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This didn’t surprise me. I’d already read about Richard Mack, a former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, who now travels the country ‘crusading for freedom and individual rights’ and insists ‘the greatest threat we face today is not terrorists; it is our own federal government’.
The militias, which are dotted throughout the US and, according to recent figures, are growing rapidly in numbers, claim they are bulwarks against tyranny. The US Department of Homeland Security takes a dimmer view, warning of a ‘rise in Right-wing anti-government extremist activity’ as far back as April 2009 and a ‘phenomenon of violent radicalisation’.
Indeed, according to the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC), which tracks extremist groups, the US has seen a dramatic spike in attempted domestic terrorism ever since Barack Obama started his campaign for office, including: two skinhead plots to assassinate him; a plan to set off a dirty bomb packed with radioactive materials during the inauguration; and a lone assassin, Keith Luke, who began murdering black people in Massachusetts.
Of course, militia activity is hardly new to the US. The very first article of the Constitution granted Congress the power to call on ‘the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions’ and the subsequent Militia Act of 1792 defined the militia as every able-bodied male citizen over 18 and under 45.
It’s an act that has been embraced by a fair number of American citizens ever since, whether loners or disparate groups of armed, disgruntled civilians. In 1992, Randy Weaver, a former US Army Green Beret, moved himself and his family to an isolated cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, to escape what they saw as a corrupt world. Rather than a peaceful nature-lover, officials claimed Weaver was a member of a race-hate group and he was charged with weapons violations. When he failed to appear in court, they stormed the cabin, resulting in the fatal shooting of Weaver’s wife, Vicki, and 14-year-old son, Sammy.
The deadly ambush only added to militias’ grievances against what they saw as an unlawful and despotic federal government. But it was the siege at Waco, Texas, a year later, that really ignited the movement. Following the deaths of 80 people in the fire, Waco became a rallying point for conspiracy theorists, members of the patriot movement and a rabid end-of-days philosophy.
Timothy McVeigh was one of those unhinged people who visited Mount Carmel during the weeks following the battle between cult members and officers of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Two years later, he would use plastic explosives to blow up the Federal Murrah building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
It was 1995 before Theodore Kaczynski, the ‘Unabomber’, was arrested, after a domestic mail bombing campaign spanning almost 20 years. Having honed his survival skills from his isolated cabin outside Lincoln, Montana, the by-then 68 year-old had succeeded in killing three people and injuring 23 others with bombs that often included bits of treebark and wood, a symbolic protest against what he saw as the destruction of the wilderness around his home.
With this sort of history, it’s perhaps unsurprising that so many militias were loath to let me in. My quest began in February this year, after a report by the SPLC claimed that the number of Right-wing extremist groups had risen by 250 per cent since Obama’s election. I had approached groups from all over the country in the hope that one of them would let me watch them train. Then, in April, members of a radical Christian militia in Michigan known as the Hutaree were arrested for allegedly plotting to kill police officers. Suddenly, the movement had become even more fearful of media interest – not to mention the heat of the law.
I still wanted to find out first-hand why there were a growing number of people wanting to arm themselves – and against what exactly? And this was how, one spring evening, I eventually found myself face-to-face with Johnny Cochran, the head of Fireteam Diamondback (named after the rattlesnake abundant in this part of Texas), in his local Italian in the oil-rich city of Odessa.
I was due to watch Cochran and his men train the next day. But first, I wanted to find out more about him and his members. Why had he left the military? Cochran told me that he had been shot in the leg by friendly fire in Iraq and in the finger by an Iraqi, and had left the navy ‘just before Comrade Clinton took office in 1992’.
So how could he ever envisage taking up arms against the US military? ‘If they take our guns away,’ he told me. ‘They already did it after Hurricane Katrina. They declared a national emergency then went through neighbourhoods disarming civilians. The National Guard units went house-to-house, physically body slamming an elderly woman to the ground, taking a .38 revolver from her even though she was telling them she needed it to protect her family.’
That was a Republican administration, I pointed out. ‘The Democrats are running towards socialism at 100 miles an hour and Republicans are only running 60,’ he said. ‘They’ll all get to the same damn place eventually. Our job as militia is to re-establish the government in a way George [Washington] and the boys intended. And to do that we can’t go and hide in the bushes; we have to take active participation in the overthrow that Thomas Jefferson point-blank told us was our duty as Americans.’
Cochran certainly sounded ready for some ‘active participation’, reeling off a list of items he always carries in his car ‘in case of emergencies’: an AR15 assault rifle, a minimum 300 rounds of ammunition, a knife, first aid kit, food for three days, combat boots, a Cold Steel curved knife (‘I can remove a human limb with that and the head of a white tail buck with one swat’), a Kimber 45 pistol and six spare magazines, a shotgun and military-issue MREs (meals ready to eat).
I asked when he thought this revolution might happen. ‘We’re anticipating something happening prior to the November elections because the Democrats know they’re on the way out.’
This may sound like some crackpot fantasy, but it’s one that’s undeniably gaining currency. According to the SPLC report, there were 147 ‘patriot groups’ in 2006; by 2009 there were 512. ‘There has been a stunning expansion in these groups,’ Mark Potok, a spokesman for the SPLC, tells me. ‘In addition, there was an 80 per cent rise in hardline anti-immigration groups and hate groups like the Klan and neo-Nazis.’
Cochran, who runs a small oilfield company, told me emphatically that his group was not racist and that, like a lot of militias, he resents being grouped together with race-hate groups by organisations such as the SPLC.
‘They say we’re Nazis but it’s ironic because we’re faith-based and the Nazis deplored religion,’ he said. ‘We’re pro-rights, and the Nazis removed as many rights as possible. All this has done is strengthen the core support.’
Certainly, the militias I spoke to all seemed to share the same preoccupations. One man recruiting for a new militia in Oklahoma told me he wanted to be ‘prepared to put down a tyrannical government’. A member of a group in Mississippi said that if the government ‘did something crazy’, like take away their guns, he couldn’t predict what people would do: ‘This could get real ugly, real quick.’
Their opposition to federal government is what distinguishes them from the militias of old, which were designed to aid the government, rather than fight them, in the event of a national emergency. Indeed, according to civil rights organisation the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the militia movement claims to be the ‘militia’ enshrined in the Constitution but is not. The ADL says that they are simply private, unregulated paramilitary groups but that there is no federal law against their existence.
Cochran, who grew up within 20 minutes of the city of Midland, George W Bush’s hometown, was introduced to the movement by his father ‘as soon as I was big enough to carry a rifle’, at the age of 10. He joined the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps in high school, after which he signed up to the military. Cochran’s wife (he won’t reveal her name) was born in ‘liberal Kansas’ – apparently a running joke in their family – and has degrees in Spanish, mathematics and chemistry. She is also an expert marksman.
Cochran told me that some of the close-quarters training would be ‘off-limits’ the next day – although he would evidently relent when it came to demonstrating knifing someone in the throat. ‘We do simulation but we don’t condone anything that is illegal,’ he tells me. ‘If someone is to show up at one of our exercises with an illegal weapon they’ll be turned away.’
The next morning I am waiting with Cochran at a restaurant five miles out of town. Inside the next door petrol station, you can buy cowboy hats, model buffalo heads, and John Wayne mugs and alarm clocks. A truck pulls up and two men get out wearing camouflage gear.
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