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CHAPTER ONE

The Other “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

HITLER IN IRAQ

The military has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt . . . they are likely to be able to complete their contracts.

US Department of Defense report, 20051

My journey into the dark underworld of the US military begins on a rainy Tuesday morning in March 2008, with a visit to Tampa, Florida, on the south-eastern tip of the country. The mission is simple: to meet Forrest Fogarty, a diehard American patriot who has served the US Army proudly for two years in Iraq, the central focus of America’s War on Terror and the country’s most controversial foreign adventure since Vietnam. The twist is that Forrest doubles as a white supremacist of the serious Hitler-worshipping type. Over the preceding months, I’d been speaking to him intermittently on his cell phone after his brother had put us in contact. It was a necessarily convoluted route: getting inside the neo-Nazi network in the United States is no cakewalk, requiring endless appeals via phone and email to penetrate the thick walls put up against a hostile mainstream media. I’d been uniquely successful with Fogarty, who is an effortlessly loquacious character with a compelling story, so I take a flight from New York City to meet him.

On arrival, I quickly check into the nearest hotel after the bus drops me off downtown, but it’s early afternoon so I walk along the deserted walkway next to the Hillsborough River that runs through the heart of the city, dividing the University of Tampa from the skyscrapers on my side. It is about 5 p.m. before I eventually muster the courage to call Forrest on his cell. He picks up after a few rings. “Oh hey, I didn’t think you’d come!” he says in his croaky voice, sounding happy to hear from me. “I usually go get a beer after work, why don’t you come?” Sure, I tell him.

A couple of hours later I’m in a cab headed for his favorite hangout, the Winghouse Bar & Grill, which describes itself as “a casual sports-bar with delicious over-sized entrees.” I’d assumed the place was downtown, so it’s an unpleasant surprise when the taxi speeds along endless miles of pitch-black highway with the full moon barely lighting up the dense forests and thickets whizzing by. The situation is prime for a bit of macabre daydreaming: will I be jumped by a group of his mates, maybe even end up decapitated in the woods? Before too long we pull up at the sparkling Winghouse, located on a plain at the side of the highway, its bright lights a welcome interruption to the surrounding blackness. It’s an open-plan restaurant with a bar in the middle and a group of Tampa belles in low-cut tops taking orders. In our brief phone call I’d asked Forrest how I would recognize him. “Just look for the skinhead with the tattoos,” he said, laughing. And sure enough, sitting straight to my right as I walk in is a youngish looking man, plastered in tattoos, with tightly cropped hair, wife-beater vest, and bulging biceps—a poster-boy skinhead, the archetypal American Nazi. “Good to meet you,” I say, not bothering to get confirmation. “Hey Matt,” he replies. “Sit down.” He is bright and alert, his keen eyes darting around as he speaks. We order some chicken wings with buffalo sauce, and a pitcher of beer. “You’re British, right,” he says. “I remember seeing black guys with British accents in Iraq, shit was so crazy.”

Forrest is obviously in his element in the Winghouse as he slouches in his chair, beer in one hand, chicken wing in the other. He doesn’t take long to start in with his life story, which, for shock value, is admittedly hard to beat. He tells me he grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Tampa at fifteen with some serious psychological baggage. In high school in LA he was bullied by Mexican and African American children and was just fourteen when he decided he wanted to be a Nazi. By the time his family moved and he switched to Leto High in Tampa, he had found his identity: “I eventually got kicked out of Leto High, for being a racialist,” he says, his voice quivering with anger still. “I was getting in a few fights. What they do in desegregation is bus blacks into the neighborhood. On the first day, a bunch of niggers, they said ‘Are you in the KKK?’ to me, and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and it was on. After this, I kept getting in fights, eventually they expelled me.”

It’s nerve-wracking sitting in a bar with Forrest as he vents openly against black people and Jews. He has no qualms about flaunting his Nazism and I look like his friend. “I get into fights myself twice a month because I’m a Nazi,” he assures me, pouring a pint of beer and smiling. “I’m completely open about it.” When black people come into the bar he emits a hiss of disapproval. “I just don’t want to be around them,” he tells me. “I don’t want to look at them, I don’t want them near me, I don’t want to smell them. And people say, ‘Oh people who are racialist you’ve never hung around black people’ . . . bullshit, I’ve showered with them, I’ve lived with them, I don’t like them . . . they’re fucking savages, they’re tribal motherfuckers, they are different to us, how they think, how they conduct themselves.” Although he has two kids to look after, aged nine and thirteen, he has the mannerisms of an adolescent. He speaks a lot about “chasing pussy” and getting into fights, and bloviates about Jews and Arabs in between. I nod my head insincerely.

But there’s more to Forrest than just bravado. As he downs our pitcher of Bud he becomes freer and talks about his other great passion in life: music. As a young man he was obsessed with Ian Stuart Donaldson, the legendary singer in the British band Skrewdriver, who is hero-worshipped in the neo-Nazi music scene with a fervor akin to a thirteen-year-old Goth’s veneration of Marilyn Manson. This adulation was so strong that at sixteen Forrest had an image from one of Skrewdriver’s album covers—a Viking carrying an axe, an icon among white nationalists—tattooed on his left forearm. Soon after he had a Celtic cross, an Irish symbol appropriated by neo-Nazis, emblazoned on his stomach. A few years later he started his own band, Attack, now one of the biggest Nazi bands in the US, playing all over the country to crowds of white power fans. But it was never his day job. “I was a landscaper when I left school,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “I kind of fell into it, I was a kid back then. I didn’t give a shit what I was doing, I was just drinking and fighting.”

For the next eight years he drifted through jobs in construction and landscaping and began hanging out with the National Alliance, at the time one of the biggest neo-Nazi organizations in the US. He soon became a member. The group’s founder was the late William Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, a novel describing the violent overthrow of the American government, and which is believed to have inspired Timothy McVeigh to carry out the 1995 terrorist attack in Oklahoma.2 The Alliance is one of the few durable fixtures in the American extremist firmament, where groups often start up and die within a hummingbird’s lifetime. At the time of Forrest’s involvement with them, they were arguably the most powerful far-right force in the US. It has called for “a long-term eugenics program involving at least the entire populations of Europe and America.”

With his music and friends in place, Forrest turned his attention to his lackluster work. Construction was never what he had wanted to do. He had always seen himself as a fighter and warrior. So he resolved to do what two generations of Fogartys had done before him: join the military. “I wanted to serve my country,” he says as he chews on the last remnants of chicken. “Every male part of my family has served in combat; my father was in Vietnam for two tours as part of the Marine Corps, and my grandfather was in World War Two, Korea and Vietnam.”

Forrest would not be the first extremist to enter the armed forces. The neo-Nazi movement has had a long and tense relationship with the US military, documented for decades. Since its inception, the leaders of the white supremacist movement—which is as old as the country—have encouraged their members to enlist. They see it as a way for their followers to receive combat and weapons training, courtesy of the US government, and to bring what they learn home to then undertake a domestic race war. The concept of a racial “holy war,” often called “Rahowa,” is adhered to by a host of extremist groups—from the Nation of Islam to neo-Nazis—and advocates an apocalyptic eruption of all-against-all racial violence that pitches races against each other and into open conflict with the government. Not all far-right groups subscribe to this vision—some, like the Ku Klux Klan, claim to prefer a democratic approach. But a large portion see themselves as insurrectionary forces challenging the moral bankruptcy of a government that is unreformable. To that end, professional training in warfare is a must. The US military has long been aware of these groups’ attempts at infiltration. Even so, the first military directive pertaining to “extremism” didn’t appear until the Vietnam War and the target of the new guidelines wasn’t racist extremists, but rather anti-war elements. The Department of Defense Directive Guidelines for Handling Dissent and Protest Activities Among Members of the Armed Forces was aimed at curbing the influence of dissidents within the military by prohibiting the publishing of “underground” newspapers, the formation of military unions, and other actions that could be used by anti-war protestors to further their agenda.3

The presence of white supremacists in the military first triggered concern in 1976. At Camp Pendleton in California, a group of black marines attacked white marines they mistakenly believed to be in the KKK. The resulting investigation uncovered a KKK chapter at the base and led to the jailing or transfer of sixteen Klansmen. But the Vietnam-era legislation was the extent of provisions until 1986, when reports again surfaced of army and Marine Corps members participating in Ku Klux Klan activities. This forced President Reagan’s Secretary of Defense at the time, Caspar Weinberger, to issue a directive stipulating that “military personnel must reject participation in white supremacy, neo-Nazi, and other such groups which espouse or attempt to create overt discrimination.”4 The 1986 policy change was modified further in 1996 when language was added to the DOD Directive that specifically banned white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. It explicitly “prohibited activities” by these groups in the military. This change came after the murder in 1995 of two African Americans by a neo-Nazi paratrooper stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The killings led to an investigation that ultimately revealed twenty-two soldiers at Fort Bragg with known extremist tendencies. Fogarty was recruited the year after.

As we finish up our drinks at the Winghouse, I ask if I can meet Forrest again while I’m in the city, which is for just another three days. “I’m working tomorrow, and with the kids on Saturday,” he says. Thinking quickly, I suggest taking them all to the local zoo, the first attraction I can remember from my hotel tourist pack. “Yeah, why not,” he says, and we set a date for Saturday afternoon.

A Narrative of Mistakes

Driving out from downtown Tampa, it takes twenty minutes to arrive at the fifty-six-acre Lowry Park Zoo, tucked away behind the tree-lined highway. The place is overrun with kids and their parents even as the inclement weather beats down rain and hail. Forrest turns up a bit late with his two kids and we set off around the enclosures. Before the rain gets too much we take in the seals, the tigers, and the camels. “Goddamn camels,” says Forrest, looking peaked, “I hate them things.” We talk candidly about his racism and violence in front of his kids, who are a smart pair, not yet set on the same political trajectory as their dad. “There’s nothing they don’t know. I just tell them it’s OK to be white,” says Forrest. “In school they teach about slavery and the Holocaust, they teach them about indiscriminately murdering Jews. I say there’s two sides to every story, you’re hearing from the people who won the war. I don’t care if they have non-white friends, but they will become gang-bangers and not like you when they are older.” The younger kid is “hardcore” according to Forrest, but his ex-wife doesn’t want him joining the military. The older one is obviously very intelligent, outlining the evolutionary reasons for various animal quirks to me effortlessly.

After a good period, the rain sends us all to seek refuge under an umbrella-covered table by a restaurant. While Forrest’s sons play by themselves, he delves deeper into how he joined the military in the first place, with his five-star neo-Nazi credentials. He knew back then that the tattoo he had riding up his forearm could be a problem when it came to enlistment. In a neo-Nazi underworld obsessed with secrecy, racist tattoos remain one of the biggest indicators of extremism for a recruiter, and in an effort to police the matter the US military requires recruits to explain any tattoos. An army manual published in 2000 notes, that “Extremist groups frequently use tattoos to show group association” and offers recruiters a list of specific images to look out for, among them “lightning bolts, skulls, Nazi swastikas, eagles, and Nordic warriors.”5 It instructs recruiters that any would-be soldier who refuses to remove an offending tattoo should not be allowed to enlist. Fogarty’s are quite clearly the kind written about in the manual—a Nordic warrior and a Celtic cross. This didn’t hinder his application. “They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo and I made up some stuff and that was that,” he says, chuckling. Maybe it’s not so surprising. According to the military itself, the education of recruiters about how to identify extremists fell by the wayside during the War on Terror. A 2005 report by the Defense Personnel Security Research Center (DPSRC), which is a DOD entity, concluded that recruiting personnel “were not aware of having received training on recognizing and responding to possible terrorists”—a designation that includes white supremacists— “who try to enlist.” It found, on the question of extremist tattoos, that recruiters lacked “completeness, accuracy, timeliness, and accessibility of intelligence for screening tattoos.”6

After hanging out with Forrest, I decided to test it out. I contacted a random pool of recruitment centers and found that the level of awareness was low to minimal. I spoke to five different stations around the country pretending to be a prospective soldier, with the caveat that I had a pair of “SS lightning bolts” tattooed on my arm. Despite being outlined in army regulations as a tattoo to look out for, none of the recruiters reacted negatively and, when pressed directly about the tattoo, not one of them said it would be an outright problem. The conversations began in the usual fashion: I told them I wanted to join the military, and covered up for my British accent by saying I was just married to an American. The recruiter at Houston station hadn’t heard of SS bolts. “I don’t know what they are; you’ll have to come in. They might be OK, might not be OK,” she said. At the Houston Willowbrook office I was told, “I don’t know, will have to crack the regulation open.” At Waldo in Kansas City the recruiter’s response was again ambiguous. “I’m not saying it means you can’t get in,” he said.7 No wonder Forrest found it so easy. Not long after, my suspicions were given further validation when I was flicking through a long 2009 Newsweek profile of army specialist Terry Holdbrooks, who converted to Islam after being positioned at Guantanamo Bay. Deep into the article, with breathless ambivalence, the journalist recalls being at Holdbrooks’s Phoenix apartment when “he rolls up both sleeves to reveal wrist-to-shoulder tattoos.” Holdbrooks goes on to describe the “ink work as a narrative of his mistakes and addictions.” These “mistakes” include “religious symbols and Nazi SS bolts, track marks and, in large letters, the words BY DEMONS BE DRIVEN.”8 The journalist fails to raise the obvious question: How did someone with a tattoo of Nazi SS bolts get into the US military in the first place?

But even if the tattoos are missed for whatever reason, it’s not the last chance the military has to rid itself of a neo-Nazi soldier. An Army Command Policy manual devotes more than one hundred pages to rooting them out. But no officer appeared to be reading it. It states the policy generally: “Participation in extremist organizations and activities by Army personnel is inconsistent with the responsibilities of military service.”9 Specifically, soldiers are prohibited from participating in such organizations through public demonstrations or rallies, attending meetings or activities, fundraising, recruitment or training, taking a visible leadership role or distributing literature. The options available to a commander should these rules be transgressed are involuntary separation, reclassification action or bar to reenlistment actions, or other action “deemed appropriate.” None of that appeared to be of interest as the War on Terror raged.

Medals and Everything

Soon after Fogarty was approved, he was stationed in the Third Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart, Georgia, the largest army installation east of the Mississippi River. Once at the base, the army got a helping hand from an unlikely source who alerted them to the extremist in their midst. As we stroll on again around the zoo, Forrest recounts the story of how his ex-girlfriend and mother of his eldest child was livid when he joined the military and tried to scupper his plans when he was positioned in Georgia, away from the family. “She hated that I was in the military,” he says as he looks at his kids. Her anger became so acute that, according to Fogarty, she sent a dossier of pictures to his military command that showed him at white supremacist and neo-Nazi rallies, as well as performing his racist rock with Attack. “They hauled me before some sort of committee, and showed me the pictures and asked me what they were. I just denied it and said my girlfriend was a spiteful bitch, which is true.” Although he talks a lot about chasing all sorts of women, Forrest claims he doesn’t go for women who are like him, which might explain her exasperation. He is currently single but says, “I try to keep some chicks, but I don’t like skinhead girls, I don’t like girls with tattoos.”

The committee, he says, “knew what I was about, but they let it go because I’m a great soldier, and they knew that.” The investigation, Fogarty tells me, was headed by Command Sergeant Major Tommy Dunne, now retired. When I contact Dunne by phone, he initially denies knowing Fogarty, but when I try again some months later he acknowledges that he remembers the soldier. I ask if he recalls seeing Fogarty’s prominent racist tattoos. “I didn’t see any tattoos like that,” he says. At one point in our conversations, Fogarty claimed that Dunn had told him “The only reason I like you is you’re racist!” I ask Dunn about this. “I don’t remember saying anything like that,” he says. “He was just an average soldier.” “It’s funny,” says Fogarty when I tell him. “He gave me medals and everything.” Even Colonel Todd Wood, the highest authority at the military installation, doted on him, according to Fogarty. I ask him whether that was because of his fighting prowess. “Yes, exactly,” he says, “They didn’t want me to get out, they were taking me to dinner, taking me and my wife out.” A roadside bomb in Iraq killed Colonel Wood in October 2005.10

The brave efforts of Fogarty’s girlfriend having gone unheeded, Fogarty remained in the reserves, until finally, in 2004, he was sent where he had always wanted to go: Iraq. “I’m a fighter, I love combat, I wanted to be in the action,” he says. At the time, the Tampa local newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, interviewed him at Fort Stewart. There was no mention of his Nazism. “We didn’t come over here to hang out at Fort Stewart,” Forrest told them.11 Before he left for the Middle East, Forrest joined the Hammerskin Nation—described by the Anti-Defamation League as the “the most violent and best-organized neo-Nazi skinhead group in the United States.”12 He was a probate for the Hammerskin Nation while in Iraq, a process that guards against infiltration, and on his return to the United States became a full-fledged member.

The degree of impunity encountered by Forrest and countless other extremists caused tensions within the military. The blind eye turned by the recruiters angered many investigators whose integrity was being compromised. Hunter Glass was a paratrooper in the 1980s and became a gang cop in 1999 in Fairville, North Carolina, next to Fort Bragg. “In the 1990s the military was hard on them, they could pick and choose,” he recalls, “that was after the Burmeister trial, so they were looking for anybody, they were looking for swastikas, they were looking for anything.” (James Burmeister was the army paratrooper convicted of murdering two African Americans in a 1995 racist gun attack in Fayetteville, while he was stationed at Fort Bragg.) But the regulations on racist extremists and fear of other Burmeisters did not continue with the inception of the War on Terror. “The key rule nowadays is ignore it until it becomes a problem,” Glass tells me. “We need manpower, so as long as the man isn’t acting out, let’s blow it off.” He recounts one episode in early 2005 when he was requested by the military police investigators at Fort Bragg to interview a soldier with blatant skinhead insignia—SS lightning bolts and hammers. “He was already in with this tattoo!” Glass exclaims. “I asked him about it, and he said he had dreamed it up. I asked, ‘Where are you from?’ He said Birmingham, Alabama.” But Glass knew what it really was. “He had a hammer above it; he was a Hammerskin.” Even so, the soldier claimed “it was because he was in an engineer unit.” Glass worked with the base’s military police investigators, who filed a report. “They recommended that he be kicked out,” he recalls, “but the commanding officers didn’t do anything.” He says there was an open culture of impunity. “We’re seeing guys with tattoos all the time . . . As far as hunting them down, I don’t see it. I’m seeing the opposite, where if a white supremacist has committed a crime, the military stance will be, ‘He didn’t commit a race-related crime.’ ” Former Department of Defense investigator Scott Barfield had a similar experience: “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don’t remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members.” Speaking in 2006, he added, “Last year, for the first time, they didn’t make their recruiting goals. They don’t want to start making a big deal about neo-Nazis in the military, because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they’ll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists.”13

The War on Terror produced no official acknowledgment from Pentagon brass that regulations have been loosened on neo-Nazis. Individually, however, officials seem to accept that it has happened by stealth. One is Douglas Smith, the public affairs officer at the Recruitment Command who spoke openly to me about the policy on extremists: “We don’t exclude people from the army based on their thoughts,” he explained. “We exclude based on behavior. But a tattoo of an offensive nature, racial, sexual, or extremist, might be a reason for them not to be in the military . . . The tattoo is a relatively subjective decision . . . We try to educate recruiters about extremist tattoos, but it’s going to depend on their general knowledge of tattoos.” He says that a racist tattoo shouldn’t automatically bar enlistment: “A tattoo in and of itself is not a bar to enlistment. It is behavior that would prohibit someone serving or enlisting. There are First Amendment rights . . . The concept seems to be if the tattoo is so patently offensive that it would cause disruption, it could require action.” Even a swastika might get through, he continues. “A swastika would trigger questions, but again if the gentleman said, ‘I like the way the swastika looked,’ and had a clean criminal record, it’s possible we would allow that person in.”

It’s in the interest of recruiters to interpret recruiting standards loosely, as failure to meet their targets means they have to attend a punitive counseling session, and persistent failure hurts their chances for promotion. When, in 2006, the army relaxed the regulations on non-extremist tattoos, such as body art covering the hands, neck, and face, this cut recruiters even more slack.14

Letting Everybody In

Leaders in the neo-Nazi movement agree that Forrest’s journey has become even more common as the military needs more fighters. One of those leaders is Tom Metzger, the seventy-year-old godfather of contemporary national socialism in the United States. “Ah, Metzger!” says Forrest, when I mention him at the zoo. “I know him pretty well, hung out a couple of times.” On the phone Metzger is quick to crack a joke, talk about his idiosyncratic political philosophy, and work out how he can help me with anything I want to know. Metzger’s journey around the white supremacist movements started in the 1970s with the Ku Klux Klan, for whom he served as Grand Dragon in California. He twice ran for the Senate as a Democrat, against the party’s wishes, and, when that failed, set up his own organization: White Aryan Resistance, or WAR. He has been in prison, declared bankrupt, and the subject of a BBC documentary. “Now they are letting everybody in,” he says of the US military. “All the gang-bangers, all the blacks, Mexicans, and white supremacists. I would say that 10 percent of the army and Marines—they are not in the navy and air force so much—are racist extremists of some variety.”

Metzger’s organization is not your typical white power outfit. “I run an association of independent people who work in cells to the best of their talents,” he says. “I would encourage them to join the military, if they have a scratch they can’t seem to itch. Then go in to bring some training back to the US to make the federal government aware of our existence.” Metzger’s philosophy is a strange mish-mash of the far left, far right, and, in fact, everything in between. When he starts dilating it sends the unsuspecting listener into an ideological daze. One minute he’s praising left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky—“we disagree radically on race but his opinions on transnational corporations and how we are destroying the environment are spot on”—while the next he’s on to Adolf Hitler. “I used to call it White Aryan Resistance. Now I call it The Insurgents,” he says. “We are now a non-violent insurgency, but we are prepared to turn violent if the need be. It’s up to the government. There are moves to suppress free speech and it won’t be too long before they get their hands slapped . . . I’m no military general, I meet military people; there are no plans, just an insurgency that could become hot I would say by any means. Like any unconventional warfare it would involve whatever we would be capable of using. The white working class don’t have jet planes and atomic bombs, we would work along other lines.”

One veteran neo-Nazi who agrees is Billy Roper, who left the National Alliance after a power struggle in 2002 to start his own outfit, White Revolution. While in Tampa meeting Forrest I decide to call Roper. “We have some members in the military,” he tells me. “There are a few in the 101st Airborne, some at Fort Campbell, and some Marines in Iraq . . . There’s about twelve in there, some of them have tattoos, because anyone can walk in and get in the military now.” Roper tells me he knew two members who had swastikas and were barred but had them re-tattooed into sun wheels and the military allowed them back in. One group who don’t shy away from swastikas is the NSM, or National Socialist Movement. It claims to be the biggest Nazi organization in the US but activists like Forrest and Roper call them “clowns” because of their propensity to dress up in World War Two fatigues. Someone calling himself Willem Herring, their spokesman, says he doesn’t believe swastikas are a problem at all. “I do believe you can join the service with tattoos,” he says. “I’m sure you can join with a swastika. There’s a big gang problem in the armed forces right now: if you went to a recruitment station with a swastika I don’t think they would stop you; it would be noted in your record.”

The NSM is undoubtedly the most media-savvy group, in terms of their showiness and their accessibility. Through their media spokesman I am put in contact with Mark Connelly, the head of the SS division in New York, who I’m told is a college student and a “genius.” I’m not given a number but rather told I will be called. “You limey bastard” is the first I hear from Mark. He suspects me of being part of the Jewish Defense Force, a radical Jewish organization. I call up the spokesman who pledges to sort it out for me. A few weeks after I get another call from Mark and this time he is less truculent. “Sorry about that,” he says. “We just had a problem with the JDF; they were trying to mess us up.” I assure Mark that I just want to find out what’s going on with the NSM, and he seems to have the arrogance of youth, so I play to that. “I do the job pro bono,” he says of his role. “It’s something that you have to have a love for, it’s hard, it takes character for people who want to learn about history. This is about the reality of World War Two and the demonized German society, and being in support of National Socialism.” What brought him in? “I got into the movement when in high school, when I was learning things about certain events. They only tell you the victors’ side of the war; I found many discrepancies. I used to be Republican, but it comes to the point where you can’t trust the system.”

Connelly won’t give his age but by the sound of his voice he’s young. He lives in upstate New York, near the capital, Albany. “I’ve been disowned by my mother,” he says. The NSM are the most explicit Nazis in the US. They unashamedly worship Hitler, and dress up in 1940s Nazi regalia at their events. I attended their “historic” march on Congress in April 2008, billed as the biggest in decades. As the hundreds of cops and large numbers of anti-fascist protesters lined the streets before the march there was a feeling of great foreboding—until the NSM contingent arrived in a beat-up old van, containing perhaps thirty people, all waving swastikas, and dressed in jackboots. Scary it wasn’t. Metzger calls them, without irony, “right-wing reactionaries”: “They try to get in to the military covered in tattoos; my kind of people are taught to keep their mouth shut, to pretend they are race-mixing liberals; they don’t join any racial organization,” he says. “They are all nerds to me,” adds Forrest. “I fit in more with the Hammerskin agenda: they are more political, we are more for street activism. We’re skinheads, we’re not politicians, we’re street soldiers.”

Away from the NSM’s ostentatious pageants are the genuinely dangerous underground operators. One such is Dennis Mahon, who has been on the extremist scene for decades and had links with the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, although he remains coy with me as to what they were. “It drives you crazy,” he once said. “Thousands think I was involved. I’ve started to believe it myself. Maybe I was there. Maybe they brainwashed me and I forgot about it. Maybe I can get hypnotized and remember it. Everybody said I was there. Everybody said I drove the truck. They saw me.”15 Tom Metzger, an old friend of Mahon’s, puts me in contact with him, and when I get hold of him he picks up the phone panting like someone who has been doing strenuous exercise. He’s at home and it’s 2 p.m. “Now’s not a good time,” he says. “What are you doing?” I ask. “Oh, I really can’t say,” he replies. When I finally get him for the interview he talks about how he started out in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan before joining the National Alliance in 1980. “I thought they were too conservative,” he says initially. “I read a lot of books, like the Turner diaries, but then I was in Miami when we had the Haitian invasion.” Mahon is alluding to the “Mariel boatlift,” which saw an influx of asylum seekers during a seven-month period in 1980 when approximately 125,000 Cubans and 25,000 Haitians arrived by boat to South Florida. At the time Mahon was in the National Guard and was drafted in to help out. “I had to take them from federal prison; they were defecating and urinating in the back of the bus.” His ideas started to change. “I thought the National Alliance wasn’t radical enough, I went back to join the KKK in Columbia, Alabama.” Now, Mahon acts as a “lone warrior,” much like Metzger, not bogged down by the politics of petty rivalries which distract from his central mission: causing carnage in his race war against the government. “I guarantee something will happen—we’ve all got our targets. The Weathermen is a book about how to destroy America. The Achilles’ heel is the grid system: when energy is needed the most you blast the stations, and once the power goes out the cities go out. I know of a lot of vulnerable areas. I’m not going to say I’m going to do this, but there are some lone wolves. Chicago will be out for a week.”

Mahon received basic training while in the National Guard and, he says, put it to good use at the time. “I was in National Guard and I was doing some real serious shit,” he continues. “No one was ever the wiser—shootings and bombings.” He pauses. “No I can’t say, they can get you on civil rights violations, believe you me; the Klan can see what the results are, but you don’t see them.” He talks about a legendary “lone wolf” in Arizona, who goes by the code name Tom E. Gunn, a former Marine. “He does a lot of damage to people’s business and harasses people; he’s kind of nuts, I hear he’s a master of unconventional warfare, he does some damage to people and he was in the Marines. I’ve tried to talk to him,” he continues, “I talked to him one time, he is above ground; the underground guys, they are not supposed to contact me, but they send me newspaper clippings, there’s so many organizations getting busted.” Tom E. Gunn can be found attacking Tom Metzger— “Metzger, you are an old nobody, a has-been, and a never-was. Go away and nobody gets hurt. Show up with ANY of your kind and it will be your LAST mistake”—in a Phoenix New Times article about an Arizonian neo-Nazi icon named Elton Hall being hit by a vehicle while taking part in a protest,16 but that’s about the extent of the evidence of his existence. Because he goes by an alias, tracking him down is near impossible.

Although joining the armed forces has been a frequently successful mission in the past, Mahon says now it’s even easier. “I know two people in the military—one in Marines and one in the army. One has done two tours of Iraq,” he says. “They are so desperate at the moment; they are going to let you in with a small swastika. If you are an obvious racist and shoot niggers and queers you might find it difficult, but generally you are fine. I’ve got reports from some of my sources in the military,” he continues. “They say they are getting a lot more skinhead types, quasi-racists, more tattoos; essentially they want guys that want to kill. In Iraq you don’t know who your enemies are, there’s no frontline.” But, he believes, this new liberalism will come back to haunt the authorities. “They are hard to stop,” he says. “The soldiers learn from unconventional warfare in Iraq and they realize that they can use that type of warfare in America, and it’s impossible to stop. I tell people to learn as much as you can to improve munitions capabilities, patrolling; I want them to learn sniping and explosives, the Green Berets. Once they go in they are not supposed to tell anyone who they are.”

By the time this book hit the press, Mahon had been sentenced to forty years for a bomb attack that injured a black city official in Phoenix.

It’s Kill or Be Killed

Back in the zoo, Forrest plays around with his boys, throwing them about as the rain subsides and we once again start off around the enclosures. The zoo is divided into different themes: we hang out with the cats for a while, then we head over to the elephants under duress from the youngest. According to Mahon’s rhetoric the US will erupt in flames when soldiers like Forrest return from Iraq, but looking at him languidly walking around with his kids, talking about his girl troubles and boredom at work, I find it hard to imagine. He laughs a lot when I mention the grandstanding rhetoric of his fellow-thinkers. “Talking about race war right now, we’d be wiped off the planet!” he cries. Despite this, Forrest says a lot of his friends in the Hammerskins are under constant surveillance by the authorities. “All my friends have been to prison. The FBI paid $30,000 to infiltrate the ’skins . . . They learn that, guess what, we drink a lot of beer and chase pussy!” He continues, “I know my name has been brought up a lot of times by the FBI, they are out for my mates Cobi and Richie, they are trying to put something together, it’s totally crazy. They are on the Terrorist Watch List. The FBI contacted them, came to their house, the cops came to my house when I busted up the anti-war protest.”

As the afternoon wears on the animals start to blend into each other and the only thing that keeps sparking Forrest up is his time in Iraq. He returns again and again to the period he spent there from 2004 to 2005—it seems his most cherished life experience. For two years he served in the military police, escorting officers, including generals, around the hostile country. He says he was granted top-secret clearance and access to battle plans. “I was always on the move . . . Some of my actions led to the deaths of Arabs.” He shot at people but he can’t know how many he killed because he was always on the move: “If you stopped you’d get hit back. It’s a big rush,” he tells me. “It changes a human being. I never had any kill counts; some soldiers do.” But there’s no love lost for the local population. “To tell you the truth I hate Arabs more than anybody,” he continues. “For the simple fact I’ve served over there and seen how they live. They’re just a backward people . . . them and the Jews are just disgusting people as far as I’m concerned, their customs, everything to do with the Middle East is just repugnant to me.” He wasn’t happy with how the war was being fought either. “You have to break these people’s will to fight; the only reason they are fighting is that there is some sort of profit to it, or it’s not that bad, that the Americans are not going to do what they did in World War Two and kill everybody.” Would he nuke Baghdad? “Fuck yeah! If we had an occupying force cracking down on spitting on sidewalks would you spit on the sidewalk if they shot you in the head for it? Go in with an ironfist: this is how you will live, if you don’t we’ll kill you. Quit pussy-footing around, listen to us or die.”

Forrest maintains that a good portion of those around him were aware of his neo-Nazism. “They all knew in my unit,” he says. “They would always kid around and say, ‘Hey, you’re that skinhead!’” Did anyone rat on him? “No, I was hardcore, I would volunteer for all the hardest missions, and they were like, ‘Let Fogarty go,’ you know what I mean, they didn’t want to get rid of me.” He was confident enough of his carte blanche from the military that during his break from service in 2004 he flew not to see his family in the US but to Dresden, Germany, to give a concert to 2,500 skinheads, on the army’s budget. “What happens is you get to choose whether you want to go to Europe or America, and I put down Germany. The military didn’t care. My friends picked me up from Frankfurt airport and I played two shows.” What about getting caught? “Ah, fuck it,” he sighs. When he was at Camp Victory in Baghdad, Forrest even says a sergeant came up to him and said plainly, “You’re one of those racist motherfuckers, aren’t you!” Fogarty’s driver in Iraq was black and he rebutted, “Only I can call him racist!” I ask him how the sergeant knew about his racism. “The tattoo, I suppose. I can’t hide everything—people knew—even the chain of command.”

He starts getting really misty-eyed recollecting some of his close shaves in the warzone. “One time, I was pulling out of Camp Anaconda, which is about fifteen miles west of Baghdad. Some convoy had blocked lanes of traffic, so we had come out with a Humvee at 5 a.m. We were chilling, but there was this truck hauling at us and not stopping. I’m looking at my driver, he can’t see, but my gunner is up there; he said, ‘This guy’s not stopping,’ and I said, ‘You know what to do,’ and right when I said that, he was just hitting him up with a 50 cal, cha cha cha! Just shooting him up and it was coming towards at us and it was getting all blown to pieces, dude, and as we’re pulling out it missed us by like two foot and just fell into the ditch . . . My gunner let him have it with a 50 cal; the gunner was a cool guy. Once you papped him up, I didn’t get out the vehicle but I looked in, and there was nobody living.”

Another time he was at Camp Victory North at Baghdad airport. “I was in the chow hall, a mortar round came in and blew up a bunch of guys, cut some chicks’ legs off. Me and my gunner, I was drinking non-alcoholic beer for the 4th of July, we were like ‘Welcome to Baghdad!’” On another occasion he came across the soldiers who had leaked the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib. “Abu Ghraib was a torture center before the Americans, Saddam will cut your tongue out. Those guys’ lives are ruined for harassing a bunch of dirty scumbags, I guarantee when an Iraqi captures us it’s ten times worse,” he says. “I met them in Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. We were in the chow hall, we were talking, I forget how it came up, one guy was like, ‘I was pulled out of mission because I told someone about the pictures.’ I said, ‘You punk motherfucker’ . . . pussy faggots, I cussed them out.”

Although Fogarty gets excited talking about various operations in Iraq, he says he would never say anything “that would put the military in a bad light.” In fact, he has so much antipathy for people who denigrate the military he was arrested by police for breaking up an anti-war protest in 2006. “They threw shit at my dad when he came back from Vietnam, I mean who are these left-wing scumbags?” he asks. “They tried to say I had PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder] whenever I got arrested. The VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] said I had PTSD, but because I bust up the anti-war thing doesn’t mean I’m suffering from PTSD.” Despite all his pro-military rhetoric, Forrest is characteristically contradictory when he waxes lyrical about the hell of war. “You are trained to accept you are going to see dead people,” he says. “War is not pretty, there’s nothing good about war.” He concedes, “The niggarabs are human beings.”

After three hours trucking around we all resolve to head out of the zoo. We walk to the gate and I say goodbye. “I’ve got to get you the CD!” Forrest remembers. And before long he has run to his car and come back with his latest album, Survival. The jacket has a picture of him in military fatigues in Iraq. Back at the hotel I cast an eye over the lyrics, which are written in Gothic type on the inside sleeve. “Eye For An Eye” opens with the lines: A slow painful death I strive / Why are you still alive? The chorus goes: It’s our turn to watch you bleed / It’s our turn to tear you limb from limb . . . We will leave no survivors of this bloody war. Another one, “In Battle”: In battle there are no laws . . . It’s kill or be killed, die with the rest . . . Relief came when I pulled the trigger and watched you die / I can’t stop laughing everytime I remember you start to cry / Watch you cry!

Kill a Couple of Towel Heads for Me OK!

Perhaps ironically considering their general warmongering, the American neo-Nazi movement was for the most part virulently against the war in Iraq. Most of the groups hold to an updated conspiracy theory about Jewish power, which they call ZOG, or Zionist Occupation Government. It is premised on Western governments’ supposed submission to Jewish and Israeli power. On their internet forums, US soldiers are often greeted with incendiary comments about being “Jewish warriors” and “Zionist crusaders” for fighting in the War on Terror. This should not be surprising. The white supremacist movement across America has ebbed and flowed since the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s South. It is plagued by fissures and rivalries and ideological nitpicking that have always damaged its ability to form a large-scale and coherent movement. In 2008, there were over 150 different far-right groups—ranging from the Hitler worshippers to Christian nationalists—nestled all over the country. But as the War on Terror raged, extremism was increasing around America generally, according the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a group that investigates hate and racist groups. In its report Rage on the Right it said that in 2008 extremist groups had come “roaring back to life,” increasing by nearly 250 percent as well as building links to the mainstream right-wing.17 It was a grave concern given their willingness to kill innocent Americans (as Timothy McVeigh had demonstrated), even more so now that they had military training.

Charles Wilson, spokesman for the National Socialist Movement, tells me the group is “150 percent against the war in Iraq. It was a total mistake to invade Iraq; we can’t even secure our own borders. By 2015 white people will be a minority in America.” The IKA, or Imperial Klans of America, is based on the original KKK. “I am, as many of us are, a vet,” Truitt Lilly, the spokesman, writes in an email because he wants to remain faceless (and voiceless). “I do not encourage anyone to join any part of Z.O.G. However, military training is good training for anyone: tactics and physical and self defense and discipline are key to any Christian’s way of life and should be taken into one’s consideration.” The original KKK is against it too. “We have opposed the war in Iraq since day one,” national director Pastor Thomas Robb tells me. “If we are going to have a war then it needs to be done constitutionally.”

But none of this anti-war sentiment has stopped them taking advantage of the opportunities for training. “We do encourage them to sign up for the military. We can use the training to secure the resistance to our government,” says Wilson. “Every one of them takes a pact of secrecy . . . Our military doesn’t agree with our political beliefs, they are not supposed to be in the military, but they’re there, in ever greater numbers.” He claims to have 190 members serving. Billy Roper, founder of White Revolution, is another advocate. “A number of skinheads have gone into armed forces for education, college, tuition, and the military training provided,” he says. “They are using it to secure the future for white children. Anyone in the movement overseas knows they are getting training and financial help. America began in bloody revolution and it might end that way.” Even Forrest, who talks with a glint in his eye about his time in Iraq, is actually against the war in essence. “I don’t believe in the War on Terror,” he says. “It’s a war to protect Israel; I don’t think we need to be over there, I just went. I get in this conversation a lot, but I don’t like it when people call me a warrior for Israel.”

Tom Leyden was in the movement for fifteen years before he managed to extricate himself in 1996. “I had to get out mostly because of my kids,” he says on the phone. “I realized that the movement wasn’t after me but my children. I was an organizer and recruiter, and I realized it wasn’t me they wanted but my children, my boys would be the next generation and militants are much more hardcore than their predecessors.” Forrest knows about Leyden and isn’t impressed. “That guy is a punk—I’ll eat him for lunch,” he says. “He’s milking the Jews—he had a couple of tattoos, said he was leader of the Hammerskins, there’s no rank structure in the ’skins like he says. He has everything to gain by doing this—he has to stay employed, so he says, ‘Skinheads are back!’” Leyden provides me with photographs of current servicemen with racist tattoos riding up their arms. “The military says maybe 1 percent is gang members,” he says, “well, that’s 14,000 people: they don’t do training exercises that big! 90 percent of the gangs in the US are street gangs but 9 percent are white supremacists. That’s 1,400 people are being trained by the armed forces who are extremist racists.”

I stalk neo-Nazi forums for a period and they are still replete with bravado and machismo from people who claim to be soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan who are shooting the locals not to further the military’s strategic goals but because killing “hajjis” is their duty as white militants. The website New Saxon is a social networking website for “people of European descent.”18 One of the possible professions when making a profile is the military. There are currently forty-six members who claim to be serving. There is even a group—populated by six professed soldiers called “White Military Men”—started by a young man whose page is headlined with the phrase “FightingforWhites.” “All men with military experience, retired or active/reserve should join this group to see how many men have experience to build an army. We want to win a war, we need soldiers,” his profile reads. “FightingforWhites” is actually Lance Corporal Burton of the Second Battalion Fox Company Pit 2097, from Florida. In his About Me section, he writes: “Love to shoot my M16A2 service rifle effectively at the Hachies (Iraqis),” and among his passions is: “Love to watch things blow up (Hachies House).” His turn-offs include: “Overweight, lazy, illegals, *WIGGERS*, rape crimes, soldiers that died in Iraq, the Air Force (I called in an airstrike and they apparently had ‘tea time’ when it was called in).” On his wall his friend writes: “THANKS BROTHER!!!! kill a couple towel heads for me ok!”

There are other examples of the same ostentatious advertising of military credentials on neo-Nazi websites. On the forum of the website Blood and Honour, neo-Nazis encourage their serving comrades to commit indiscriminate murder, and allude to the training they are getting. “I am in the ARMY right now,” writes 88Soldier88. “You have no idea how ‘nice’ we have to treat these fucking people. I work in the Detainee Holding Area so I see these fuckers every day (Terrorists) and we have to treat them better than our own troops. Its sick. I am in this until 2013. I am in the Infantry but want to go SF [Special Forces]. Hopefully the training will prepare me for what I hope is to come.”19 “I get out in 2009. I have the training I need and will pass it on to others when I get out,” writes AMERICANARYAN. 88Soldier88 says he is leaving for Iraq in three days. “Aye bro stay safe!!” says AngryAryanHitman, “try get a few notches on ya rifflebutt from the filthy sand nigger cunts.” “Good Luck Mate, Stay safe, Get a few Kills, and come Home,” says “Paul.” “Good luck and i hope everything goes well stay safe keep your head down and try to bag a few sand niggers,” says 14 callum 88.

Via the website I wrote to a soldier, Jacob Berg, who claimed to be serving in Iraq. “There are actually alot more ‘skinheads’ ‘nazis’ White supremacists now then there has been in a very long time,” he wrote back. “Us racists are actually getting into the millatary alot now because If we dont every one who already is will take pitty on killing sand niggers. yes I have killed women, yes I have killed children, and yes I have killed Older people. But the biggest reson Im so proud of my kills Is because by killing a brown many white people will live to see a new dawn.”

In 2009, the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks released the internal emails of the NSM, including mine, and uncovered a number of military members conversing with the leadership back in the US. As the SPLC documents:

Among those who contacted NSM was an infantryman who identified himself as Kyle R. Wrobel. Writing from a hotmail contact, Wrobel told NSM that he was from Cleveland, Ohio. “i am a sergeant in the US Army infantry, currently serving my second combat tour to iraq,” he wrote on Jan. 17, 2008. “i vehemently support your cause, and want to become heavily involved. my wife and i both advocate and support the cause. i want a lifetime membership and want to become involved and do whatever i can as soon as possible.”

Wrobel served for four years in the Army and was discharged in November 2008 as a specialist, according to an Army spokesman. The type of discharge is not public information, the spokesman said, though an acquaintance of Wrobel said it was honorable. (It’s unclear why Wrobel stated in his E-mail to the NSM that he was a sergeant, which is higher ranking than a specialist.) Wrobel received seven awards for his service, including the Combat Action Badge and the Iraq Campaign Medal for two year-long tours in Iraq, as well as the Army Good Conduct Medal.20

I had tried to get an interview with a NSM soldier (which was never forthcoming), but the Wikileaks release revealed the private correspondence between the group’s members about my request which gives a shocking insight into how prevalent their members were in the military: “I did my part and forwarded his inquiry to NSM Colorado who is lead by Davi the guy who got the purple heart in Afghanistan,” said Commander Jeff Schoep, the head of the organization and arguably the most powerful Nazi in America. “He . . . did not respond back. I know the Colorado guys are active and recruiting, just processed 2 or 3 new members from there. I cannot force them to talk to student reporters. Apparently they just don’t want to do it. I agree with you, its an opportunity to reach people, but it seems most of our members will not talk with any Press. 88.”21 (In Nazi code, 88 symbolizes Heil Hitler, H being the eighth letter in alphabet.)

The more public internet bravado is hard to vet for truth, but there has been a real-life high-profile case of murder involving a soldier in Iraq who had SS bolts tattooed on his arm. The victim, Kevin Shields, was murdered on December 1, 2007, in Colorado Springs by three of his fellow soldiers, Louis Bressler, Kenneth Eastridge, and Bruce Bastien, Jr., who all served in Iraq as part of the Second Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division in their early twenties. Bressler and Bastien were each put away for sixty years for their part in the murder alongside a litany of other crimes in Colorado Springs, while Eastridge is now serving a ten-year prison sentence for his part. But in the aftermath of the arrests, National Public Radio publicized the MySpace page of Eastridge.22 It showed him proudly displaying his SS bolts tattoo. It also had a picture of him holding a cat in Iraq with the caption, “Killed another Iraqi pussy.” There is a picture of a gun and a cache of ammo. “Ready for Whatever!!!!” says the caption. He has another tattoo that reads: “Killing is what I do.” After his arrest, Bastien told investigators that he and Eastridge had randomly fired at civilians in Iraq during patrols through the streets of Baghdad. In broad daylight, Bastien alleged, Eastridge would use a stolen AK-47 to fire indiscriminately at Iraqi civilians. At least one was hit, he said.23 “We were trigger happy. We’d open up on anything. They even didn’t have to be armed. We were keeping scores,” said another member of the platoon, José Barco, who is serving fifty-two years in jail for shooting and injuring a pregnant woman in Colorado Springs.24 So far, no one has been charged with shooting civilians in Iraq.

The military not only ignored Eastridge’s extremism, but on his return from combat awarded him a Purple Heart and Army Achievement medals. Eastridge’s lawyer, Sheilagh McAteer, becomes palpably angry when I talk to her on the phone. She claimed that the military were now knowingly sending mentally unstable young men to Afghanistan and Iraq. “The military is to some extent desperate to get people to go to fight, soldiers who are not fit, mentally and physically sick, but they continue to send them,” she told me. “Having a tattoo was the least of his concerns.” Another white supremacist soldier, James Douglas Ross, a military intelligence officer stationed at Fort Bragg, was given a bad conduct discharge from the army when he was caught trying to mail a submachine gun from Iraq to his father’s home in Spokane, Washington. Military police found a cache of white supremacist paraphernalia and several weapons hidden behind ceiling tiles in Ross’s military quarters. After his discharge, a Spokane County deputy sheriff saw Ross passing out fliers for the neo-Nazi National Alliance.25 On top of this, in early 2012, a photo emerged of a ten-strong US Marine Scout sniper unit posing for a photo with a Nazi SS bolts flag in Sangin, Afghanistan. According to the military, the symbolism was unknown to the soldiers. “Certainly, the use of the ‘SS runes’ is not acceptable and Scout Snipers have been addressed concerning this issue,” Marine Corps spokesman Captain Gregory Wolf said.26 But nothing about the SS bolts was unacceptable, and the claim that it could result in punishment was laughable. There were countless similar examples throughout the War on Terror that the military had known about—and brushed under the carpet.

Emerging Terrorists

The magnitude of the problem within the army and other branches of the military is, however, hard to quantify. The military does not track extremists as a discrete category, coupling them with gang members. People in the neo-Nazi movement claim different numbers. The National Socialist Movement claimed 190 of its members are inside. White Revolution claimed twelve. Tom Metzger claimed that 10 percent of those serving in the army and Marines are extremists of some sort. But the problem was conceded by the Department of Homeland Security in a 2009 report, Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, which noted that “the willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.”27 On the back of the publication, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano had to apologize to veterans’ groups about her department’s findings that “the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.” But the report was right. Following an investigation of white supremacist groups, a 2008 FBI report declared: “Military experience—ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces—is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement.”28 In white supremacist incidents from 2001 to 2008, the FBI identified 203 veterans. Most of them were associated with the National Alliance and the National Socialist Movement, which promote anti-Semitism and the overthrow of the US government, and assorted skinhead groups.

Because the FBI focused only on reported cases, its numbers don’t include the many extremist soldiers who have managed to stay off the radar. But its report does pinpoint why the white supremacist movements seek to recruit veterans—they “may exploit their accesses to restricted areas and intelligence or apply specialized training in weapons, tactics, and organizational skills to benefit the extremist movement.” In reality, white supremacists were using their military status to build the white right. The report found, for example, that two army privates in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division at Fort Bragg had attempted in 2007 to sell stolen property from the military—including ballistic vests, a combat helmet, and pain medications such as morphine—to an undercover FBI agent they believed was involved with the white supremacist movement (they were convicted and sentenced to six years in prison). It also found multiple examples of white supremacist recruitment among active military including a period in 2003 when six active-duty soldiers at Fort Riley were found to be members of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations, working to recruit their army colleagues and even serving as the Aryan Nations’ point of contact for the State of Kansas.

It seemed everyone knew what was happening. A 2006 report by the National Gang Intelligence Center noted that “various white supremacist groups have been documented on military installations both domestically and internationally.”29 Neo-Nazis “stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they’re inside, and they are hard-core,” Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the SPLC. “We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad,” he added. “That’s a problem.”30 Harold Cloverdell served in the army in Afghanistan for a year and in Iraq for two years. “You can go in any restaurant you can find graffiti, maybe a swastika,” he says. “Or ‘I hate hajjis’—what they call someone with Middle Eastern heritage . . . It pisses you off that you see it,” he continues, “as it effects someone’s performance, most guys are white in the infantry, a lot of them tend to be of European descent, it may have made someone else uncomfortable.” Aaron Lukefahr is now a member of the Aryan Nations, but served two years as part of the Marine Corps in Okinawa in Japan. “I know of at least one other racialist,” he tells me. “Once I saw some swastikas in our barracks, stationed in Japan, I don’t know who that was, they never found out who it was, but there wasn’t much investigation into it as an extremist act rather than an act of vandalism.”

Despite the mounting evidence, the government itself did nothing, apart from to issue denials. The US Senate Committee on the Armed Forces has long been considered one of Congress’s most powerful groups. It governs legislation affecting the Pentagon, defense budget, military strategies and operations. When I contacted the committee, it was led by the influential senators Carl Levin and John McCain. An investigation by the committee into how white supremacists permeate the military in plain violation of US law could result in substantive changes. Staffers on the committee would not agree to be interviewed. Instead, a spokesperson responded that white supremacy in the military has never arisen as a concern. In an email, the spokesperson said, “The Committee doesn’t have any information that would indicate this is a particular problem.” But in June 2011, the SPLC reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had “virtually dismantled its unit responsible for investigating homegrown extremists.” Daryl Johnson, an analyst who authored a 2009 DHS report warning of a “growing threat” from far-right radicals, told the group: “My greatest fear is that domestic extremists . . . will [carry] out a mass-casualty attack. That is what keeps me up at night.”31 Johnson’s fears came closer to being realized in April 2012, when neo-Nazis started “heavily-armed” patrols around the area of Sanford, Florida—it was the natural conclusion of a decade of hard training by the US military, and a complement to similar work on the US–Mexico border. This new paramilitary garrison in Florida was organized by the National Socialist Movement—who, as we have seen, included a large number of veterans—in the aftermath of the shooting of black teenager Trayvon Martin. The Miami New Times reported that the group and their shock troops were “prepared” for race riots, and they would “defend” the white population. “Further racial violence . . . is brimming over like a powder keg ready to explode into the streets,” said Jeff Schoep, the NSM Commander. “In Arizona the guys [in NSM] can walk around with assault weapons and that’s totally legal,” he added.32 Schoep, however, refused to divulge what kind of “firepower” they had with them on the patrols of between ten and twenty American-style Waffen-SS. But with the military experience running through the movement, along with years of access to the highest-grade weaponry in the world, it can safely be assumed that it wasn’t just 9mm handguns.

Begging

During the whole time I spend with him, the only time I see Forrest angry, aside from when his kids are messing around, is when he talks about he was treated after his tour of Iraq. He left in June 2006 and was later honorably discharged from the army before being asked to reenlist. “They were begging me to reenlist, they didn’t want me to get out, my whole military career they didn’t want me to get out,” he says. He wanted to join Blackwater, become a private contractor and go back to Iraq. “You make a lot of money at Blackwater, $100,000 a year, I was getting $30,000 when I was in the army,” he says. “They are hardcore, they’re doing cool stuff, the army is fighting with boxing gloves on, Blackwater is gloves off.” Unfortunately for Forrest the SPLC would intervene to stop his dream of going back to Iraq with immunity. In between honorable discharge from the civilian army and application for Blackwater, the SPLC had publicized his neo-Nazi connections.33 After putting his application in to Blackwater, he was told that they “couldn’t touch” him because he had been put on the Terrorist Watch List, kept by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center in a bid to identify all potential terrorist threats to the US. “They defamed me,” says Fogarty with real emotion. “It was slanderous, they painted me as a dumbass . . . I would have been able to stay in without the SPLC,” adds Fogarty. “They [the army] wouldn’t care unless I made an incident at work, but now the SPLC comes out it looks bad.” Fogarty is right that he was unlucky. Despite his girlfriend’s dossier, his tattoos, and his impromptu trip to Germany, he had been allowed to stay in, and would seemingly have been fine reenlisting had the SPLC not intervened. Following their report, the President of the SPLC, J. Richard Cohen, wrote a letter to the Under Secretary of Defense, David S. C. Chu, stating that “a combination of manpower shortages and poorly written inconsistently enforced regulations has resulted in the recent reappearance of significant numbers of extremists in the armed forces.”34

John Fain is another. A soft-spoken and more thoughtful character, he spent two years fighting in the War on Terror, but has none of the bravado of other military extremists. He tells me he joined up “Not to learn combat, but to make myself a better person. I wanted a better work ethic, not just the training to be a soldier. It wasn’t so much for a political thing when I joined the military . . . I’m concerned with the welfare and wellbeing of white Americans,” he continues, “but the main thing with me is not so much how people look, but there’s a particular interest that there is in the media, most of the people are Jewish, they’ll admit it. It’s not good when you have a population of three percent brainwashing the rest of the populace. People should be made free to have information, because the masses are stupid.” His neo-Nazi affiliations did nothing to stop the military trying to reenlist him. Fain claims he has never been a member of the National Alliance, but considers himself a “patriot, which liberals in the military deem as extremist,” and admits that he “support[s] the National Alliance” and “agrees with most of what they say.” Erich Gliebe, the leader of the Alliance, seems surprised when I tell him Fain wasn’t a member. “He isn’t?” he asks. “I’m a separatist,” says Fain. “I’d be willing to state it out in the street. I’ve worked with a black guy who had been member of the Black Panthers; he said, ‘I don’t have problem with white people but I don’t want my daughter bringing home white men.’ I feel the same, we’re both racists. We had an understanding.”

Fain joined the military in 1999 when he was eighteen years old, and since he had no tattoos or criminal convictions, he passed through recruitment easily. “I was kind of at a crossroads in my life, doing a dead end job,” he says, in a familiar story. “I wanted to try to better myself, and I thought about joining the military. I was going to join the Navy but when I was there the army recruiter said, ‘Can I talk to you in a sec?’ ” Within a week Fain had signed up. Between 2003 and 2004 Fain served two tours in Iraq, going all over the country, from Baghdad to Basra. “Most people keep their opinions to themselves,” he says of fellow extremists. “But I’ve met quite a few of them actually. Last year I ran across a lot of people. I was sitting in the barracks in the US,” he says. “There were some guys I overheard on their laptop and they were playing music from Resistance Records [a neo-Nazi music label]. I never noticed people causing a ruckus; the unit I was with was what would be considered good ol’ boys from the country.” Fain is actually relatively pro-Arab, for good racist reasons. “It’s more what’s in someone’s head than color of their skin. Arabs aren’t European, but they are governing themselves. They are not coming over to mingle with us. And they are against Zionist control of governments; they just want to have their own country and own lands.”

When Fain returned from Iraq in 2004 he started to work for Vanguard Books, the literary arm of the National Alliance. It sells US army books: $9.95 will get you a tome on Explosives and Demolitions. And when Fain left the army, this spell working for the National Alliance came back to haunt him. The army refused him security clearance, which is a privilege conferred on soldiers and other civil servants after service that gives them access to classified information of a certain sensitivity. “They had found out information about me,” says Fain. “I had worked for National Vanguard books, and they were like, ‘Who owns it?’ and I said, ‘It’s owned by a corporation.’ So they said, ‘Isn’t it owned by the National Alliance?’ I said, ‘I don’t know,’ ‘Are you member?’ ‘No, I don’t hold membership but I work for them.’ ” The army had procured information on his employment through tax returns, and pursued their investigations of Vanguard Books. Despite this, Fain claims he was asked to reenlist. “I’m not going to do it, I’ve had enough now,” he says. Does he think they relaxed standards? I ask him. “It’s quite possible. I can’t say that it is, I don’t know what the government has issued, but I would say it’s quite possible. Before they could be picky, now that they need to keep troop numbers high they are accepting no high school diploma, which is more detrimental. I’d rather see swastika than an idiot with no tattoos.” Elsewhere the SPLC quotes Fain as saying, “Join only for the training, and to better defend yourself, our people, and our culture. We must have people to open doors from the inside when the time comes.”35

The discharge figures confirm the experiences of Fogarty and Fain. They show that the avenues the army guidelines stipulate for dealing with extremists already serving in the military have been drastically reduced since 1998, and increasingly so since the War on Terror was initially announced. One such avenue is the denial of reenlistment, which fell from a high of 4,000 soldiers rejected in 1994 to a low of 81 in 2006. Another is a soldier receiving misconduct charges resulting in discharge from the army. In the five-year period from 1998 to 2003 the number of discharges for misconduct teetered from a high of 2,560 to a low of 2,307. But by 2006 this number had fallen off to 1,435.36 Again, misconduct is a broad category but the decline shows clearly that standards dropped.

The US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) is set up to investigate criminal behavior by army personnel and their reports have often touched on the problem of extremist soldiers. A number of internal investigations into extremist soldiers I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that CID consistently ignored evidence of violent neo-Nazis and white supremacists. One case at Fort Hood included evidence that a soldier was making internet postings on the white supremacist site Stormfront.org. But the investigator seems to have been unable even to locate the soldier in question. Due to “poor documentation,” he writes, “attempts to locate with minimal information met with negative results . . . I’m not doing my job here,” he notes. “Needs to get fixed.”37 Another investigation into another soldier at Fort Hood is even more distressing. The investigators found that he belonged to the neo-Nazi Hammerskins and was “closely associated with” the Celtic Knights of Austin, Texas, another extremist organization, a situation bad enough to merit a joint investigation by the FBI and CID. The army summary states that there was “probable cause” to believe that the soldier had participated in at least one white extremist meeting and that he had “provided a military technical manual [Improvised Munitions Handbook] to the leader of a white extremist group in order to assist in the planning and execution of future attacks on various targets.” Of four preliminary probes into white supremacists I obtained, CID carried through on only this one. On March 22, 2006, the suspect provided the Improvised Munitions Handbook to the leader of the Celtic Knights, it notes, “to assist in the planning and execution of attacks on five methamphetamine laboratories in the Austin, TX area.” It adds, “these attacks were not carried out and the [Joint Terrorism Taskforce] indicated a larger single attack was planned for the San Antonio, Texas after a considerable amount of media attention was given to illegal immigrants. The attack was not completed due to the inability of the organization to obtain explosives.” The document notes that despite these grave threats the subject was only interviewed once, in 2006, and the investigation was terminated the following year because the action commander or prosecutor indicated intent to do nothing or at least only “action amounting to less than a court proceeding.” The report added, “no further investigative assistance of CID is required.”

Another internal report documented the case of an Army National Guard member who investigators believed was “the leader and recruiter” for the Alaska Front, yet another white supremacist organization. The summary describes the soldier as “a person of interest to the FBI due to statements made by the Soldier relating to the robbery of armored cars.” The soldier and another member of the Alaska Front were, the report notes, employed by the security company in Anchorage responsible for transporting money using armored cars. Once again, after noting clear affiliations and concrete threats of criminal activity, the narrative indicates that the investigation was closed. “The Soldier’s Commander was briefed,” it reads. “No further investigation has occurred by the FBI since the Soldier has been mobilized to Camp Shelby, MS in preparation for deployment to Iraq.”38

The 2005 DPSRC report found that because recruiters and basic training officers lack clear instructions on how to handle evidence of extremist affiliations and also fail to share information, “military personnel cannot evaluate the full extent to which problematic persons associated with particular groups are trying to enlist in the military and their apparent strategies for doing so.” It concludes, “Personnel are unlikely to be able to detect anything beyond what would appear to be isolated incidents.” Finding evidence of participation on white supremacist websites would be another easy way to screen out extremist recruits, but the same report found that the DOD had not adequately clarified which web forums were gathering places for extremists. In fact, even in cases where active-duty soldiers have been caught posting to such sites, the investigations have been terminated. It appears to some insiders that this incoherence and confusion is consciously fostered to allow the recruitment of extremist soldiers to continue, and to avoid their discharge. “Effectively,” the report concludes, “the military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt . . . they are likely to be able to complete their contracts.”39 This went for Islamic fundamentalists, too. When Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly murdered thirteen of his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas, it was revealed afterwards that the military had been aware of his Islamic extremist ideology but had done nothing to stop it. Hasan had been in contact with his ideological hero Anwar al-Awlaki—the extremist cleric exiled in Yemen who was assassinated by the Obama administration in 2011—and the military had either not trained its personnel well enough or had told them to turn a blind eye to extremism.

Carter F. Smith, another former military gang investigator, defends CID, who he worked with in 2004–6, telling me, “They don’t bend to the whims of the commander as much as people on the outside say. They piss a lot of people off. If they wanted to push something they could, but it takes a lot of emphasis on what’s right.” But he is not surprised by the lax 2006 CID “investigations.” “When you need more soldiers you lower the standards whether you say so or not,” says Smith, who served as military investigator from 1982, and from 1998 to 1999 was the chief of the gang-hate group investigations team. “The increase with gangs and extremists is an indicator of this.” He says the pressure to maintain numbers might make an investigator “ignore stuff . . . Say an investigator sees a soldier with a tattoo that reads ‘88,’” he says, “if you know 88 is Heil Hitler, but the soldier gives you a plausible reason and you don’t look for any memorabilia, you can let him go . . . It’s not that they aren’t concerned about white supremacists,” he adds, “but they have a war to fight and they don’t have any incentive to slow down.”

Iraq as Race War

For neo-Nazis to prosper in the US military, a general culture of racism is undoubtedly a prerequisite. Forrest stood out because of his skinhead appearance and tattoos, but his casual use of the derogatory term “hajjis” and perception of Arabs as “backward” became endemic throughout the military during the War on Terror. “Racism was rampant,” recalls veteran Michael Prysner, who served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 as part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. “All of command, everywhere, it was completely ingrained in the consciousness of every soldier. I’ve heard top generals refer to the Iraqi people as ‘hajjis.’ And it wasn’t auto-ingrained in the soldiers, the anti-Arab racism came from the brass, it came from the top and was pushed into the mind of subordinate soldiers.” Prysner believes this kind of racist attitude is consciously fostered to make the military operations easier to carry out. “Even before the invasion racist language was always used against the Iraqi people,” he said. “Attributing their condition to cultural backwardness, painting a picture of backward people helped this idea that they needed the US to go in. When you are carrying out missions this is what was on the mind of the soldiers, so the soldiers conduct themselves terribly; we weren’t acting with human beings to protect them, we were there to control every Iraqi who was subordinate to us, and everything was justified because they weren’t considered people.”

Another vet, Michael Totten, who served in Iraq with the 101st Airborne from 2003 to 2004, agrees: “I think at a fundamental level there’s a type of superiority complex, a heightened sense of importance; the military carries this attitude, in my experience, towards the people of Iraq. The Iraqis were seen as substandard, second class, a lot of times they weren’t seen as human, they were seen as an obstacle, more of a burden, I didn’t feel that we were going in as liberators, I felt I was there for the sake of being there.” On neo-Nazis like Fogarty, he doesn’t think they would stand out at all. “It wouldn’t stand out if you said ‘sand-niggers,’ even if you aren’t a neo-Nazi. At the time, I used the words ‘sand-nigger,’ I didn’t consider ‘hajji’ to be derogatory. I have changed since I came back, obviously.” Even racism between soldiers was rife. In late 2011, eight soldiers were charged after the suicide of Chinese-American Private Danny Chen, a nineteen-year-old infantryman from New York, who shot himself in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The charges were brought against the soldiers for an alleged long history of assaults and racist taunts which led to him taking his life. Geoffrey Millard served in Iraq for thirteen months, beginning in 2004, as part of the Forty-Second Infantry Division. He recalls General George Casey, who served as the commander in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, addressing a briefing he attended in the summer of 2005 at Forward Operating Base, outside Tikrit. “As he walked past, he was talking about some incident that had just happened, and he was talking about how ‘these stupid fucking hajjis couldn’t figure shit out.’ And I’m just like, Are you kidding me? This is General Casey, the highest-ranking guy in Iraq, referring to the Iraqi people as ‘fucking hajjis.’” (A spokesperson for Casey, who later served as the Army Chief of Staff, said the general “did not make this statement.”) “We had a frago [fragmentary order] come out one day that actually talked about how the DOD wanted us to stop using the word ‘hajji’ because it was seen as a racist slur, but I still heard [another general] use the word hajji. He’d have to correct himself, but it didn’t change his thought pattern.” Millard was later an organizer for Iraq Veterans Against the War and says he has seen white nationalist tattoos during outreach operations. “Since we’ve been doing outreach to bases there’s this [White Power] tattoo that I’ve seen a couple of times, and a couple of other different racial symbols. They’ve got rid of the regulations on a lot of things, including white supremacists . . . The military is attractive to white supremacists,” he adds, “because the war itself is racist.”

Forrest never saw what the beef was—much like the military itself. “As long as you don’t bring personal beliefs to the military it’s not a problem,” he tells me. “If I was goose-stepping maybe, but I served my country honorably. I’m a soldier who is trying to come home, I have got two children, I’m not gonna be preaching politics while my driver’s a nigger.” He pauses. “What about the Bloods and Crips?” he asks, exasperated, before we go our separate ways. What about them? I ask. “I seen a million Bloods and Crips,” he says nonchalantly. The Bloods. The Crips. Two of the biggest and most dangerous gangs in the US or any other country on the planet. “I seen a million.”

STRAIGHT OUTTA BAGHDAD

When these cats, these gang members, come back, we’re going to have some hell on these streets.

Miguel Robinson, Airman First Class and Los Angeles Crip, 200740

On the eve of America’s most patriotic day in 2005 a group of US soldiers from the army base in Kaiserslautern, southwest Germany, took a drive down to the park pavilion in a nearby forest. The twelve soldiers in the group were in high spirits: aside from the July Fourth festivities coming the next day, some of them were due to finish their first eighteen-month tour of duty, including a spell in Iraq, within a matter of weeks and would be returning home to their long-suffering families. Among them was twenty-five-year-old Sergeant. Juwan Johnson, or J. Rock to his friends, a member of the Sixty-Sixth Transportation Company who was looking forward to returning home to his pregnant wife within the fortnight. It was to be a welcome relief; the past year had been a difficult one. During his tour of Iraq, he had seen the sharp end of the conflict, reportedly surviving an IED (improvised explosive device) attack which blew up his vehicle, and finding the toil of war difficult to cope with. But nothing would prepare him for the treatment he was about to receive from his comrades shortly after 9 p.m. that night. In the park pavilion, J. Rock was set to become a full-fledged member of the Chicago-based gang the Gangster Disciples, listed by the FBI as one of the fifteen biggest gangs in the US. The purpose of the trip that night was to conduct his initiation ceremony, a rite of passage he had to endure to realize his dream of becoming part of one of America’s fiercest street gangs. In gang lingo the ceremony is called “jumping in,” also known as a timed beating. Soon after they arrived, the pack of men Johnson had gone down with began to circle their new recruit. The leader of the gang at the base, Rico Williams, a former airman, struck the first blow, lamping Johnson straight across the face—a blow that knocked him unconscious. The ferocious beating that ensued soon “escalated from reckless to a free-for-all.”41 Johnson’s lifeless body was treated to a six-minute orgy of violence in which he received 200 blows all over his body and head from the fists and feet of his fellow soldiers.

Still in an unconscious state, Johnson was placed back in his bed by his attackers. He would never wake up. The next morning one of Johnson’s roommates found him in his barracks room but could not rouse him. After trying desperately to resuscitate him, a German physician was called who pronounced him dead on arrival. The resulting autopsy report, signed by an Army Forces regional medical examiner, concluded: “The cause of death of this twenty-five-year-old male is multiple blunt force injuries reportedly sustained in a physical assault resulting in fatal injury to the heart and brain.” It added, “The manner of death, in my opinion, is homicide.”42 Despite the unambiguous verdict, more than three years later only three of the eleven suspects had been convicted and given confinement terms.43 One reason for this abysmal bit of police work may have been the intense fear running through the veins of the suspects which had stopped them speaking out. At a Gangster Disciples barbeque in the aftermath of the murder, the gang’s ringleader Williams had warned the rest of them that he would kill anyone who snitched to the authorities, along with their families. The more likely reason for the failure to bring Johnson’s killers to justice, however, was reluctance on the part of the military to prosecute the case as it tried to keep a lid on public recognition of the developing crisis arising from the gangs’ infiltration of the military.

In the end, it took until February 2009 for the police to arrest the main suspect Williams in his hometown of Chesapeake, Virginia, and charge him with second-degree murder as well as three counts of tampering with a witness, including intimidation and threats.44 The military decided to try him through a court-martial—a legal process much more secretive and less independent than civilian trials. He was found guilty of second-degree murder in November 2010, nearly six years after Johnson was slain, and was acquitted of tampering with a witness.45 If the military’s goal was to keep the embarrassing press to a minimum, it was a success. In another trial by court-martial, suspect Private Bobby Morrissette was acquitted in Germany on charges of voluntary manslaughter and conspiracy to commit aggravated assault, which carried a possible fifty-five years confinement.46 It was a stunning verdict—Morrissette had been found to have taken part in the “jumping in” that had led to Johnson’s death. He was instead found guilty of impeding the investigation and the trial, and willfully disobeying a superior commissioned officer. In a separate incident, giving a further indication of his questionable moral fiber, he was convicted of committing an indecent act on a female in the presence of another person and wrongful use of a controlled substance. In the end, he got away with forty-two months confinement and a bad misconduct charge.

Understandably the acquittal and weak sentencing angered Johnson’s grieving mother, Stephanie D. Cockrell. “I’m angry, and I’m outraged that we have gangs in the military,” she said. “The court system is sending a message that it’s OK.”47 Her complaint would be vindicated not long after when another soldier involved in the beating, senior airman Jerome A. Jones, was also acquitted of involuntary manslaughter in another court-martial, despite being present at the beating. After denying all charges, Jones was given the lesser conviction of aggravated assault, as well as being found guilty of marijuana use and assisting in hiding gang members and conspiracy to cover up the murder—including tampering with their gang tattoos.48 He was given a dishonorable discharge and sentenced to two years in prison by the five-member panel which comprised two air force officers and three air force non-commissioned officers from the Little Rock base—where Jones was stationed. In the subsequent months, the military cover-up became even more scandalous as it emerged that the authorities had actively suppressed intelligence from a whistle-blower on the growing threat of gangs in the Sixty-Sixth Transportation company. In the period before the murder, another soldier in the company, Private Nick Pasquale, had taken copious pictures of gang graffiti in Iraq and on the base and handed them to his superiors in an attempt to press them into action. It had resulted in an investigation into the unit over the course of its thirteen-month deployment to Iraq, which turned up ironclad evidence of gang activity. According to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, “the probe involved soldiers believed to be members of the Chicago-based Gangster Disciples. Numerous photos of Disciples had been found, along with graffiti and a list of potential gang members, in the soldiers’ living quarters.”49 But the investigation reported to have found no evidence “validating or disproving” the rampant gang activity in the unit.

Just two months later Johnson was dead. “The only thing that came from the investigation downrange was that I was a disgruntled soldier, causing problems,” Pasquale said. He had even written down the names of those he suspected of gang activity and given them to his superiors, who refused to take action. “Then we come back from Iraq and wham, bam a soldier’s dead. I want [Johnson’s] family to know that your son, your husband, the father of your child did not have to die. I want his family to know that he didn’t have to die if someone had done their job and not swept this under the rug,” said Pasquale. In the aftermath of his testimony, Pasquale was the target of relentless abuse and intimidation, including threats to his life and gang graffiti daubed on his barracks. He even had alarms fitted and slept with knives. “If I do get killed, I don’t want to be another Sgt. Johnson with people wondering, ‘What happened to him? Why?’” he said. “I don’t want my mother going through what Sgt. Johnson’s mother’s going through, trying to get answers from the army.”

Getting Answers

That Pasquale didn’t want his mother asking the military for answers is understandable. Throughout the War on Terror, getting genuine answers from the army or any other branch of the military about gang infiltration was impossible. The reaction from the military brass when presented with evidence of the vast numbers of gang members in their midst—even from federal investigators or their own troops—oscillated from outright denial to ad hominem attacks on those making the charges. The threat to the wellbeing of troops, the occupied populations and those back home in American cities didn’t seem to trouble them. The most serious and important work undertaken to collect information had, therefore, to be undertaken outside of the military establishment—primarily, by the FBI and civilian police. An extensive report on the problem was published by the FBI in 2007, but at the time it barely registered on the radar of the mainstream media and became another important military-related document read only by the initiated.50 This time around, however, it was more surprising than usual as the findings were particularly worrying for the domestic population of the US. Gang-bangers know a lot about fighting and violence—it’s their raison d’être. But until the War on Terror that “expertise” had never been shifted wholesale from the inner city to the US military, from South Central to Baghdad and back again. “Gang-related activity in the US military is increasing and poses a threat to law enforcement officials and national security,” the investigators concluded. “Members of nearly every major street gang have been identified on both domestic and international military installations.” The FBI did not mince words when outlining the problems this could cause for the military. Gang membership in the ranks will “result in disruption of command, low morale, disciplinary problems, and a broad range of criminal activity,” as well as the “risk of transferring their weapons and combat training back to the community to employ against rival gangs and law enforcement officers.”

Despite this prognosis, in its long history the US military had never instituted regulation prohibiting gang members from joining its ranks. It is true that gang members tend to have criminal records, which can bar an individual from enlistment, but if they are clean, there is sufficient ambiguity in regulations to allow them through. And even criminal records aren’t always a bar. Another strange feature of the military’s enlistment process is that it relies on recruits to voluntarily reveal their past records, rather than actively investigating them. If the recruit is upfront enough they will go through a “suitability review” which includes a police record check. If that record contains frequent offenses for a number of misdemeanors, the recruit will require a “moral waiver” in order to serve.51 The FBI fingered this as a serious problem which had allowed gang members to fly through recruitment. “Gang members have been known to enlist in the military by failing to report past criminal convictions or by using fraudulent documents,” said the report.52 And once they are in, a whole new complex of problems appears. The FBI lamented the impossibility of gauging the extent of the gang members in service because “military authorities may not recognize gang affiliation or may be inclined not to report such incidences” (my emphasis). It’s an incredible suggestion: the federal government’s investigative branch cannot gauge the problem of criminal gangs in the country’s fighting forces because the military refuses to report gang activity. This dereliction of duty could, the report said, “ultimately jeopardize the safety of other military members,” as it did so tragically in the case of Johnson—and he was far from being the only one.

The unit of the military assigned to investigate criminal activity in the service, the CID, was an integral part of the cover-up, denying the existence of the problem from start to finish. “We recently conducted an Army-wide study, and we don’t see a significant trend in this kind of activity, especially when you compare this with a million-man army,” said its report into gang activity in the military, published at the same time as the FBI report.53 CID’s own report found that gang-related investigations went up from four to sixteen between 2003 and 2006, while incidents went up from eight to forty-four in the same period, in keeping with the enlargement of the force. But FBI gang investigator Jennifer Simon told Stars and Stripes that “it’s no secret that gang members are prevalent in the armed forces, including internationally.”54 She said gang members had been documented on or near US military bases in Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Iraq. The discrepancy in the reporting of the problem caused huge tensions between the FBI and the military’s investigative units, who seemed piqued that the federal authorities took their job so seriously. They were shocked that the FBI was failing to understand the manpower pressures the military was under. The resulting internecine war was bitter. On the back of the worrying FBI report, the military said the bureau was “overstating the problem, mixing historical and more recent events, and using unsupported hearsay type comments and statements from various undocumented experts.”55 In the aftermath a joint memorandum from the military investigative units was sent to the FBI “contesting parts of the assessment, asking for its withdrawal, and offering increased cooperation and coordination to obtain a more accurate estimate of the gang problem in the military.” The FBI said no, and the military published its own report in riposte.

A military spokesman later asked about the problem entered the realm of fantasy: “In nearly every one of the cases that we looked into, it is a young man or woman who thought that the symbol looked cool,” he said. “We have found some people even get gang tattoos not really knowing what they are, or at least that they have not had any gang affiliation in the past.” It’s a serious strain to believe that the significance of florid gang tattoos would be unknown to their owners: usually an indelible mark on the skin demands some research. But these dopey soldiers had company within the military in the form of recruiters, who seemed to know even less about what gang tattoos look like. It wasn’t entirely their own fault: as the military investigators demonstrated so impeccably, commanders didn’t see it as an issue and preferred to turn a blind eye in the face of pressure to maintain recruitment levels. On top of that, as the FBI pointed out, many “military recruiters are not properly trained to recognize gang affiliation and unknowingly recruit gang members, particularly if the applicant has no criminal record or visible tattoos.”56

Hunter Glass, the gang investigator, adds: “If we weren’t in the middle of fighting a war, yes, I think the military would have a lot more control over this issue, but with a war going on, I think it’s very difficult to do.” The military was also experiencing an intense financial squeeze from the Bush administration, which was impacting its ability to control the problem. “Forming multi-agency task forces and joint community groups is an effective way to combat the problem,” says the FBI report. “However, decreases in funding and staffing to many task forces have created new challenges for civilian communities.”57 Recruiter conduct deteriorated at the same time. In a single year, from 2004 to 2005, the number of military recruiter violations increased by 50 percent as recruiters tried increasingly aggressive tactics and unscrupulously doctored documents. In the same period, the local CBS station in Denver, KCNC, did an important investigation into recruiter conduct when faced with a prospective soldier who claimed to be a gang member. The station’s reporter asked his interlocutor in the recruitment center: “Does it matter that I was in a gang or anything?” to which the recruiter responded, “You may have had some gang activity in your past and everything . . . OK . . . but that in itself does not disqualify.”58 There were also numerous reports of recruiters trying to cover up the previous affiliations of gang-members-turned-soldiers. In 2005 a Latin Kings gang member was allegedly recruited into the army at a Brooklyn, New York, courthouse, while awaiting trial for assaulting a police officer. He was reportedly told to conceal his gang affiliation. The effects were perhaps predictable. Jennifer Simon, the FBI gang detective, added: “It’s often in the military’s best interest to keep these incidents quiet, given low recruitment numbers and recent negative publicity. The relaxation of recruiting standards, recruiter misconduct and the military’s lack of enforcement have compounded the problem and allowed gang member presence in the military to proliferate.”59

In this period, according to reports from soldiers and investigators, Baghdad had become a veritable canvas on which gang members sprayed their markings after the invasion. The Gangster Disciples, as well other heavyweights like Latin Kings and Vice Lords—groups fostered in the badlands of Chicago—had left their mark on armored vehicles, walls, barricades, and bathrooms. An Army Reserve sergeant, Jeffrey Stoleson, seeing this all around him and growing increasingly angry about it, decided to go out on a limb in an effort to alert the American public. Stoleson was deployed twice—first in Kuwait and Iraq in 2005–6, and then later again in Iraq—but he stayed away from a face-to-face confrontation with the gangs. “We all carried loaded weapons at all times and with these hot heads you never know who they may be trying to prove something to,” he tells me. He adds that there were two types of gang members: some genuinely wanted to escape from the ’hood and the lifestyle and without the military had no chance. But the majority were training themselves for the war back at home. He says they were “using the methods taught in combat to take home and use against others who have no chance in hell of defending themselves.” They weren’t trying to hide it either, many posting up graffiti all over Iraq. “It was all over the place, the graffiti was blatant; they were not trying to hide the colors or gang affiliations or even tattoos. Most of the bases had gang graffiti on them from Kuwait to the border with Turkey. It was on Baghdad International Airport, the blast walls. It was a Who’s Who of American street gangs, everything was there.” Stoleson tried hard to get pictures of the graffiti, but when his senior officer realized he was intent on publicizing the problem “he made sure I was busy and not able to get them.” Before he got to the airport to take the snaps they painted over the graffiti. “I mean it was covered with graffiti close to one mile long, twenty feet high.” “Some was ‘Hi Mom’ and derogatory terms for other soldiers but most of it was gangs,” he added. Stoleson was also hearing from his colleagues that graffiti was being sprayed on the streets of Baghdad by US troops from different bases to denote their domains of influence. “It was like their turf, you didn’t go there after certain times of the day,” he says. “Many feared for their safety.” Some troops would even wear their gang colors in their military fatigues by coloring the inside pocket of their fatigues red or blue and when they passed each other they would pull them out to show allegiance.

As an upstanding soldier, Stoleson thought that if he raised this with his superiors they would take action or at least investigate. He was wrong. “I brought it up a couple times, but I was told to leave it alone, that they [gang members] were doing a good job et cetera,” he says, adding, “but for who and what flag? Not the red, white and blue.” Things got more serious when Stoleson started seeing military gear begin to go missing—mainly parts for weapons systems, mounts, optics, and small things that were easy to hide or ship. The command still weren’t interested. “At first they blew it off and said to leave it alone, it’s not your job,” he says. But Stoleson had taken an oath to protect his country from terrorists domestic and foreign, so he went to the press. “When the CID got a hold of me after the story got out in the Chicago Sun-Times, the 2-Star General wanted my ass on a platter,” he says. “Then it got messy.” The military sent an agent from California who was a gang specialist for the San Bernardino Sheriff Department in California. Two agents sat Stoleson down and spent a whole day going through his documentation which included hundreds of pictures. “My captain came through and was amazed when the CID agents looked at him and said his sergeant was right: they had a problem and he had a set of balls for what he did.”