That Night I Spent With Ammon Bundy’s Armed Militia
Very good article. Well worth the read.
BY MARNIE HANE
VF News
It was just past midnight when I noticed the five magazines of ammunition. Near a window, there was a rifle and a scope. Beside me were two members of Ammon Bundy’s armed militia—the one that had recently made national news for taking over a federal wildlife sanctuary and a smattering of buildings contained therein. All around us was complete and utter blackness. We were standing atop a watchtower, in 18-degree weather, eight rickety stories above the snow, in the middle of a remote bird sanctuary in Eastern Oregon, 30 miles from the nearest town, which was 130 miles from the next nearest town.
Thus far, it had been a pretty strange night. After dusk, I had arrived at the front gate of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, outside Burns, Oregon. I am admittedly new to militia life, but I was surprised by what I encountered. A number of men were huddled around a campfire, gossiping and passing the time. Two hailed from Idaho and a third, an old-timer in a cowboy hat roughly the width of my shoulders, had driven in from Hermiston, Oregon, with his second-favorite horse trailer. (“Only take shit we can lose,” his wife insisted.) They were talking about the Three Percenters, a rival militia in Idaho. (“They never returned my phone calls,” said one man. “Sounds like my wife,” responded the other.) I stood by Ryan Payne, 32, the “response coordinator” of the militia.
The militia, which had adopted the moniker Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, had taken over the park four days earlier and declared that they hoped to return the land to its homesteading roots. They were at the fore of a larger movement, they claimed, aimed at forcing the U.S. government to relinquish control of large swaths of western territory—a John Wayne fever dream of sorts intended to re-create a modern Wild West idyll.
The Citizens had come poised, they told reporters, for a fight with law enforcement. Instead, somewhat to their surprise, law enforcement had decided to wait it out. What ensued was something of a compromise: a slow-bleeding media circus. Under Bundy’s stewardship, amid the news-free days of early January, the Citizens had successfully captured the imagination of content-deprived editors and producers the nation over. The Pine Room, in downtown Burns, was filled with journalists, laptops open, drinking pints of beer, many of them complaining that USA Today scooped their shot. The highway was littered with satellite trucks.