were going to jail for touching any gun, much less this arsenal, which today included a Sig Sauer 9mm, a .22 also by Sig, a Beretta 9mm, a shotgun, and a variety of AR-style “black guns” Doyel made himself back in his workshop, which he calls Shamley Arms.
It was another of those lifestyle things. Outside of BB guns at camp, I’d made it through nearly seven decades of life without ever firing a rifle or pistol. In Eagar-Springerville, nine-year-olds get .22s for Christmas.
Doyel approached our session with the stern air of a longtime shooting instructor. We started off with the M14 US Army battle rifle. Doyel thought I might be interested in firing it because it was the closest thing to the M1 Garand that my father carried during the winter of 1944 as a member of the 133rd Combat Engineers under General George Patton.
I was always proud of that, my dad, just a New York City junior high school teacher, taking on Hitler’s Wehrmacht, marching into the Nazi Vaterland, saving the world. It never occurred to me to ask him about the rifle he carried, the caliber of shell it shot, and whether he found it easy to use the open sights. Back in Flushing, Queens, it never came up.
“It should have,” Doyel said. “That M1 might be the only reason you ever got born.”
He took back the M14 and gave me an M16. There was a certain symbology to it, since the M16 was the gun that replaced the M14 before the Vietnam War because Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wanted a new weapon for a new war, something sleeker, with more horsepower. Unfortunately, the M16, reputedly never fully combat tested before it was deployed, proved unreliable in the eyes of many soldiers, especially in comparison with the AK-47 the NVA and Vietcong used. I knew this about the M16 because, as Dad carried his M1, the M16 was supposed to be my gun for my war, the thing I’d carry if I was dumb enough to lose my 2-S student draft classification and end up in the soup like Bill Cooper.
It is a standard question for many men in my generation: How’d you get out? It was the smart move, the best move. No question. The war was wrong. Yet, with each passing year, I find myself increasingly emotional about what happened back then, the way so many got sent over there and wound up dead. Sometimes I can’t even talk about it. I just start weeping.
I discharged a magazine or two before Doyel took back the M16 and gave me one of his black guns, the homemade jobs built in his workshop, according to his personal specs. Like any good teacher, he was calm, genuinely pleased when I showed progress. When I pumped a few shells into a battered Frisbee nailed to the canyon wall a hundred feet away, he sounded his approval.
“You’re doing phenomenal! Keep doing like that and we’ll get you signed up for the JDL,” he said.
That was when Doyel brought out the pièce de résistance: Bill Cooper’s personal .45.
During my first days in Eagar, I’d viewed the original manuscript of Behold a Pale Horse, complete with editor’s marks. I’d seen Cooper’s raised copper bust of John Kennedy, which, no matter how many times Cooper moved, was always given prominent wall space. There was plenty of memorabilia inside the storage unit Doyel still kept: Cooper’s medals, his old microphone, the Wu-Tang Clan–brand stereo system someone sent him.
But when it came to artifacts, nothing quite equaled Cooper’s 1911 Springfield Armory Silver Chief .45. Emblematic of his status as a free man, the gun never left his side, Cooper often told the Hour of the Time listeners. When and if the jackbooted minions of the New World Order stormed his mountaintop outpost, he expected the tension of his finger on the pistol’s trigger to be his final sensation.
I let the gun’s weight rest on my palm. Cooper had had a lot of work done on the 1911, Doyel said. He’d added a competition metal trigger mechanism, fancy grips, inlays on the body and barrel.
“You know, it looks okay now,” Doyel put in. “But after Bill died, I found it lying around all gummed up with lint and hair, like something you’d find in a pool of Coca-Cola at the bottom of a cupholder. My dad and I had to soak it in kerosene just to get it to working order.”
Not that it mattered. “Bill really couldn’t shoot for shit anyhow.”