Chapter 12
The hotel had a bar attached to the main office.
It was a dim room with six tables, a jukebox that didn't work, and a bartender with plenty of idle time.
Joe took a table in the corner with a bottle of Budweiser and spread the briefing folder open.
Task Force materials. Background on the militia movement. He'd skimmed it in DC, but now he had time to actually read.
The history went back further than he'd thought. Pre-World War II, even. Groups like the Silver Shirt Legion in the 1930s. The Christian Front. Homegrown extremists who'd faded after Pearl Harbor but never completely disappeared.
The Cold War brought a new wave. The California Rangers.
The Minutemen of the early 1960s who were armed anti-communist militants who stockpiled weapons and trained for guerrilla warfare against a Soviet invasion that never came.
They'd been small, scattered, mostly ineffective. But they'd established a template.
Joe took a pull from the bottle. The beer was cold, at least.
The modern movement started in 1969 with something called the Posse Comitatus in Portland, Oregon.
Posse Comitatus. Latin for "power of the county."
The ideology was simple, the briefing said.
Radical. The county was the highest legitimate level of government.
The county sheriff was the supreme law enforcement authority.
Anything above that, including state and federal government—was illegitimate and tyrannical.
Part of a conspiracy to enslave free Americans.
If a sheriff refused to uphold "constitutional law" as the Posse defined it, citizens had the right to form a posse and remove him.
By force if necessary. One Posse document described hanging the offending sheriff "at high noon at the most populated intersection, the body remaining until sundown as an example. "
Joe flipped a page. The movement had grown slowly through the seventies, spreading from Oregon to the Midwest.
Not all Posse members bought into the group’s beliefs.
But enough did. And the anti-government message resonated with a growing number of Americans who felt betrayed by Washington.
Vietnam veterans who'd come home to protests and indifference.
Small farmers facing foreclosure. Tax protesters who believed the IRS was unconstitutional.
The farm crisis of the early eighties became a recruiting bonanza. Grain prices collapsed. Interest rates spiked. Family farms that had been solvent for generations went under. Banks foreclosed. The government offered programs that felt like too little, too late.
The Posse offered an alternative. Reject federal authority. Refuse to pay taxes. Form common-law courts. Arm yourselves. Prepare to resist.
Joe rubbed his eyes. The bar smelled like stale beer and fried food.
Then came news from the Ozarks. A new group formed called The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. They frequently used the acronym CSA.
Founded by a Texas minister who'd started a small survivalist Christian community in Missouri in 1971, the group eventually moved to a 224-acre compound near Bull Shoals Lake in northern Arkansas. Called it Zarephath-Horeb.
By 1978, it was transformed into a guerrilla training camp. Firing ranges. Obstacle courses. A mock town called Silhouette City where they practiced urban warfare. Targets shaped like blacks, Jews, police officers wearing Stars of David instead of badges.
In 1983, they declared war on the U.S. government. Tried to blow up a natural gas pipeline. Failed. Tried to burn down a church with a gay congregation. Mostly failed. Plotted to assassinate federal officials. Never carried it out.
But they had thirty gallons of potassium cyanide. Planned to poison the water supplies of major cities.
April 1985, the FBI finally moved and it ended peacefully as the group surrendered. But the raid turned up an arsenal. Machine guns, explosives, rockets, stolen vehicles. And that cyanide.
Joe flipped through more pages then drained half the second beer. His head was starting to hurt.
The movement had evolved, the briefing explained. Started as a tax protest in the sixties and seventies. Added survivalism—people preparing for economic collapse, nuclear war, social breakdown. Then came the paramilitary element. Training. Weapons. Organization.
Vietnam played a role. Thousands of veterans came home feeling betrayed.
They'd fought for their country, watched friends die, came back to a nation that didn't want them.
The government that sent them to war now seemed to be working against them.
High unemployment. VA hospitals overwhelmed. Benefits cut.
Some of those veterans brought skills. Infantry tactics. Weapons expertise. Leadership. Operational security. They became the cadre for militia groups. Trained civilians. Imposed discipline. Turned weekend warriors into something more dangerous.
The groups varied widely. Some were just angry men drinking beer and shooting guns in the woods. Others were organized, disciplined, preparing for actual conflict. The dangerous ones had structure. Chain of command. Training regimens. Secure communications. Weapons caches.
They recruited carefully. Targeted the disaffected. Veterans. Farmers facing foreclosure. Blue-collar workers who'd lost jobs. Rural Americans who felt ignored by Washington, looked down on by coastal elites. People who felt they'd played by the rules and gotten screwed.
The pitch was simple. The system is rigged. The government is corrupt. The media lies. But you're not alone. Join us. We're preparing. We'll protect our families, our communities, our way of life.
Joe flipped to the assessment section. Current status.
The movement was growing. Several thousand active members nationwide.
Tens of thousands of sympathizers. Groups in almost every state, concentrated in the Mountain West, the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest. Some overlap with white supremacist organizations, but not total.
Some militias explicitly rejected racism, focused purely on anti-government ideology.
The Cold War ending was accelerating growth, paradoxically. For forty years, Americans had a clear external enemy. The Soviet Union. Communism. Now that was collapsing. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Eastern Europe was breaking free. The existential threat was disappearing.
But the fear didn't disappear. It turned inward.
Joe closed the folder and stared at the bottle in his hand. Outside, a semi roared past on the highway. The neon sign buzzed and flickered through the window.
Kinsman fit the profile perfectly. Decorated veteran.
Special operations background. Disillusioned with government.
Living off the grid somewhere, surrounded by weapons and extremist literature.
If he'd been building something, he would have been exactly the kind of leader the task force was worried about.
The bartender was wiping down the bar, getting ready to close. Joe checked his watch. Nearly midnight.
He left a ten on the bar and gathered the briefing materials.
Outside, the night was cold and clear.
There were stars everywhere, no light pollution this far from cities.
Out here, Joe knew, anything could happen.