Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507070094
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: GLENCOE, ALA. LENGTH: Long
8:30 a.m.:
Weapons rest against tree trunks. The Confederate flag hangs limp. Daryl Cheatwood, camouflaged and well-armed like most others here, talks in a calm voice, sitting at a picnic table.
He tells of a professor's experiment: A frog is placed in a pan of water on a stove and the heat turned up. The frog does not jump and finally dies, Cheatwood says.
Why? ``Because he turned it up slow.''
That's what's happening to this country, he says.
Signs that the national temperature is heading, undetected, toward boiling are everywhere, Cheatwood says, pulling out documents culled from the nationwide militia movement's fax and newsletter network. They cite:
United Nations efforts to limit parents' rights. Unexplained black helicopters. Closed off national forests. Nearer home, federal meddling in a state problem, the burning of an Alabama high school during a racial controversy. Waco. Oklahoma City.
Around the picnic table, others join in.
Bill Gribble arrives at his first militia gathering. He comes armed and with his wife, Charli. Waco got them into the movement. Congressional hearings will prove nothing. ``They'll whitewash that,'' Charli Gribble complains.
Her husband talks of a conspiracy to disable all of America's cars through the vulnerable electronics installed in most models since the 1970s.
There's deep suspicion, too, of the executive orders President Clinton is writing. ``Like you and I write grocery lists,'' says one woman.
There's something else behind the frustration: a sense that people work harder for less today. Cheatwood recalls the comment of a fellow militiaman who had camped here the night before:
``He said this is the first time in years he's had time to sit down and talk ... And his wife is working like a dog, too.''
12:30 p.m.:
Twenty paces back from a makeshift firing range, a militiaman with a USMC tattoo picks up a squawking walkie-talkie as shots thunder behind him.
``How many Bosnians did you kill down there?'' someone jokes over the two-way phone.
``We got 'em on the run,'' he bellows back, laughing.
He gives his name only as Gene, saying he works for the government and cannot be identified fully.
What is the militia? He kids around: ``The militia is Neighborhood Watch on steroids. The militia is a buddy plan. If your buddy finds a deal on ammunition, he'll call around.''
He describes the arsenal in the back of his pickup truck:
A slew of copper-coated, three-inch-long .30-caliber bullets; a Chinese-made SKS semi-automatic rifle; a Ruger .22 rifle with a telescopic site that he uses to ``enforce a crow no-fly zone over my property,'' and, under a blanket, a fully automatic machine gun, a replica of a World War II model, for which he has permits.
He's always had guns, always liked them. He's just out here to keep the firing line safe.
A rifle equipped with a 76-round drum-shaped magazine, looking like the tommy guns in the old ``Untouchables'' TV show, blasts in the background, tearing the surface of a pond, then the bank beyond it, then a chrome hubcap someone set out.
``This movement,'' Gene continued when the pounding shots quit, ``has caused people to have opinions that haven't had opinions.''
Joining the conversation, two 40ish brothers, one of whom fired the Untouchables gun, say they don't ``believe the American dream anymore.''
Why not? Their reply wanders. A highway patrolman was arrogant with them. High taxes keep the employees in their concrete business from getting ahead.
One brother muses about emigrating: ``I've thought about going to some country ... Maybe I couldn't be in air conditioning no more, but I'd just set up in the shade and, like when we were kids, just listen to the radio. Somewhere where you're not just constantly worried about what's next.''
3:30 p.m.:
John McCain has just returned from the firing range with his three sons, ages 12, 10 and 5. They're all hot, and the father pours drinks from an ice chest, then breaks up an ice cube skirmish.
``We gave Mom a break today,'' says McCain, who spent nearly 10 years in the Army. He brings the kids out to instill gun safety, he says, and maybe to pass on a bit of constitutionalist politics to his oldest.
Why the militia? ``It's something to actually vent frustrations. This is all a new political game for me.''
When he hears about an issue he doesn't like, McCain says he fires off letters to public officials. But they've mostly been thrown away, he figures. If addressed properly, the wording was often wrong.
``I'm hot-headed,'' he says. The militia leaders have sharpened and focused his words. ``That's something they've helped me with.''
One of those leaders is Jeff Randall, a wiry man wearing a blond mustache, a police cap and an intense expression. He estimates Alabama militia membership at 5,000.
Randall says he's been on the road a lot lately, most recently in Missouri, stoking the national militia fires.
``There's an emergency in progress,'' he says.
Another leader, Mike Kemp, says he holds a chemistry degree. He makes a point that he knows about bombs. His eyes grow wide, and he grins. Kemp understands he'll be quoted.
``I want to scare the ATF. They've been terrorizing the people for a long time,'' he says.
``You screw with me and you pay the price.''
Later, he emphasizes he has no plan to attack anyone.
``I'm not a bomber,'' he says. ``I'm an educated man with children.''
Asked his personal weaponry, he says, ``A ballpoint pen.''
He grins again.
A cooling rain has passed and militia members form a circle, eating meat from a barbecue smoker.
A pony-tailed man in camouflage has the group rapt, describing a raid by sheriff's drug officers at his home a year ago, searching for marijuana:
``They didn't find nothing, but yet they destroyed my home, interrogated my kids, took my daughter in the back room by herself, which should never have happened. Holding a gun on my kids.''
He got serious about the militia. ``I'm not against anyone,'' he says. ``I'm just to the point that I'm tired of being run over.''
Listening, some fellow militia members grunt or shake their heads.
Randall speaks up, promising retaliation if his home is invaded. ``They better cut their hedgerow down by their driveway, 'cause I'm gonna be hiding in there with a baseball bat.''
9:15 p.m.:
The more or less formal Gadsden Minutemen meeting is starting. A fire in a 50-gallon drum spews sparks like swarms of orange fireflies.
Members stand to recite: ``I pledge allegiance to the flag ... '' But one man, with a rifle over his shoulder and a handgun holstered at his waist, turns away.
``I don't do that no more,'' says the man, Vern Wilkins.
Back when he was a paratrooper in Vietnam, he thought he was ``doing the right thing for God and country, Mom and apple pie,'' but disillusionment started growing when he saw GIs mistreated in a veterans' hospital.
``What I'm bitter about is the way the country is today,'' says Wilkins, who drives a truck and has been a machinist and a corrections officer.
``I've got a daughter that's 9 years old and she's a genius, and she'll probably never get to go to the college of her choice because I'm not wealthy enough to send her to that college.'' Someone, whom he does not specify, is ``holding me back.''
That's why he's here.
Wilkins insists that this militia organization is educational, not militant. He worries about differences between militias - for example, Klan-related groups.
``If this thing gets to a shooting war ... it won't be just us and the government. There'll be lots of people shooting at lots of people. It'll be really messy. It'll be like what Bosnia is now.''
By the fire, the leaders speak.
Kemp tells of overtures by the Minutemen - all members present are white - to a militant black group to see if they have grievances in common. ``No positive feedback at all,'' he reports.
Randall issues a warning. Someone has stolen explosives from an Alabama construction site, and militia members should beware of being set up with ``a good deal'' to purchase it.
``They're looking to do anything to set us up right now,'' Randall says.
``You don't need explosives. If the day ever comes that we need that, there's plenty of people we can take it from. Don't get it and bury it.''
The meeting continues. At one point, Randall shouts, ``Anybody want out?''
A man moves unsteadily forward, raising a beer can, and vows, ``Hell, no, I'm with you 110 percent.''
by CNB