Oregon standoff

That Night I Spent with Ammon Bundy’s Armed Militia

Inside a strange, sad media circus.
Image may contain Human Person Military Military Uniform Armored Army and Soldier
From SIPA/A.P.

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.

Meanwhile, the militia members weren’t going anywhere. They were known to shuttle in envoys for food and supplies. They had sent out entreaties for provisions via Facebook. By the time I arrived, the militia and the media had already established their own dynamic, with one side offering daily press conferences and a sprinkle of scoops, and the other side returning the favor with plentiful coverage. The militia even had their own media-relations person, an online conservative radio host named Pete Santilli, who wore a flak jacket with the word “press” emblazoned on the back. He was the guy who could get me to Ammon Bundy. “What interests you most about the story?” he asked me, a bit too wide-eyed, when I approached him.

Soon enough I was in a car and headed to the main compound with Payne, who, with his trim beard, black Mountain Hardwear jacket, and single earpiece, looked like your average Portland cyclist. Payne worried aloud about the F.B.I. and what it might do next. Law enforcements’ inactivity, he suggested, was something of an insidious maneuver. According to Payne, the F.B.I. had already planted a crazy man to camp out at the front gate and get on-camera and make the militia look bad. What’s more, he said, they had set up high-pressure sodium lights and begun clearing rooftops in preparation for battle, and, worst of all, they even started disseminating misinformation. The night before, word arrived “through five different channels” that the F.B.I. was preparing to raid the compound with warrants out for five militiamen’s arrest. It made for a restless, fearful night. No one slept, Payne told me. Several people left, including a preacher and two women. But in the end, nothing happened.

Nevertheless, Payne seemed vexed that the F.B.I. would consider playing mind games with a group of “peaceful, God-fearing Americans.” As we neared Bundy’s compound, he promised me: “You are truly going to witness the cream of humanity’s moral possibility here.”

Burns, Oregon, seems less like a setting for a showdown about government rights than a setting for a Coen Brothers movie. It’s in the heart of Harney County, which consists of some 7,126 people scattered among 10,226 square miles. Cell-phone service is severely limited. High-school basketball games make up much of the social calendar. Bumper stickers like “Fuck al-Qaeda” are not entirely unheard of.

Many in Burns have a hard time believing that their tiny town has attracted so much attention. By the fifth day of Ammon Bundy’s siege, Sheriff David Ward called a town meeting at the Harney County Fairgrounds to address the matter. A half hour before the meeting was to begin, the parking lot was already filled with news vans. Around 200 folding chairs had been set out in the fairground’s main building, and by four P.M., it was standing-room only, with a news camera, television or still, for every 15 people filing into the room. Many wore the best cowboy hats you’ve ever seen in your life: broad cattlemans and curved cutters and a Stetson Boss of the Plains.

Some locals had found inspiration in what had gone down in their small town. “Burns, Oregon, is on the map!” exclaimed the local optometrist. Another joked that it only took an armed standoff to gather enough people to have a proper dance. Only residents were invited to approach the podium, but the room was filled with looky-loos from all over the country, seemingly determined to get a piece of the action. A 61-year-old man named Jimi O’Hagan, a commercial salmon fisherman and fourth-generation cranberry farmer from Washington, told me that he launched a suit against the state in the amount of $666,666,666.66. “I’m suing the devil for its due,” he explained. By his side was oyster farmer Daniel Russell, 27. They drove down to Burns to deliver 300 oysters to the militia, and they hoped to spend the night at their compound. Of the militia, O’Hagan told me, “They’re pretty somber: no alcohol, drugs, or chewing tobacco; no partying.” When I asked if there were any women in the compound, he raised his eyebrows and said, “Oh, yeah.”

Many of the townspeople had already grown a little weary of the attention. The sheriff’s department, after all, had set up in a former junior high school that typically serves as a community center, and so, many people had to miss their weekly get-togethers, writers’ groups, and such. A thirtysomething brunette seated nearby was ticked that she wasn’t able to attend the high school’s basketball game. A young mother said she was having trouble finding things to do with her kids during the indefinite school closure. The meeting opened with a prayer: “Help us to know your presence in our midst, in the midst of trying times,” a man said to a room of people gazing at their folded hands, a collective act of intimacy.

Sheriff Dave, a veteran who toured in Somalia and Afghanistan (“Y’all seen Black Hawk Down? That wasn’t me”) took the stage to a standing ovation. “I’m a little bit nervous,” he began, his mild demeanor a mismatch for the news photographs of the tough sheriff, wearing a thin jacket in the sub-freezing temperature, standing up to the men who hijacked his town. He went on to talk about the “stress” the community had faced in dealing with these outsiders, and how it’s affected his own family. Someone flattened his wife’s car tire and she left town (“It was too much”) and others followed his parents around in what Sheriff Dave perceived to be a threat to their health (they have pacemakers). “I’m here today to ask those folks to go home and let us get back to our lives in Harney County. At this point, nobody has been hurt,” he said into the microphone, and then conceded, “Some feelings have been hurt.”

The Malheur refuge is as cushy an outlaw hideout as any militia could ask for. One of the men with the Citizens, Blaine Cooper, 36, told me he’d already been involved in four standoffs with the Bureau of Land Management, including one in which he’d camped at a mine. This place had a lot more perks. The buildings inside the refuge were designed to offer all the comforts of home to the weekday park rangers, with a sizable headquarters containing a large kitchen, living room, bathrooms with showers, and a hallway of bedrooms. When I entered this main building, the “chow house,” it was evident that those Facebook entreaties for food had worked. The militia had enough snacks to wait out just about any standoff, particularly given that their estimated numbers hovered around two dozen, a figure which seemed overly generous on this evening.

A woman named Melissa Cooper, one of only two women then staying at the refuge (despite the cranberry farmer’s claim) stood in the designated storeroom, which usually serves as a gym, organizing boxes of supplies, many donated by visitors. There was everything from tuna fish to peanut butter, muffins to Doritos, wool socks to foot warmers, plus freezers filled with meat. For dinner that night, Melissa said, she served two hams, 30 pounds of potatoes, green beans, and apple pie. “God is on our side,” Melissa said, as she showed off the two washers, two dryers, four refrigerators, two ovens, two dishwashers, and television in the camp. One of the houses where people are bunking had HBO, she told me. The only thing they couldn’t seem to get to work was the Internet, even though they’d found the password. “We have T-bone steaks,” she said.

The refuge's manned watch tower.

By Rick Bowmer/A.P.

I asked where Bundy was, and Payne explained that he was already “racked” for the night, or in bed. It was 10 P.M. Sensing my disappointment, he suggested another activity.

“Want to climb the tower?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” I replied.

The watchtower has been a much-photographed feature of the standoff, both because it can be safely viewed from a distance and it’s a tidy symbol of the insurrection, with a gunman manning it around the clock. It looks like it belongs on an oil field rather than a nature preserve, what with its shaky metal scaffolding exposed to the sleet and freezing wind, but it’s typically used to spot fires. Now it is the militia’s strongest defense asset, offering a clear view for miles from its lofty cab. But first you have to get there. The climb starts on a slippery metal ladder and ascends eight sets of stairs in vertiginous switchbacks. Up top, a trap door opens into a room with windows that swing outward. There, you’ll find yourself in a small enclosure, 150 feet above the ground with two heavily armed men.

When we reached the lookout, Payne opened the window so I could see the view, but the night was cloudy. I got the feeling that this wasn’t working out exactly as he’d hoped. I put my hand on a narrow window ledge where five boxes rested.

“What are these?” I asked reflexively, as I realized they were magazines of ammunition.

“Candy,” Payne said.

There was a rifle in the room, and a piece of equipment that they were trying to hide from me, so I shone my cell phone on it. It was a long-range surveillance scope, engineered to make it possible to see a target from far away—a sniper setup. “We don’t want to talk about that,” Payne said. “It’s really cool though, right?”

The guard, who went by Captain Moroni (a reference to a military commander in the Book of Mormon), had been in the watchtower for six hours. He had a canister of trail mix, some Windex and paper towels to clean the window, and a radio, which wasn’t working. Payne picked it up and tested it.

“This is Rogue in the tower,” he said and handed the radio back to Moroni.

“Check the channel and make sure it’s on 150,” someone replied.

“I hear you loud and clear. It’s on the right channel. Thank you. Over,” Moroni said politely, only to receive static in return.

The radios were “soup.” Part of the problem, Payne said, was that people were taking them but not recharging them. For now, there wasn’t a functional radio in the tower, which seemed pretty important. Payne said it didn’t really matter. Moroni could just yell—everyone below would hear him.

When Payne isn’t organizing an armed militia, he is an electrician in Montana, and I bet he’s good at it. He is reserved and reliable, with two young children, and he likes to tease you in a brotherly sort of way. There was a part of him I found completely relatable, and then he’d launch into a diatribe on constitutional rights that would make me think, Then again, maybe not.

But Payne represents a grievance many his age have with their government. He enlisted in the Army when he was 17, and was deployed to Iraq as a long-range surveillance specialist. He said he started out as a “very motivated soldier” until a bad mission (he won’t go into it) near the end of his second tour made him question the legitimacy of the whole endeavor. Now, he said, “I see this as my actual service. I don’t believe that my military service was service. I thought it was unconstitutional disservice. I raised my right hand and took an oath to uphold and defend the constitution and the very next day I put on a uniform for an unconstitutional army and violated the oath for the next five years. And then I allowed myself to be sent around the world for an unconstitutional, non-declared war—not declared by Congress, so it’s not constitutional—to go kill and help kill people. It’s a horrible thing. ”

Payne is easily the most competent militiaman I met—“Take a knee, Moroni. Take a knee,” he repeatedly instructed the watchman in the tower, every time the guy pulled out a flashlight—but it seems he’s overestimated his own power. “They know that I’m here and they know what I used to do,” Payne said of the F.B.I. “There are a couple of other guys here who are also very specialized. They know what our capabilities are but they don’t necessarily understand how to react to it, because we both have the same knowledge. It’s like playing checkers with someone who is equally skilled as you.”

The cardinal rule in checkers is that you keep your back row intact and wait for the opposing player to flinch. That seems to be the F.B.I.’s tactic in Burns. There hasn’t been a visible police presence at the compound and the strategy of appearing to ignore the militia—like waiting out a toddler during a tantrum—is working. When I asked numerous members of the militia what they were after, most suggested a vague goal to return federal lands to the ranchers they see as its rightful owners, an aim which, as the chairperson of the local Paiute Tribal Council suggested to NPR, was sorely misdirected.

The truth is that most simply wanted to be there. Cooper and his wife told me they quit their jobs, cashed in their 401(k) funds, and left their three kids with friends in Arizona to be “full-time patriots.” They told me the militia had already won: they’d occupied federal buildings without firing a single shot. More importantly, the entire world knew it. He gestured to me as if to say, “Just look at you, you’re here.”

Inside one of Malheur's compounds where militia guards are supplied with bottles of water, canned food, and potatoes.

By Jim Urquhart/Reuters/Corbis.

Earlier this week, the Citizens sent word to the media that Bundy would hold a press conference on Friday to announce their exit plan. But it is already afoot. Many of the incoming volunteers, who have yet to turn out in the thousands as hoped, are only willing to commit for short stints. One guy I met planned to return to Idaho for the weekend to install a water heater. All together, the Citizens are poorly organized, poorly trained, and in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by only themselves.

For many of their members, that’s beside the point. The real goal, it seems, is to re-invigorate the far right, inspiring militia groups throughout the nation. And when it comes to that, the Bundys are winning. According to an annual report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center last week, there are presently 276 active militias in America, a count that’s increased by one-third in the past year. The S.P.L.C. linked this uptick to the 2014 standoff at Bundy ranch, when the Feds confronted Cliven Bundy for his unpaid grazing fees and he threatened them at gunpoint until they backed down. He walked away from the incident, neither paying his fines nor going to prison. That perceived victory inspired some men, including his son, Ammon, to air his own grievances. It is likely that, at present, Ammon is inspiring someone else.

It’s easy enough to distill this uprising as yet another outbreak in our nation’s epidemic of gun violence. (Without their arsenal, after all, the militia in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge would amount to nothing more than over-solicitous bird-watchers.) But even if we could pass more restrictive gun legislation more quickly, these men would be among the last to lose their legally obtained weapons. A greater concern is why they carry them in the first place.

On the watchtower, Ryan told me he believes that “everything is Divine Providence. There are pressure points that lead you everywhere you’re going to go. You don’t ever make your mind up. That’s a ridiculous notion.” The socioeconomic “pressure points” in our country—poverty, lack of education, and the militarization of the poor and uneducated—are inadvertently manufacturing disenfranchised men who seek community in gangs and strength through force, arming themselves in order to be heard by the nation. While the general response to this particular insurrection, hashtags such as #yallqaeda and #vanillaISIS, have underlined its absurdity, it’s not a joke that the Citizens employ the same dangerous tactics as all terrorists, using the threat of violence to push their unreasonable demands to international awareness and thereby solicit new members.

When I left the compound at one A.M., Bundy was still “racked.” He had a big week ahead of him. The Citizens may be riding off into the sunset apace the fading spotlight, but they promise to return again.