CHAPTER 5: M.O.M.

PART II

Falling Star

Whenever a people entrust the defense of their country to a regular, standing army, the power of the country will remain under the direction of the most wealthy citizens..., your liberties will be safe as long as you support a well-regulated militia.

                                               Independent Gazeteer, Pennsylvania 1791

Chapter 5

M.O.M.

mi-li-tia   n.  1 a) orig., any militiary force  b) later, any army composed of citizens rather than professional soldiers, called up in time of emergency  

2   in the U.S., all able-bodied male citizens between 18 and 45 years old who are not already members of the regular armed services: Members of the National Guard and of the Reserves (of the Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, Navy, and Marine Corps) constitute the organized militia; all others, the unorganized militia

                                                                                 Webster's New World Dictionary (1991)

In history, it was likely that the Militia of Montana would go down as the grandfather of the present-day Constitutional Militia movement. For among these citizen groups, it was the most visible. The Militia of Montana, or M.O.M., as it liked to call itself, had made, not military preparedness, but a strong educational mission, its primary function, taking the lead in the Militia movement to educate Americans about what had gone wrong in the Founders' Republic, and what their citizen rights were. 

During the summer following the Oklahoma bombing in 1995, there were Senate hearings on the Militias in the Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Government Information; they were broadcast on C-SPAN. Like most people, this was my first direct look at Militia members. On the Militia panel were John Trochmann, who, with his brother David and nephew Randy, had founded M.O.M. and was its acknowledged leader. Although he was wearing a gray flannel suit, what struck me about the fifty-year-old Trochmann was that, with his broad, high forehead and dark, piercing eyes, salt-and-pepper hair and full silvery beard and mustache, he seemed to be from another era. It was as though there were another, superimposed reality (something like a double image), where he wore, not a suit, but overalls and held a pitchfork. Trochmann, I would learn much later, indeed, had grown up on a Midwest farm.

He had long been a member of the patriot community before setting out to form the Militia of Montana, and had brought with him to the Militia movement many of his former friends and beliefs. Through M.O.M.'s publications and Trochmann's lectures around the country, he had, in great part, set the tone for the emerging Militia movement. It had been the already-existing patriot community, with its many overlapping beliefs and constituencies, that had been the most receptive at first to John Trochmann's Militia message.

Little did I imagine at the time that one day I would meet with him. Again, one of the first things that struck me about Trochmann when I finally did, at a "Preparedness Expo," was that it didn't matter that he was wearing a gray suit, I could see only a plaid flannel shirt and suspenders. His hands were like rough, dry Idaho potatoes. John was nothing if not an American Gothic character out of a Grant Wood painting, stern and righteous. That day in Pennsylvania, some time later, he seemed never to be at ease as he told me his life story leading up to the Senate hearings. He started, telling me how he had come to live in Montana: 

"It was a childhood dream of mine to be in the Rocky Mountains. When I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade, I came upon an encyclopedia. I looked up the letter 'M,' and found 'mountains' and 'Montana.' I grew up as a farm boy in the northwest corner of Flatland, Minnesota. I was not happy with flat land, and I wanted to go to the mountains. Everybody has to have a dream. If they don't, they don't accomplish much in life. Dreams are gold. I don't see much difference.

"My curiosity was first tweaked by my dad. He was a farmer, carpenter and preacher. He bailed out of the Lutheran Church in the early '50s because they joined the National Council of Churches. He joined the Evangelical Churches of America, and when they joined the World Churches of America, he said, 'That's enough organized religion for us, Johnny.' He called me Johnny.

"At the age of 17, in 1960, I joined the U.S. Navy. I went to Cuba during the Missile Crisis as part of a bomb squadron out of Norfolk, Virginia—for submarine warfare. Part of our job was to take pictures of the Soviet ships leaving with the missiles on the decks. In fact, we discovered it was not missiles but just decoys covered by tarps. We brought this to our superiors and they just told us to shut our mouths. So that tweaked my interest a whole bunch.

"Beyond that point, back in Norfolk, I watched on a military television as our President Kennedy was shot in the face by our own people. It was shown in Life magazine. They printed a few thousand copies and then tried to recall them. They changed the article midstream. They actually showed the footage of the Zapruder tape. I realized something was wrong with this picture. The more we discussed it, the more we realized, something's gone radically wrong here in America. That did it for me. I pretty much questioned people in public service positions ever since.

"So, ever since then, I've really been in the pursuit to find truth, exposing the corrupters to the American people. But I guess the big push came in the mid-'70s when I started getting involved in trying to educate our fellow Americans. We were distributing information to our customers, reduplicating what we came across. People were very receptive. My two brothers and I had two businesses—A&T Motors, which did automobile repairs and built racing engines, and Trochs Enterprise Inc. which dealt with parts for snowmobiles, under the trade label, 'Snowstoff.' We had 5500 wholesale accounts. As a part of the military, I had attended the U.S. Armed Forces Institute in Norfolk—business law and business administration. I never set out to finish. I just wanted to get an education.

"I built myself a Bentwood dome home—thirty-foot domes spaced twenty feet apart. It had about 6,600-and-some square feet, three stories high, a third of it built into the ground, quite self-sufficient. That took a lot of time. I was into self-sufficiency. My electricity was wind powered. The interest in self-sufficiency was something that I acquired by watching our country and observing how those in high places were trying to control the populace based on energy and food. And I wanted to be independent, not 'interdependent.' 

"Eventually, I sold my home. It was valued at $360,000 but I had to sell it for $60,000. Minnesota had become a rearview state where, as far as I could see, most Minnesotans didn't care what happened. Montana has always been a more free-thinking state, based on the way of life. People are few and far between. The economy is much tighter there. The unemployment rate is much higher. In our little community, its about 50% unemployment, and the global grabbers are making sure it continues to grow, by shutting down the sawmills and the mines. And then, the UN Biosphere grabbers, land grabbers, are making sure that the land grazers have no place to run their cattle. Besides, a lot of people who have woke up across the country and are realizing the cities are not a good place to live are moving to Montana.

"I moved to Noxon, Montana in '87. I married a lady from there. My brother David had located there earlier. He took my dream and left with it before I had the opportunity, because I was in the process of building a house at the time. I moved to Montana and occasionally did an engine job for someone, or a transmission job. I'm semi-retired. 

"In Montana, we home-schooled our children—with our children from former marriages, they totaled six. In early 1990, part of the home-schooling was to do a story on the Aryan Nations church, so we sent our children to Aryan Nations in Idaho with some trusted friends, and when we went to pick them up the next day, we found that, being teenagers—of course they didn't ever lie to their parents, ha, ha, ha—we found that they had gotten little or no sleep the night before and had been on alcoholic beverages. And we had trusted our friends and had trusted the church over there, that they would take care of our children properly. While I was there, I was invited to come back and speak in July of that year at the Aryan Nations World Congress, and I did. I spoke about immorality—'their' immorality.

"From that point on, I was branded an Aryan Nations Neo-Nazi. Mainstream media, from that point on, has been slandering me. Never, ever, ever, did I belong to Aryan Nations. Never paid any dues, never signed anything, never received anything in the mail. What does it take to be a member?

"OK, I only brought that up because you needed to see how I connected with the Randy Weaver family. That's how we met them. We pretty much lost touch with them after that, but our children were writing letters back and forth to their children, because our children became friends. In early 1991 Randy Weaver was arrested, as far as I'm concerned, for not cooperating with federal agents to set the Trochmanns up.

"He was arrested because he wouldn't participate in a federal sting operation. The Aryan Nations was part of it, but he came to the Noxon, Montana area that year with the specific purpose of infiltrating the Trochmann family. It came out in the trial in 1993. He went over there to case it out. Apparently, at the time, he had agreed to it. Something changed his mind. Anyhow, he was arrested in '91, and when he got out of jail on bail, he went up into his mountain retreat—what they, the government, called a 'compound.' We call it a clapboard cabin. It was made out of mill ends. It was a little cabin that would sway in the breeze when it blew.

"Why did the government want to set us up? We were outspoken against tyranny in government. Our reach was all over the country, because of our former customers. We were still sending them things. We sent out one book called Billions for the Bankers, Debts for the People, showing the three different methods of takeovers, and the one that we were concentrating on was the financial takeover. I don't even remember who wrote it, but we must have sent out, phew, thirty, forty thousand of them, free." (This 30-page booklet, of which I was given a copy by a patriot during my research, published in 1984, was basically an expose of the Federal Reserve System, a subject dear to the heart of all Militia people, about which I was beginning to learn in the spring of 1996.) 

 

"The snowmobile parts was a very good business, and that's why we have this business, because we took that money and we sunk it into this. But it would be nice to break even some day. The IRS thinks we're making so damn much money, the bastards.

"In '91, when Randy Weaver retreated to his mountain cabin, we brought them food for, probably, sixteen months. At the time I didn't know he had gone there to set me up. And then, on April 19—that date always comes up—of 1992, my nephew Randy Trochmann and I went to visit the Randy Weaver family because we just felt in our spirit that we had a problem someplace with one of our friends—that they were being put in jeopardy of some sort—and the Randy Weaver family is the only ones that we could not call and find out. They didn't have a telephone.

"So we drove up to the Randy Weavers' and we found Vicki Weaver sitting on the rock overlooking the gate with her rifle on her lap, with little Samuel standing to her left side with a rifle—Sara and Rachel were to her right side—looking down at us. I said, 'Good morning Vicki, good morning children,' and all I got for a response was, 'John, what are you doing here?' And I thought, 'How strange. Why should she talk to me like that?' I thought to myself, 'What do I usually do up here? I come up here to visit you.' And she says, 'I don't know who to believe anymore. John, turn around and look.' So I turned around and saw a whole row of federal agents behind us, at least a dozen, and I realized that they were under siege. I didn't know we drove into the middle of a siege and just kinda screwed it up for everybody. And she said, 'John, go home.'

"Now, Randy Weaver was nowhere in sight. Neither was their brand new baby. So, instead of going home, we went down to a pay phone in Naples, Idaho, which we knew was bugged, and called my brother's phone, which we knew was bugged, and made this statement: 'I don't know what these agents are up to, trying to harass the Weaver family, because Randy Weaver was killed two weeks ago when he fell off the cliff.' I mean, if they're masters of deception, why can't we join in? So, from there we went to visit a newspaper man we knew was former CIA and probably still with them, and we gave him still another story. As we sat in the restaurant talking with him, we looked out at the Weaver home, and there was a huge, thick, black cloud that sat right over the home and rained like crazy. And that was the end of the siege at the time. The marshals abandoned their program, apparently." (This incident, interestingly, had taken place a year before Waco, also on the anniversary of Lexington. The question the Militias were asking was, had this date already been selected by the feds for some action?) 

"From that point on, we just didn't have anything more to do with the Weaver family, seeing they had just told us to go home. And then, in August we realized that the Weaver family was under siege again. We didn't know at the time that a marshal had been shot—Marshal Degan—and that Samuel Weaver had been shot and killed. Friends of ours heard about the siege on the news. There were hundreds of people by the time we got there, from all over the countryside—Montana, Washington, Oregon, Idaho. I'm sure there were a few Canadian citizens too. Its close to the border.

"So, from that time on, the Trochmanns—my brother David, my nephew Randy, and myself—maintained a twenty-four-hour vigil, and one of us was awake at all times for the eleven-day siege that followed. At which time we discovered that little Samuel Weaver had been shot in the back by federal agents, coerced into a mortal gunfight, that Marshal Degan had been shot two hours before the Weaver family knew he was there—shot by his own agents. We've got eye witnesses to prove it. Gerry Spence didn't believe it until the trial was well underway, and by that time the witness had had a threat and disappeared.

"Prior to that, however, we had a Los Angeles police chief take an affidavit from the man, which we still hold a copy of, that he actually saw Marshal Degan being shot in the back by his own men. The sheriff up there wants to know how come there's never been an investigation, with seven bullet holes in Mr. Degan's backpack, which was on his back, and no inquest. The man who saw this was in the process of purchasing land in the area, and the marshals apparently didn't know that he was walking the land right below them.

"Marshal Degan was a good marshal, but he was part of a drug bust operation on the East coast, in the Boston area, that netted a $6 million catch and sent a number of federal agents to the pen. And for that, he had to die. So the rogue agents within the agency found a way to sacrifice him, and vilify the Weaver family to boot. You gotta ask yourself, how many point men does a six-man team need? This six-man team already had a point man. Why did they need Degan? If Degan was in front of the rest of them, why?

"At the siege, the three of us tried to keep the peace down below at the barricade, to make sure that the federal agents would have no excuse to remove the public from the area. We felt once the public was hauled away, they could butcher the family very easily, which they tried to do. They tried to burn the house down twice. The first time they tried to do it, the rains came and washed all the diesel fuel off the building, that the choppers had dumped on it. The second time the Huey military choppers did that, we had moved the media into the area, and got them to start taking pictures of what was going on. They swarmed against us, arresting some of the media that didn't hide quick enough, and they never did burn the place, because of our observation and scrutiny of them all the time.

"Bo Gritz got involved, and eventually talked Randy Weaver out, and what was left of the family, after they killed his son, shot his wife in the face, with her infant in her arms. A sick bunch of beasts. But they were just obeying their orders, right? Who would do such a dumb thing as that?"

John was silent for a moment, then said, "It reminds me of a poem I've been taught by an elderly gentleman. It goes like this:

Captain, what do you think, I asked, of the part your soldiers play?

The Captain answered, I do not think, I do not think, I obey!

Do you think you should shoot a patriot down and help a tyrant slay?

The Captain answered, I do not think, I do not think, I obey!

Do you think your conscience was meant to die and your brains to rot away?

The Captain answered, I do not think, I do not think, I obey!

Then if this is your soldiers code, I cried, you're a mean unmanly crew, and for all of your feathers and guilt and braid, I'm more of a man than you.   

For whatever my lot on earth may be and whether I swim or sink, I can say with pride, I do not obey, I do not obey, I think.

"That's what our agents need to do." 

The Paul Bunyan-with-a-blue-ox character stopped talking, and looked at his watch as if he had more important things to do in the wilderness of America than talk to a reporter. Looking back at me warily, after a bit, he continued, "After this happened, we were part of an organization called 'Citizens for Justice.' It was an investigation team that held meetings every week or so. We helped set it up. There were hundreds involved in it. We were investigating and uncovering evidence, and turning it over to Gerry Spence. That was the fall of '92.   

"Then, in April of 1993 came the burning of the Branch Davidians in Waco, including women and children." Trochmann began to sound irritated, saying, "If they wanted David Koresh, why didn't they arrest him while he was jogging? Why didn't they arrest him when he went into town? No, they didn't want it that way. They had a much bigger picture to work on. Why was the military involved, and why did they do the shooting as they did? Why did they kill four agents which were Clinton bodyguards? We have evidence of that—like Marshal Degan. I mean, questions, questions, questions and no answers, still today. And still, all that happened, including the Randy Weaver siege and Waco, and it didn't seem like America was waking up.

"It seemed like they just went on about their lethargic life. So we decided in June of 1993 that Montana was not as remote as we'd like it to be, and we were just going to walk away from our fellow Americans, let'em wallow in their own mire. And we went to Alaska to look for a more remote area. We spent the 4th of July in Wrangell, Alaska. We had found jobs and were all set to move up there, and we came back down and packed a forty-foot high cube, semi-trailer.

"Just before we left, we took a tour around the country and realized, America really is starting to wake up. We can't abandon her now. So we gave up our plans to leave, and decided to start organizing to educate our fellow Americans on an even larger scale than we had before. So, in early 1994, about February—this was after the Brady Bill—we started the Militia of Montana, and all these people are starting to get involved, including little old ladies and doctors and nurses, and everybody in between."

A light came into John Trochmann's stern, black eyes beneath the thin gray eyebrows, and he explained, "We organized the Militia of Montana under the First Article of the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech—and that's what we're doing today, exercising the First Article of the Bill of Rights, to educate our fellow Americans. We started a Militia because we had tried all those other names for many, many years and it didn't seem to get anywhere; Wildwood Fellowship was one of them, and United Citizens for Justice. But the one that seemed to make the most sense was one that would point in the direction of the foundation of our nation, which was the word, 'Militia.' I don't know if anyone thought of it. It was just laying there waiting to be used. It was my nephew Randy that came up with the name, 'Militia of Montana,' based on the acronynm that he'd come up with—'M.O.M.'" John savored his words, saying, "What a nurturing name!" 

M.O.M. had put out a manual on how to form a Militia, which quickly became a blueprint for Militia units around the country, although variations emerged. It could be said that this manual, in a way, had been the cornerstone of the most-recent incarnation of the Militias as a 1990s movement. M.O.M. also put out a monthly publication, Taking Aim: The Militiaman's Newsletter, that was widely-read among the Militias, and a catalogue of related tapes and books, with subjects that ranged from how to survive in the wilderness and U.S. military manuals, to government conspiracies having to do with such things as an imminent New World Order takeover under the UN and Bill Clinton's connection, as governor of Arkansas, through the Mena airport, to Iran-Contra and drug trafficking, that I began learning about also in the spring of 1996. Although there had been groups that called themselves Militias before Ruby Ridge and Waco (in places like Texas and the Midwest), the Militia of Montana was the first to publicly advocate that ordinary citizens organize and network nationwide.

The Militia of Montana Information & Networking Manual, as M.O.M.'s 27-page instruction manual on how to form a Militia was titled, was published in early 1994 when the Trochmanns formed M.O.M. (he couldn't remember what month exactly, but others said it was February). On the cover, in all four corners, was the eagle from the United States coat of arms, wings spread, holding an olive branch in one claw and a sheaf of arrows in the other, and a ribbon in the beak that said, "E PLURIBUS UNUM." The Manual had been written mostly by Randy Trochmann (John's nephew), who also edited the newsletter. The Trochmann family approached writing like a country store that offered the bare essentials along with a few luxury items, everything neatly displayed on rough-hewn shelves and in well-ordered cardboard boxes. Randy Trochmann's writing was the cardboard boxes and rough shelves that held all the necessary Militia accoutrements for survival and for the defense of property and family, as well as a good bit of no-holds-barred advice.

On the first page was the Second Amendment, followed by some world history on the role of "militias," beginning with Britain in 54 B.C. It was noted that Caesar and his Roman army of 23,000 had been routed by the militia, made up of the local landowners. In modern times, after World War II, Finland, it said, due to the militia, had kept free from Russian occupation, and in Afghanistan, the local militias had held Russian troops at bay for eleven years.

The popular saying, "A man's home is his castle," M.O.M. explained, could be traced to England, to the Magna Carta, which King John had been forced to sign in 1215, guaranteeing Englishmen the right to keep and bear arms. It had been understood, said the Manual, that this "meant castles with moats, ramparts, draw bridges, etc, and all of the other paraphernalia of a castle and needs to secure it... meaning that a man had the right to fortify his home against any who may assault it, and likewise, have the right to defend it in like manner." 

The Founding Fathers, many of them fluent in Greek and Latin, the Trochmanns explained, had been well schooled in the historical role of the militias, and "There was much discussion during the constitutional convention as to how the states would secure their sovereignty and liberties from a national government." They had been afraid the government would turn into a monarchy, and for that reason, had established three branches of government, with a clear separation of powers, and "protected the right of the Militia of the several states to keep and bear arms through the Second Amendment."

Although many Americans today believed the primary reason for the Second Amendment was to defend against criminals and for hunting, the Manual explained, the Founding Fathers had written this amendment so that the people could, as Thomas Jefferson had put it, "protect themselves against tyranny in government." Jefferson, M.O.M. noted, had understood that in order to take away their liberty it would be necessary to disarm Americans. In 1775 Jefferson had anticipated the arguments of the anti-gun advocates, that taking guns away from people would lower the crime rate, when he had copied into his Commonplace Book, Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria's words: 

False is the idea of utility... that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction (of liberty). The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes, such laws serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

Most of the Founding Fathers had served in the Militia at one time or another, explained the Manual, and understood that it was the source of protection for the people's rights. They had also understood that the Constitution, in the future, would need to be interpreted with an understanding of the original intent. Indeed, its primary author, James Madison, had warned:

[D]o not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government.

In earlier times, explained M.O.M., Greece, Rome and Israel had all had militias, and when they had been replaced by standing armies under the complete control of a king or emperor, these nations had "all passed into oblivion." It explained how the National Guard had only been created in 1903 with the Dick Act, and was therefore not the Militia referred to in the state and federal Constitutions. A report by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommitee on the Constitution was quoted, that concurred as recently as in 1982:

That the National Guard is not the "militia" referred to in the Second Amendment is even clearer today. Congress had organized the National Guard under its power to "raise and support armies" and not its power to "Provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the militia." The modern National Guard was specifically intended to avoid status as the constitutional militia, a distinction recognized by 10 U.S.C. 311(a).

In 1916, during World War I, recalled the M.O.M. Manual, when Teddy Roosevelt had offered to raise a Militia and lead it into battle in Europe, as he had done in Cuba, President Wilson had proceeded to alter the definition of the Militia and who controlled it. The National Guard had been put under the full control of the president, making him its commanding officer, not as president but as senior military officer—an important distinction. In effect, said M.O.M., Wilson had made the National Guard "a private army of the president." And so, Title 32 USC stated:

[T]he President shall prescribe regulations, and issue orders necessary to organize, discipline, and govern the National Guard.

States had soon been forced to comply under threat of loss of federal funding, explained the Manual, and the National Guard units, now federally funded, had been made subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and put under the direct command of the Secretary of the Army (which started under FDR). Massachusetts had been the last state to capitulate, in the 1950s. Montana, however, like many states, M.O.M. explained, in its definition of "Militia" in the state constitution, had retained the distinction between "organized" and "unorganized." It was stated in the legislation that insofar as the National Guard and the Montana Home Guard were concerned, federal regulations governed. But, said M.O.M., the "unorganized" Militia in Montana had remained that of the Second Amendment, with Montana reserving to itself that portion of the Militia provided for in Title 10-1-103, which stated:

[T]he unorganized militia... consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the organized militia.

M.O.M. pointed out that in instances around the world where a "militia" had played an important role in overthrowing a tyrannical government, as in the case of East Timor, or in the ousting of a foreign nation, such as Poland under Nazi Germany, when subsequently that militia had been disbanded and its weapons collected, this had resulted, in East Timor, in annexation by Indonesia, and in Poland, by the Soviet Union. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, where the militias had also been strong and were disbanded at the close of the Second World War, likewise, had been absorbed by the Soviet Union. Although it had remained legal In the Soviet Union to own a shotgun or a hunting rifle, the ability to organize and bear arms had been eliminated, along with the leadership and organizations that would have allowed for training and preparation of militias.

M.O.M. explained that taking the "lead in the legislation of the disarming of America" was the organization Handgun Inc., and its founder Sarah Brady, who, the Militias believed, had showed her true intentions when she once stated:

Our task of creating a Socialist America can only succeed when those who would resist us have been totally disarmed.

It was Sarah Brady, readers of the Manual in early 1994 would have known, who was responsible for the Brady Bill, named after her husband, James Brady, the White House Press Secretary who had been wounded in 1981 in an assassination attempt against President Reagan, and left a paraplegic. The Brady Bill, passed in late 1993 (which had precipitated the forming of the Militia of Montana early the following year), required a five-day waiting period to buy a handgun, during which time a background check was to be performed, leaving a computer trail of information, that many already believed was the first step towards a national firearms registry. 

The Manual went on to explain that Militias were not out of date, as some would argue, and this could be seen in places like the Kurdish territories, Croatia and Bosnia, where minority groups had recently been able to protect themselves with militias from majority oppression. In plain-carboard-box language, M.O.M. put it thus:

The militia, under the second amendment, is to be able to bare [sic] arms, meaning to use them in a military confrontation... The security of a free state is not found in the citizen having guns in the closet. It is found in the citizenry being trained, prepared, organized, equipped and led properly, so that if the government uses its force against the citizens, the people can respond with a superior amount of arms, and appropriately defend their rights.

   The framers had learned that the regular Army would not protect the rights of the people under the bureaucracy or [if] a tyrant went mad with power. It was not the army, or the bureaucratic officials, members of parliament or Governors who made up the Revolutionary militia, Continental Congress, or committees of Correspondence that started the war to protect the rights of man. It was John Q. Public—the common man... Our government by passing these Crime Bills and the Brady Bill have shown us that they are attempting to disarm the militias of the several states... It is not enough to have a gun, it takes knowing how to use it, when, and who you can trust and rely upon.

   The lessons of history... If the army has control of the militia, then the militias will be obedient to the command of the army, which is in the command of the government. If the militia is independent and viable, then only laws which are right and just will come forth from the government, keeping the populace supportive and loyal to the government. To balance the military power of the nation, with the might of the militia, will put at odds any scheme by government officials to use the force of the government against the people. Therefore, when the codes and statutes are unjust for the majority of the people, the people will rightly revolt, and the government will have to acquiesce without a shot being fired.

Following this in the Manual was a modern-day "Declaration" by the Militia of Montana, modeled on the 1776 Declaration of Independence:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for the Citizen's of this State, to exercise their right to protect and defend their lives, families, property and the right of this State to be free and independent, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights, which are guaranteed and protected by the Constitution of the United States of America.

We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (property). That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. The history of the present federal government is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of absolute power and control over the citizen's of the State of Montana, and likewise, the rest of the several states of the union. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

Following this were enumerated the current "Train of Abuses" that M.O.M. charged the government with, which began, "The present federal government has bribed the several states and their local governments into obeying their rules and regulations," which is "contrary to" the federal and state constitutions, through threats to "withhold... grants and/or funds." It continued with a long list: "federal intervention, manipulation and control" of trade; deprivation of trial by jury (tax foreclosures) and deprivation of the disadvantaged of a proper defense; "quartering large bodies of armed foreign troops among us and protecting them, by mock trials, from punishment for any murders which they have committed on the innocent inhabitants (Weaver, Waco, etc.)"; for erecting "a multitude of new offices," and sending "hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance, often these officers being under foreign control and finance"; giving its consent to agencies that "have unconstitutionally plundered our homes, ravaged our property, burned our homes, and destroyed the lives of our people as well as murdering innocent citizen's"; "altering fundamentally our forms of government, which our Founding Fathers bled and died for, without the consent of the governed"; and rendering the states defenseless "by taking away their organized militia... " and "disarming the unorganized militia by laws which are unconstitutional." (The reference to "foreign troops," as I was learning, meant "federal," as opposed to state or local law enforcement, a qualification that at first had sounded totally off the wall to me, but was indeed backed by a cogent argument.)

The M.O.M. Declaration, continuing its imitation of the Declaration of Independence, concluded:

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; to the judiciary, the legislative and the executive branches of this present government; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

Nor have we remained silent to our fellow citizen's. We have warned them from time to time of the usurpations and travesties that this present government has done to them and continues to do to them; Some have listened; Some have not;

This present federal government has, by it's actions, declared war upon it's citzen's;

As our fellow citizen's have not consented to altering or abolishing the form of government guaranteed to us through the Constitution of the United States of America and the Constitution of the State of Montana, we, therefore, the able-bodied citizen's of the State of Montana, do, by and through the authority of the citizen's of the State of Montana and the citizen's of the several States united, have the right to protect and defend our lives, families, property and the right of the State of Montana to be a free and independent State, in the form our Founding Fathers enacted for our use.

This was followed by a section of quotes from The Federalist Papers, a collection of essays by the Founding Fathers that illustrated, among other things, their thinking on the Militia. These writings had appeared in the various newspapers after the Constitution was drafted, when the Antifederalists were arguing against ratification unless a Bill of Rights was included to protect the newly-won freedoms. The Federalists, arguing that these freedoms were already sufficiently protected because the body of the people constituted an armed Militia, against which no government tyranny could prevail, had included Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, and left no doubt as to their intention that there be a self-regulating citizens Militia. In Number 28 Hamilton had argued:  

The militia is a voluntary force not associated or under the control of the state except when called out; a permanent or long-standing force would be entirely different in make-up and call.

In Number 69 he had said also:

The president, and government, will only control the militia when a part of them is in the actual service of the federal government, else, they are independent and not under the command of the president or the government. The states would control the militia, only when called out into the service of the state, and then the governor would be the commander in chief where enumerated in the respective state constitution.

Madison had written on this, in Number 46:

The highest number to which a standing army can be carried in any country does not exceed one hundredth part of the number of the souls, or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Besides the advantage of being armed, [a militia] forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. The governments of Europe are afraid to trust the people with arms. If they did, the people would certainly shake off the yoke of tyranny, as America did. Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors.

Next, in the Militia of Montana Manual was a section that cited the passages in the U.S. and Montana constitutions authorizing the Militia. Aside from the Second Amendment, the "Constitution of the United States of America," it noted, made three references to the Militia—two under the powers granted Congress, and one under the executive powers. Together they read:

To provide for calling out the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrection and repel Invasions;

(Article I, Section 8, #15)

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

(Article I, Section 8, #16)

The President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States.

(Article II, Section 2, #1)

M.O.M. noted that among the articles pertaining to the Militia in the "Constitution of the State of Montana," Article VI, Section 13 stated:

The militia forces shall consist of all able-bodied citizens of the state except those exempted by law.

This meant, as in most states, that almost everyone not in the armed forces was a member of the Montana Militia. Quoted also were, Daniel Webster, Winston Churchill, John Salter, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Jefferson, who had once stated:

When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny.

Following was the Militia of Montana's statement of "Intent" (still in mock-Colonial), which stated:

We, the able-bodied Citizen's of Montana, hold these truths to be self-evident, that when the government is instituted among men for the purpose of protecting their rights and liberties, it is the DUTY of man to put on the cloak of liberty for the sake of protecting man-kind from government that is out of control and that has transformed itself into a Tyrant. Just as our Founding Fathers of this Country shook off their shackles of bondage, so must we.

THEREFORE, we, hereby solemnly publish and declare that as free, able-bodied Citizen's of the State of Montana [we] do hereby pledge to exercise our right to protect and defend our lives, families and properties, by and through the authority of the free people of this state and of this nation, and to further this protection, we hereby form as members of the unorganized militia of the State of Montana, a volunteer organization to be known as the "Militia of Montana, ________ County, Unit ________"

This had been the model for statements by Militias around the country. It was followed by the section, "Rules and Regulations," with the chapters: "Rank and Structure," "Taking Up Arms," "Officers and Members," "Funding and Property," "Association," "Law and Justice," and "General Provisions." Each unit commander, it explained, was to be chosen by the unanimous vote of the members for a two-year term. Officers were to be chosen by the commander, supported by a members vote of two thirds. The uniform would consist of bluejeans and a gray shirt. Dissatisfied members were encouraged to break off and form new units.

The rank and structure, it said, should mirror that of the "organized" state Militia (the National Guard), without violating the military code. When engaged in the active service of the state, the unit was to be organized according to that branch it was in service with.

All able-bodied state citizens over twenty, in no case under eighteen, were eligible for membership. A new member was to have the Declaration read to him by an officer, and be voted in by a three quarters vote. Then, the new member would "be enlisted" by reading "the covenant of service":

I (state name) shall faithfully execute the Constitutional laws of the Union and the United States of America and the State of Montana, to the best of my ability; to protect, defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States of America and the State of Montana against all enemies foreign and domestic.

The M.O.M. Manual called for every unit to send a representative to the sheriff and county commissioners "with a letter of greetings and notice of the ability to serve." However, the Militia could only be called into service with a unanimous vote during roll call, and could not be used against unarmed citizens, "nor," Most importantly, "against armed Citizen's" defending "the constitutions of the State of Montana and of the United States of America" (meaning Constitutional Militias. A unit could only be called into service by the governor, the county commissioners, the sheriff, or the unit commander (of a Constitutional Militia). It could be called up to exercise the right of defense, only for the protection of lives and property of state citizens and the state and U.S. constitutions, "against all enemies foreign and domestic."

The Militia unit could not be used against the police or governmental authority within the state, "except by call out by the representative authority of the government, with the sustaining vote of the Unit," and only when there existed "crimes of violation of their oath of office." It was to be used outside the state only in times of invasion and with the unanimous approval of all the members, as well as permission from the governor and a majority vote of the county commissioners. ("Invasion," as I was learning, for the Militias, could consist of federal troops entering any state of the Union.)

No member received pay, and all were responsible for their own uniforms and equipment. It advised collecting dues, with a suggested $20 application fee and $5 a month, and stipulated that donations could be accepted only without any strings attached. Funding was not to be accepted from any political entity except in times of a general call-out. Interference by the federal government would not be tolerated.

Disobedience of the lawful orders of a superior and the commission of a crime were grounds for dismissal. A member could also be dismissed by a two-thirds vote. But members were guaranteed a fair hearing in all cases.

Members were to support all laws not in contravention of the "Constitution of the United States of America" as well as the state constitution. The Manual referred to the (federal) Constitution's Article VI, paragraph 2, which said:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States, which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; ...shall be the supreme Law of the Land, and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Members were to be subject to the highest moral standards. They would at all times be respectful of civil authorities and the rights of citizens, and were to suppress insurrections against laws "held to be Constitutional." Units, however, could be called into service for use against any armed force not authorized to assemble in the state by the federal and state constitutions. (Those familiar with Militia thinking would know that this could be interpreted to include the ATF, FBI and other federal police forces, as well as the regular army, on the grounds that there were no federal police powers in the Constitution—which was why the government was seeing red regarding the Militias.) Units could also be called into service to assist in time of natural or manmade disasters. 

In the Manual was a grammatical diagram of the Second Amendment:

A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of the state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

 The diagram, prepared by a woman named Bernadine Smith (of the Second Amendment Committee in Hanford, California), showed that the words, "shall not be infringed," constituted the "predicate" in the sentence, therefore meant to be a "restrictive" clause. These same four words, showed the diagram, contained as they were in the "declaratory," latter part of the sentence, applied equally to both subjects, the "militia" in the first clause, and the "right" (of the people) in the second clause—meaning, to the Militia "collectively" and to (the right of) the people "individually." Accordingly, Smith explained, there was another grammatically-correct way to phrase the Second Amendment (without changing the meaning), which was:

Because a well-regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. 

Next to the diagram was quoted a man by the name of A.C. Brocki, who was described as a "teacher of Advanced English, a foremost expert in grammar, former Senior Editor for Houghton Mifflin," who concurred, saying that in the Second Amendment, what was meant was "that the people have the right that is mentioned"—to "keep and bear arms."

On the subject of grammar, in fact, one of the foremost experts on the English language, Roy Copperud, author of American Usage and Style: The Consensus, a member of the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and expert frequently cited in Merriam Webster's Usage Dictionary, had the following to say in response to written questions regarding the true meaning of the Second Amendment:

The sentence does not restrict the right to keep and bear arms, nor does it state or imply possession of the right elsewhere or by others than the people; it simply makes a positive statement with respect to the right of the people... [which] right is not granted by the amendment; its existence is assumed. The thrust of the sentence is that the right shall be preserved inviolate for the sake of ensuring a militia... The right to keep and bear arms is deemed unconditional by the entire sentence...

   To the best of my knowledge, there has been no change in the meaning of the words or in usage that would affect the meaning of the amendment. If it were written today, it might be put: "Since a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged."

Underneath Smith's Second Amendment sentence diagram in the M.O.M. Manual was the Preamble to the Bill of Rights, which stated, as I now knew, that the ten Articles were "further declaratory and restrictive clauses" added "in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of [the Constitution's] powers."

On the back cover of the Manual was an essay by Smith, titled, "Interpreting the Meaning & Purpose of the Second Amendment." Contrary to much contemporary opinion, she explained, the reason the Framers had put the Militia first in the sentence, "A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of the State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," had been in order to stress both the importance of "the collective use of the right to arms," and that the individual right had "equal status."

Smith recalled that when the Constitution had been submitted to Virginia in 1787 for ratification, for three weeks, Patrick Henry (who had made the "give me liberty or give me death" speech) had railed against it every day, warning that it had been written "as if only good men will take office!" The main reason for objecting to the Constitution, he had argued, was that "it does not leave us the means for defending our rights or waging war against tyrants." Already, he warned that the federal government was being given too much money and power and that it would end up converting the states "into one solid empire."

Another area that Patrick Henry had believed needed greater limitations, noted Smith, was treaty power. He had argued for another Constitutional Convention, but had agreed to settle for a Bill of Rights. Over the protestations, the secretary of the Constitutional Convention, future-President James Madison, argued that a Bill of Rights was not necessary because the government would exercise only those powers delegated it, with Patrick Henry replying, "Let Mr. Madison tell me, when did liberty ever exist when the sword and the purse were given up from the people?" It was only after Madison was blocked from the first Senate, and he promised to draft a Bill of Rights, that he was able to secure a seat in the House of Representatives. On December 15, 1791, related Smith, man's natural rights, thus, were memorialized in the Bill of Rights, becoming the "unrevokable and superior part of the Constitution."

She ended, quoting Patrick Henry once again:

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel! Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force, and whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined! 

Toward the back of the M.O.M. Manual were diagrams for setting up "Militia Support Groups," as well as Militia "cells." The support groups, it was explained, were to be structured so they could be easily transformed into Militias with a military chain of command. There were sample worksheets for keeping track of the command network and members (these were soon to be discontinued, when it became clear that the authorities were anxious to get their hands on them).

At the back of the Manual, in good country-store manner, was a list of "Materials to Assist You in Your Preparation"—video and audiotapes and publications, available for purchase from M.O.M.—which included a number of government military manuals on subjects such as survival, guerrilla warfare, special forces, unconventional warfare, map reading, booby traps, hand to hand fighting, small arms defense, how to escape from confinement, clothing and equipment, caching, training, and medical care. Highly recommended was the selection, The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, who was quoted:

To win without fighting is best.

John Trochmann grimaced as he continued, explaining to me in the interview, "Then came the problems with infiltrators. By the summer, there were snakes everywhere you turned. We'd come out with this networking program to put people in touch with people. What started the program was a radio show in Detroit, Michigan—the Mark Scott show. He had read part of one of our newsletters on his talk show, and there was such an uproar, with people from Michigan calling Montana for more information, we realized that these people needed a way to get in touch with each other. There were all these people that don't even know the other person exists, so we started a system of putting people in touch with people in Michigan. That was the beginning of our network program. And one of the main people involved in helping us get going on this was a beautiful woman, and I'm not going to give you her name, that still is part of the Detroit Police Department. She's a police officer, and she felt she wanted to find ways to get in touch with people too, and she begged us to get involved in this. She was very concerned about her country.

"When we started putting people together, the provocateurs decided to jump on board. There were many instances of people calling and saying, 'Why are you circulating this person's name and giving our name to him? We know that he has been convicted of a felony and works for a federal agency to keep himself out of the pen.' And we kept getting these reports all over the country as we were networking. These were people who had authorized us to network their name with others; we didn't do any of it without authorization first. But then we began to realize that this is a dangerous program because of all the infiltrators and the inability of our fellow Americans to recognize what could be there. There were a tremendous amount of naive people out there who were too doggone trusting. We, the Trochmanns, had gone through the pits of Hell as it were, and were not very trusting. That's when we came up with the checklist of who to allow into your cell structure system."

    

An insert had been added to the Manual in the summer of 1994, with the heading, "Tips on Networking," with recommendations on how to recognize government infiltrators. It advised that Militia members should "Beware of all strangers," noting that successful resistance groups, historically, had been small groups or cells where members knew and trusted one other from long experience. Someone who said all the right things and supplied money, warned M.O.M., should not be trusted. Nor should someone whose background and interests were different. It advised doing a little investigation of new people, bearing in mind the ruthlessness of tyrants, and that a government that would "mass-murder innocent families" (as at Ruby Ridge and Waco) was "not going to play 'fair.'"

"Be double aware of a stranger who proposes illegal activities," it warned. "You will find him testifying against you in federal court." It advised against handling someone else's weapon, or "you may find your fingerprints showing up at a crime scene." People who received paychecks from the enemy, it warned, could have divided loyalties. And it called for recognizing media tactics and not reacting to buzzwords such as: "religious separatists," "white supremacists," "Nazis," etc.

"We must be committed to spreading the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," it emphasized, to informing the masses and getting them to be sympathetic. "There is an enormous amount of moral high ground which has been abandoned by our foes. Claim it and use it."

At the bottom of the page, it said in tiny italics, "we are everywhere."

Trochmann continued, "We got on talk shows all over the country. We ended up on the Phil Donohue show, I think, in November of 1994. The staff asked me to recommend other people to be on the panel of Militia people, along with myself and my cohort Bob Fletcher, so I did. And when they found out that the one person I had recommended was a black man, they tried to cancel him out—J.J. Johnson. And I said, 'If you cancel him, you'll cancel all of us. That's the way it is.' The reason, we discovered, was that they had members of the ADL [Anti-Defamation League of the B'Nai B'Rith] on that panel also, and they were going to use this stupid racist thing against us, but it wouldn't work very well if J.J. Johnson was sitting there. Now, would it? 

"They tried to get us to sign a contract that would cause us never to do another show until theirs aired, but we said, 'No, this is not going to work this way. We're gonna give you thirty days to either air it or we're gonna go do other shows.' And they said OK and decided not to air it. So we put out bulletins all over the country to call this number to get our show aired. And NBC had to hire extra people to handle the phone lines, and they finally aired the show, incorrectly. I mean, they did a bad job of it. They showed firearms in front of the screen and made bad statements about us, and across the screen during the breaks they showed the Second Amendment minus the words, 'right of the people.' They took that out of the Second Amendment."

Trochmann's eyes never ceased sizing me up as he spoke, like some Scandinavian villager in an Ingmar Bergman film, always on guard before strangers. He clasped his rough, dry hands together on the table with solemnity, holding tight, as he laid out his life story to a stranger. All the time, I could see him questioning in his mind whether to continue.

"Early '95, a couple of things happened. March second, I kissed my wife goodbye at 6 o'clock in the morning and headed east to rally with a number of other people, to visit the Freemen in eastern Montana, in Roundup. My purpose for going there was to get a mission statement from them. Find out first hand what they were all about. They were not yet under siege; this was a year earlier. They were teaching Common Law trusts, about the Federal Reserve, how corrupt it was. We wanted to put out a mission statement about them in our newsletter, based on what they had to say, themselves.

"So I met up with other people on the way to eastern Montana. Roundup was eleven hours away from us, so its not like a hop, skip and a jump. When we got to the Freemen's, I had a severe headache because I had followed a diesel truck all the way there. The next day, we sat down and they were to give me this mission statement, which ended up being a three-foot stack of paper, with a fist on top of it that said, 'If you want to know our mission, read this. This is our mission statement.'

"I said, 'I have 24 hours to get home. I want your mission statement. I'm a slow reader. That's a year's worth of reading there.' They broke their promise to me right off the bat by not having this mission statement ready. Later that day, we found out that some of the people had gotten arrested. Dale Jacoby and Frank Delano were the first two people to be arrested, in the afternoon of March 3. Supposedly, they were trying to file Freemen papers in the courthouse, which the judge had allegedly passed orders against allowing them to do.

"I was in the ranch house several miles out of town. The Freemen didn't move to the Clark ranch, which is way east of there in Jordan, until the fall. So we're headed home, and we went into town to find out what was going on with these guys. We couldn't get the sheriff's department to admit to having seized these people, yet some of our people saw them being arrested. So we had our Militia of Montana office make an official call to them.

"As one of my passengers went in to confront the sheriff's department and see what was going on, and to retrieve his radio, that the sheriff's department had confiscated from the other two people that were arrested, the next thing I know, two deputies came roaring out, headed in my direction. I wondered, 'What in the world is going on?' And I looked behind my shoulder to see who they were after, and by the time I turned around, there was a twelve-gauge shotgun in my face. And the guy had his eyes rolled back like a mad cow. You couldn't even see his pupils, and he was kicking the fender in the door and he blew the window out, and I ended up being arrested. And I thought this mad person was going to kill me on the spot. So I was incarcerated for thirteen days.

"One of the things they charged me with was criminal syndicalism. Its been declared unconstitutional, but its still on the books in Montana. I was looking at 52 years in prison for sitting in my car waiting for my passenger. We got Senator John DeCamp from Nebraska involved as our attorney, and all the charges were eventually dropped without any adjudication. In the case right now, we are bringing suit against them for what they've done to us. Then, in April, a few weeks later, the bombs went off in Oklahoma City, on the 19^th—there's that date again." 

John DeCamp had explained in a second edition of his book, The Franklin Coverup, that the Trochmanns had decided to contact him because they had read his book. In the section on his defense of John Trochmann in early 1995, along with six Freemen, DeCamp described the experience as, "one of the strangest cases in which I had ever been involved." The "Montana Seven," as he called them, he related, were put under bail requirements of hundreds of thousands of dollars, after being "charged with the crime of sedition with mandatory 10- and 20-year prison terms," when "their 'crime' was that they had met with individuals like themselves—not for any actual violation of the law." The arrests, stated DeCamp, had been "unconstitutional," and he had become convinced, irrespective of what he thought of their beliefs, that "these individuals had done nothing wrong, but were classic victims of improper government arrest, harassment, and abuse... under color of law." 

In a written ultimatum to the Montana Attorney General, included in the book, where he requested the dismissal of all the charges and threatened to make it into a "civil rights case," DeCamp had described the arrest and what followed:

A couple of defendants go into the sheriff's office to seek return of the Lopez radio and the others wait in their car properly parked in front of the sheriff's office. None of the Montana Seven defendants does anything improper or illegal. All are polite.

But suddenly, with lightning speed and led by Deputy Jones, the officials assault these individuals. They believe, apparently driven by paranoia, they have a right to capture. Again, led by Deputy Jones, the Montana Seven are trussed up like hogs; handcuffed with their hands behind their backs; forced to lie for six hours in pain on concrete trussed up and handcuffed. They abuse them in a variety of other ways, threaten them with loaded shotguns in their backs and chests, break out car windows, question them in violation of all legal and proper police standards; charge them with felonies of every ilk and description and fabricate allegations to support their charges and their actions. The officials lie to the relatives and friends calling into the sheriff's office and repeatedly deny that the Montana Seven are even in jail or have been arrested.

And these things recited here are the nicest things the local officials do. 

An example of the leaks to the press by the authorities, DeCamp related, was a pending charge of "counterfeiting," which turned out to be based on possession of a $3 bill bought in a novelty store. There was so much media hype, he wrote, with the press repeating the officials' "leaks" in "one sordid wild tale after another," and politicians jumping on the bandwagon, "proclaiming the evils of terrorists and how the state must not be a victim of such terrorists," that "the families and businesses of the Montana Seven are horribly damaged." DeCamp, eventually, was able to get all the charges dismissed. (In a subsequent federal lawsuit against the sheriff's department brought by John Trochmann, the judge ruled that Trochmann's civil rights had not been violated, but nevertheless awarded him his legal expenses plus $200 for damage to his pistol, which a deputy sheriff had confiscated and inscribed with his initials.) 

DeCamp explained that at the same time as the lawsuit, he was dealing assiduously with the offices of the Montana governor and attorney general, and officials in Washington, as well as the national press, "trying to prevent an outbreak of violence spawned by either the militias or by the government." From the time of Trochmann's arrest in early February, DeCamp said, and all through March and early April, the April 19 date was a hot issue among the patriots. He wrote:

[R]umors were flying through the entire Militia and Patriot community on almost an hourly basis, warning of imminent raids by federal officials against militia compounds. Nationwide, militias were circulating reports in all their fax, press and phone networks that these raids were coming, and that militia members had better be prepared.

The militias specified in their written and oral communications, the date April 19, 1995, as the date of the impending onslaught...

Federal officials advised us that no attack was planned, information we relayed to militia leaders... working non stop to defuse the extremely volatile situation... [I]t was inevitable that the Feds showed up on my doorstep right after the Oklahoma bombing.

It seemed that the Militias had had information that "something" was going to happen on the second anniversary of the Waco massacre in 1995. But they had not known what, exactly. What had happened, was the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City.  

John Trochmann continued, "Right as soon as that happened, we contacted John DeCamp to get a court injunction to stop the demolition of the evidence, of what was left of the building. But the harder we pushed, the faster the building came down. And McVeigh's attorney, Stephen Jones, was at the head of the class to bring it down. How would you like to have him for an attorney to defend you? A scary thought, isn't it? He went out to look at the building for half an hour and says, 'Yeah, bring it down. We don't need it as evidence.' What kind of an attorney would do that? Not one that's looking out for the defense of his client, for sure. Apparently, McVeigh had total trust in him." (In fact, Jones, who had no explosives expertise, later said that he did not agree with General Partin's analysis, but gave no explanation.)

"Just after the 'bombs' went off—that's plural—," continued Trochmann, "we ended up with an avalanche of media personnel at our doorstep because the U.S. Attorney in Oklahoma City said there were Militia ties. It was about two days later. At that time, which was a Friday, the media went right off the scale on us, and for the following three weeks we had approximately 360 different media at our doorstep. The population of Noxon, Montana, which is about 300, more than doubled. It was an absolute circus. About 300 of them were U.S. media, and 90% of them had the same questions, in the same order. I could look them in the eye and tell them what their next question would be. It was just ridiculous.

"As a result of how we were treated by much of mainstream media, and their twisted stories that they told of the interviews there, we have since banned the media from our offices. We found six bugs planted in our office. We found merchandise missing, and we just drew the line and said, 'No more. If they want to interview us, it'll have to be off the property.'

"This lasted several weeks, and we contacted John DeCamp—my nephew Randy did—and said, 'You know, it doesn't seem fair, John, that we should bear the brunt of this entire storm, and the Senate trying to pass bills against us,' meaning the Militia, 'that we not have our day before the Senate. Why don't you get us an invitation to sit down in front of Senator Specter's office on the Anti-terrorism bill?' So he acquired an invitation for us to bring the Militia to Washington on May 25th. Late the 24th, we landed in Washington, only to find that the meetings had been canceled. We broke our piggy banks, we took every last dime we could to get the airline tickets to get there. Senator Specter's reason for canceling was because Senator Dole pulled rank on him and said that there'd be no Militia hearings, that they were going to have budget hearings.

"So the 25th, we scheduled a press conference at this hotel we were staying at. Acquaintances within the CIA says, 'You might as well forget about it. You're not going to have anybody from the press show up. They're going to stay and cover the budget.' We said, 'Well you don't mind if we have the press conference, do you?' And they said, 'Well we can't really say anything about it,' and I said, 'That's right, you can't.'

"We held the press conference, and we took all the media off Capitol Hill. The place was absolutely packed, including C-SPAN, CNN, the major networks, etc. And we ran that press conference for one hour. C-SPAN aired it several times. And then, right after that, Time magazine came out with this little article about, the Militia comes to Washington, their meeting is canceled, and they're left here with time on their hands in all these federal buildings. Talk about sick yellow journalism!

"So, we visited with Senator Specter, and we told him, 'If you want us to come back to Washington, D.C., the bill will have to be on you next time. We can't afford it. You broke our bank.' So it was rescheduled for June 15, and they purchased the tickets and sent them."

As I listened to him, I was slowly coming to understand that John Trochmann, in his own way, was a visionary—a dark visionary who painted a stark present and a bleak future. I felt that, somewhere, he inhabited still an ancient northern Scandinavian landscape of trolls and orcs, under the unrelenting glare of the midnight sun, and the multi-color Northern Lights. What I had before me was a character out of Ingmar Bergman's black and white film, The Seventh Seal, about Sweden in the Middle Ages, grappling with the Black Plague, and why God had abandoned them.

I was certain that John had seen the face of his God. And He was a wrathful God.

On June 15, 1995, when the C-SPAN cameras zoomed in on the two panels at the Senate hearings—one, of senators, the other, of Militia leaders—John Trochmann sat there, bristly and straight as a pine tree in the northern snow.