The Americans Finally Noticed Us
By Christopher Shulgan, TORO Magazine
Winter 2006

…but after reading this, you might wish they hadn’t. The Minutemen, average American Joes with guns and night goggles, banded together along the U.S. border this fall to keep illegals from sneaking in through Canada. Toro’s Christopher Shulgan joins a batch of their new recruits on the battlefront to get a closer look at the line between us and them

Most of the recruits arrive in late-model, American-made pickups at Camp Standing Bear, five miles south of the Canadian border, beneath British Columbia in northwest Washington state. Their bumper stickers all bear the same prickly, battle-ready messages of patriotism: “No Guts No Glory,” “Don’t Tread On Me,” “United We Stand.” One of the last pickups to arrive sports an American flag taped upside down to its antenna. This inverted flag – the universal sign of distress – is intentional, says the pickup owner. It’s his comment on the state of his nation.

That is precisely what these recruits are here to change. They’ve driven from rural Washington state towns like Everett and Lynden and Olalla and Ritzville, a five- or six-hour journey for some. Their preferred uniform leans toward Marine Corps baseball caps, American denim, and leather hiking boots. Ask them why they’re here and they’ll mention things like Mexican “illegals” clogging up the social services of nearby Bellingham and how President Bush has done squat to secure the nation from the threat of OBL – what these folks call Osama Bin Laden – just as they’ll mention the drug tunnel discovered under the Canadian border in July near Langley, B.C., thirteen kilometres northeast of here. The recruits aren’t so specific on specifics; what unites them is a vague sense that their American culture is threatened. The solution, they say, is nothing less than a militarization of the world’s longest undefended frontier, to protect the home of the brave from the apparent evils of the true north, strong and free, as well as their neighbour to the south, and any other country that isn’t the United States.

To that end, these recruits have come to Camp Standing Bear this October to join the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, an Arizona-based organization that agitates for more border security with mass surveillance operations at the American frontier. This lawn-chair militia usually stages its actions at the Mexican border; today’s event in Washington is the first along the boundary with Canada. Armed with night-vision goggles they bought from eBay and million-candlepower spotlights purchased at Costco, as well as the occasional sidearm, these self-styled irregulars intend to spend the month before Halloween strung out along thirty-five kilometres of the forty-ninth parallel, between the Georgia Strait and the Cascade Mountains, at points they believe are likely to attract America-bound illegal immigrants.

Except, when they arrive to join the Minutemen’s Washington detachment, the recruits discover that its headquarters isn’t quite the fort they expected. Camp Standing Bear is modest. It’s actually the domicile of a detachment leader, set on an acre’s worth of verdant, north-facing hillside along a rural concession five minutes north of the Washington city of Ferndale. It contains a white metal barn and a camper van on blocks. The principle residence is a pair of dun-coloured trailers at the hillcrest that could use another coat of paint. And along with the unmown lawn and the handful of decomposing SUVs set around, the site looks downright trashy.

Less crowded than expected, too. The recruits gather in the barn sipping bitter coffee. Some of them seem ready to bolt. You can see them counting the ranks. All told, instead of the hundred volunteers they expected, the group numbers just under fifteen, two women among them, with the mean age about sixty. “Is the plan to make some sort of schedule?” asks Bob Inge, a retired social worker with a broad moustache and a green-hooded sweatshirt that fits him like a poncho. “I haven’t even registered yet. I mean, are we going to do anything today?” Doing things was the plan, but the leader of the Washington detachment, a Vietnam vet named Tom “Skipper” Williams, is a busy guy. For the past hour or so, he’s been out talking to reporters. Then he needs to deal with the film crews. Not to mention the radio interviews.

When Skipper finally gets around to addressing the Minutemen recruits, he realizes they’re sizing him up. At sixty-four, Skipper has close-cropped white fur covering his scalp and face and would stand a little over six feet with improved posture. In his grey U.S. Marines T-shirt, tapered Levi’s, and grimy Indian-print flannel jacket, he’s no vertical-spined, clear-eyed Patton. Skipper starts with an item intended to boost both their morale and his legitimacy: This morning, he says, he took a call from Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minutemen , who told Skipper how proud he was of the red-blooded recruits protecting the northern frontier and, by extension, the culture of the United States.

“Darn right,” says someone from the rear of the group. Skipper describes Minutemen actions he’s witnessed in Arizona, as well as past threats from infiltrators, violent protestors, and a Hispanic militia, MS-13, that once threatened to attack the group. “Now, weapons,” says Skipper. “Officially we discourage you from carrying a firearm” – and here, he smiles – “but under the laws of this state, so long as you have a concealed weapons permit, I can’t do anything to prevent you from packing.” Later, Skipper’s assistants hand out two varieties of reflective yellow armbands that identify Minutemen to the United States Border Patrol. When everyone has them secured around their upper arms, a third of the bands show red crosses, which signals the wearer is entitled to carry a concealed weapon.

Skipper lowers his voice for the final instruction. The gambit succeeds in prompting the group to lean in close so they can hear. Last night, says Skipper, he received some “intel” from a covert operative who informed him of a threat from the anarchists. “Those guys who closed down the World Trade Organization in Seattle a few years back?” Skipper practically whispers. “They’re headed up here. They may come here at 2 p.m. They may come here in two minutes. We’re about to reconfigure our observation posts to keep you folks safe. The Minutemen don’t want any trouble. And if they come, don’t be a hero. The last thing we need is some hotshot popping his gun off at a few radicals,” says Skipper, advising his charges to alert headquarters if things get out of hand – and then to get out of there. The common enemy infuses the crew with new purpose. Formerly doubtful expressions have been replaced by grim, narrow-eyed confidence. In a few moments the recruits will hurry through their registration, pick up their border maps, and set about deciding which observation posts to man.

But before that, Skipper concludes his orientation with a story of the former leader of the California Minutemen, Jim Chase, who once found his car surrounded by activists smashing bullhorns against his windows. “We could see him sitting in there and he might as well have been in a bathtub, he looked so calm. Dealing with protestors, it’s like we all have to be Mahatma Ghandi.” He surveys the group, then grins: “Except we get to eat.” Nervous laughter shifts through the line. Almost involuntarily, several recruits glance toward the door, as though to detect the approach of any number of handkerchief-masked homeland-threatening black-bloc anarchists.

In the era of the American Revolution, the Minutemen were an armed civilian group who responded at a moment’s notice to community threats from British redcoats, Indians, or Acadian insurgents. Today, some will tell you the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps stems from the same spirit of civilian activism: to keep the United States safe by keeping the nation’s borders secure. Others will tell you that members of the Corps are racist vigilantes who cloak their hostility to foreigners in the patriotic weave of the Stars and Stripes. What seems certain is that the group’s appeal involves a prototypically American notion of the ideal citizen, bolstered by a distrust in government and the responsibility of regular folk to protect their own. One of the group’s slogans is “Americans doing the jobs our government won’t do.”

The modern Minutemen were founded in 2004 by a retired California accountant and Vietnam veteran named Jim Gilchrist, who believes alien newcomers are threatening American culture. His aim was to get the country talking about immigration reform.

“I saw the country change literally overnight into a foreign country,” Gilchrist told the American press earlier this year, describing the Hispanic influence in southern California. “The Fourth of July was not being celebrated, but Cinco de Mayo was.” Helped by a newspaper publisher named Chris Simcox, Gilchrist staged his first rally this April in the Arizona town of Tombstone. Estimates of the civilian volunteers in attendance, many armed, who patrolled a 37-kilometre-mile slab of the Mexican border for two and a half weeks, ranged between 150 (according to the media) and 450 (according to the Minutemen). They said they were looking for illegal immigrants, terrorists, and drug smugglers, and by the end Gilchrist claimed his volunteers helped to apprehend 146 “illegals.” Federal authorities declined to comment on the figure.

Regardless of statistics, the project amounted to a brilliantly successful publicity stunt. At points during the Arizona mission, the Minutemen were outnumbered by media from all over the United States. Such frenzies occur when a story taps into the popular psyche. Since the group’s first operation in Arizona, the Minuteman organization has reflected, reinforced, and normalized a suspicion of foreigners that was largely latent until the World Trade Centre attacks. The Minutemen have succeeded in depicting immigration within a context of homeland security, a way of framing foreign cultures, including Canada’s, as enemies to the character of the United States. The idea has currency, particularly in the American South. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll this spring found 48 percent of Americans believe immigration weakens the country. Favourite bugaboos include Mexican immigrants and Muslim terrorists; but Canada, a nation some perceive as rife with drug smugglers and al-Qaeda sleeper cells, is also under suspicion. “Canada is a sanctuary country,” Minutemen president Chris Simcox told me in September when asked why the Minutemen would bother watching the northern U.S. border. “You have Canada giving refugee status to people we wouldn’t.”

Initially, the Bush administration derided the Minutemen as “vigilantes,” but once presidential aides grasped the group’s popularity, they swiftly changed tack. This summer, the top immigration enforcement official at the White House, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner, said the Border Patrol was investigating whether to form its own civilian force, an idea he said was inspired by the Minutemen but which was later rejected by the Department of Homeland Security. A month later, founder Gilchrist’s status as a hero of red-state America was confirmed when his campaign to replace a departing congressman in a southern California district drew a remarkable 15 percent of the vote.

The Civil Defense Corps has not found much support in the comparatively more liberal northern half of the country. Soon after the end of the April mission in Arizona, the Minutemen announced an expanded operation planned for every American border state. Hundreds of volunteers enlisted in the four states that border Mexico, but along the line from Washington to Maine the project drew a lukewarm response. Eventually the Minutemen limited themselves to three detachments. One in New England staged border surveillance during two weekends in mid- to late October. Washington State leader Skipper Williams intended to deploy checkpoints from the Georgia Strait all along his region’s uppermost boundary. Then he discovered a problem: Many of his statesmen didn’t understand the dire threat posed by the Canadian border. “People here think we’re a bunch of gun-toting vigilantes,” Skipper complained weeks before his operation was slated to begin, perhaps forgetting he had informed the media that he planned to pack a firearm during the border observation. (Skipper later changed his mind, opting to brave the dangerous hinterlands of rural Washington without a sidearm’s protection.)

In traditionally liberal Whatcom County the Minutemen generated protests and no small amount of bemused attention, particularly from hunters, who warned the Corps to wear bright clothing at their observation posts because their October 1 mission start date fell in the midst of hunting season. Among the most vociferous of the opposition were Kirk and Sara Shields-Priddy, who live with their two children on a farm that abuts the boundary.

“I’m against the Minutemen, period,” said Kirk. “We don’t want people with guns running around our property. They’re just playing on people’s fear, exploiting 9/11 to advance their own ends.”

Others disagreed. “Their guns don’t bother me,” says David Englert, a fifty-nine-year-old research scientist at the University of Washington. “They’re not breaking the law. They believe in what they do.” Like the Shields-Priddy family, Englert lives on a road that dead ends on the border, and I interrupt him while he gardens to ask if he thinks the United States needs more border security.

“You don’t have the time for me to answer that. It’s too complicated,” says Englert. “But I do know this. I grew up around this area. When I was a kid, Canada was a lot different. Before, the coolest thing in the world to do was to go to Canada. Now I don’t go there. Canadians treat Americans differently. Who’s that politician you have who said that stuff about President Bush?” I assume he’s referring to Carolyn Parrish, the Mississauga-Erindale Member of Parliament who has called Americans “bastards” and stomped on a President Bush doll on national television as part of a satirical skit. “Yes, the name’s something like that [Parrish]. To me, she shows how Canada has changed. That would never have happened before. You treat other leaders with respect. Nowadays, there are a lot of people, a lot of Canadians, who don’t have that respect.”

On Saturday morning, just before the newly minted Minutemen head out from Camp Standing Bear, an assistant of Skipper’s named Paul Ridley, sporting thick spectacles and a ponytail to the middle of his back, provides the group with a rough guide to the Canadian border. Standing before a map of northernmost Whatcom County, Ridley points out that British Columbia is separated from Washington State in most places with just a waist-high fence marking a farmer’s property. Or sometimes a foot-deep ditch. Or maybe not even that – in some places, there’s nothing. Worse, says Ridley, everyone’s heard about that drug tunnel discovered just north of here, back in July? Well, Ridley has some “intel” that 70 percent of the land on the Canadian side adjacent to Whatcom County is owned by the Hells Angels. No one questions the numbers.

“That’s the sort of people we’re dealing with here,” says Ridley, pointing out a dozen “OPs” (observation points), where pairs of Minutemen will monitor the border. One is set on a bluff overlooking the American border town of Sumas, another on the end of Englert’s rural road, and a third is near the Holmquist Hazelnut Orchards, an OP that Skipper refers to as the “nut farm.”

Among the Minutemen, one gains an insight into exactly how right-wing conspiracy theories proliferate, such as that “intel” about the Hells Angels. The media is dominated by left-wing liberals, that’s a known fact, and if you can’t rely on the media, what you hear from other clear-thinking, logical people, in conversation, on those phone-in radio shows, from the conservative blogs, is how you build your sense of things. Take Gene Kliewer, a slim, sad-eyed sixty-two-year-old tractor buff and retired general contractor from Ritzville, Washington. It was Kliewer who flew the upside-down Stars and Stripes from his pickup.

He’s upset about the illegal immigration invasion, as are most of his peers, but Kliewer is particularly concerned about the Mexicans who aren’t, in fact, Mexicans. Kliewer recounts how al-Qaeda agents have pretended to be Mexicans, assuming Mexican surnames, dressing like Mexicans, even learning a little Spanish so they can sound like Mexicans if they’re picked up by the border patrol. According to what he’s heard from reliable sources – and, in fact, a Republican congressman from Colorado named Tom Tancredo has been circulating this story since the World Trade Center attack – southern border patrols are finding diaries written in Arabic, prayer rugs, and what Kliewer calls “ragheads” (which he defines as the material “they” wear on their heads) – at points along the Mexican–U.S. border.

Other favourite Minutemen stories involve tuberculosis-spreading Brazilian illegals in New England and Hispanic serial-rapist illegals in Georgia, as well as North Korean infiltrators spotted just east of Whatcom County. “How’d they know they were North Korean?” I ask Kliewer. “That’s a good question,” he says. “Maybe they were Chinese.”

Several members of the Minutemen’s Washington detachment are Vietnam veterans nostalgic for the camaraderie and purpose they shared while armed and in uniform. Certainly, that’s the impression provided by Skipper Williams and his second-in-command, “intel” chief Claude LeBas, whose home, Camp Standing Bear, is actually a piece of property jointly owned by his sister and niece, who permit him to reside there. Anyone who hangs around LeBas for any length of time will soon hear about his medal-winning stint in Vietnam and his career as an undercover agent not just for the FBI and the CIA but also U.S. Customs. The fifty-nine-year-old claims to have impersonated an arms dealer selling guided missiles to a KGB colonel as well as a field marshal in the Symbionese Liberation Army to help find Patty Hearst.

As for Skipper, he’s likely 100 pounds heavier than he was when he fought the Viet Cong in the ’60s. Married three times, he currently lives alone in a single-storey ranch home in the little town of Deming, Washington, twenty minutes from here. His only steady companion is the dachshund Vigilante. Wildflowers are one of his hobbies; in fact, it was during a springtime trip to Arizona to watch the desert bloom that he checked out Gilchrist’s April border monitoring. Rather than out of any rage at border porosity, he seems to have participated as a lark, as something to do. Skipper won the leadership of the Washington Minutemen simply because he was one of only a handful of people from the state to participate in the April mission.

And yet, for each of the detachment’s slightly bored outcasts from another era, there is a younger, more mainstream – and apparently more productive – citizen who genuinely believes the juggernaut of Yankee culture is so threatened by foreign menaces that the country needs an iron curtain perimetre to protect it. Mike and Betsy Madan belong to that school. At about 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, Mike pulls their teal Ford F-250 pickup onto the shoulder of Hammer Road, an observation post five kilometres west of Sumas. Mike is a beefy forty-six-year-old building-supply-store owner with a beard and a disarming grin. At forty-eight, Betsy’s about a foot shorter than Mike, with a tidy soccer-mom haircut and incandescent blue eyes. Once they’re stopped she takes a good look around. They’ve parked in a berry farm, where six-foot-tall berry bushes block most of their field of view. Still, the OP is about as strategic as they could find around here, thanks to a dirt road that runs through the berry fields parallel to the border, intersecting with Hammer Road immediately under where they’re parked. Any southbound illegals hidden in the berry fields would be forced to cross the dirt road, making them visible to Betsy and Mike. The only house around here is ahead of them, halfway between the Madan truck and the border, on the opposite side of Hammer Road. The house is a one-storey structure shaded by leaves, and the yard is strewn with children’s toys.

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