Them

by Jon Ronson

  When she said ‘whoa’, she slid her shoulder back as if she was dancing.

  “Do you want to try it out?” she said.

  “OK,” I said.

  Rachel disappeared into the back room and she returned holding two semi-automatic rifles.

  “This is the .45 70,” she said. “And this one is an AR15. Honey…?”

  “Yeah?” called Josh.

  “Will you get the mini .14?”

  “OK,” he yelled.

  Josh appeared holding a silver revolver. They laid the guns out on the kitchen table – a mini cache, almost like a photograph of a police seizure – and loaded them one by one.

  “How did you two meet?” I asked them.

  “High school,” said Rachel.

  “She didn’t like me in high school,” said Josh.

  “What a dork,” said Rachel.

  “Ha,” said Josh.

  “He was a jock,” said Rachel. “Mr ‘I’m A Stud.’” She rolled her eyes. “I was always, ‘OK, whatever…’”

  But now they were engaged to be married.

  “Josh is one of the boys that your mom says not to go around with,” said Rachel.

  ♦

  We put on our coats and our baseball caps and we headed out into the fields behind Rachel’s house. Before we started, Rachel wanted to give me a talk about the basics of sensible shooting, but Josh just shoved a loaded rifle into my hands.

  And then, once Rachel’s four horses had been shooed to a safe distance, and I had propped the gun onto my shoulder: Bam!

  “Look at him!” laughed Josh. “He’s grinning all over his face!” Josh was delighted. “You see that?” he said. “Big smile.”

  This was true.

  Bam! I went. Bam! And then: Bam bam bam bam!

  “Now I understand why you people don’t want to give up your guns!” I yelled.

  “Once you’ve fired your first shot,” said Josh, “there’s no going back.”

  Bam bam! I tried out a fancy manoeuvre. Bam bam!…Bam!

  “Careful, Jon,” said Rachel. “You’re starting to look a little radical!”

  “Ha!” I said.

  “You’ve crossed over now,” said Josh.

  It was Josh’s turn to shoot, so Rachel and I sheltered from the snow in the woodshed.

  “You know,” she said, “I don’t see guns as a big political thing.”

  “Why not?” I asked her.

  “Well,” she replied. “The reason – ”

  Bam! went Josh. Bam bam bam! Bam!

  “The reason – ” said Rachel again.

  Bam! Bam! Josh continued shooting into nothing.

  “Come on,” said Rachel, impatiently. We waited for Josh to stop, which he finally did in order to reload.

  “OK,” said Rachel. “The reason why I don’t see it as a big political thing is because even if I had my rifles it’s not going to do me any good if the government wants to wipe me out. They can just fly over in a helicopter and drop a fire bomb.”

  We both involuntarily looked up to the sky.

  “Trying to go up against the government?” said Rachel. “That’s just…”

  She trailed off. Then she added, wistfully, “Unless the whole country did it.” She laughed. “Now that would be different, I guess.”

  She turned to Josh.

  “Honey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got about five minutes. Then I’ve really got to get into town.”

  “OK,” said Josh.

  We shot some more. Rachel found some tin cans. She said that shooting into nothing was pointless. She shot three times and hit the tin cans twice. Then she looked at her watch.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Honey…?”

  “I’m going to shoot these last five,” said Josh.

  “OK,” sighed Rachel.

  “I’m going to shoot these five,” repeated Josh, thinly.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to,” snapped Josh.

  “Watch the horses, honey,” said Rachel. “They’re – ”

  BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM!

  But Josh had finished it. He finished it in a manner I would have called testy had guns not been involved – but guns were involved so I will call it frenzied – by pumping his pistol senselessly and abruptly into the ground.

  Rachel stared daggers at Josh.

  “Easy as that,” he said, icily.

  “You enjoy just wasting bullets?”

  “Yes,” said Josh.

  We wandered back to the house. Sensible, safety-conscious Rachel led the way, dumb gung-ho me and even dumber gung-ho Josh followed. I had never seen a domestic quarrel punctuated by gunfire before, and it had startled me into an awkward silence. Rachel was silently furious with Josh for behaving like a gun-toting idiot in front of a journalist. Josh was silently seething for his own unfathomable reasons. Nobody said anything.

  ♦

  When Rachel was two years old, in the early 1980s, her parents, Randy and Vicki Weaver, took her from the city to live on top of a mountain in Idaho. Her father, an ex-Green Beret in the US Special Forces, built them a plywood cabin, 25 foot by 32 foot, 4,000 feet up in the Selkirk Mountains, at the top of Farnsworth Road overlooking Ruby Creek, among the bears and the mountain lions.

  There was Rachel, her parents, her nine-year-old sister Sara, their seven-year-old brother Sammy, and some dogs and chickens. Later on Vicki would give birth to baby Elisheba up there.

  If you can’t opt out on top of a mountain in Idaho, her parents figured, you can’t opt out anywhere. If the government won’t leave you alone there, where can you be left alone?

  “They just wanted to get away,” said Rachel, “away from the bad things they show on TV.”

  The children were home schooled. Rachel’s parents believed that the world was being secretly ruled by a clique of primarily Zionist international bankers, global elitists who wanted to establish a genocidal New World Order and implant microchips bearing the mark of Satan into everyone’s forehead. But they had no intention of doing anything about it. The international bankers were a long way off.

  They were pioneers back in 1982. Nowadays many people, including Omar Bakri and his friends, believe that the New World Order, the international bankers, are secretly ruling the world from a room somewhere. But Randy and Vicki were among the first. They hammered a sign outside their cabin that read: ‘STOP THE NEW WORLD ORDER’.

  Some of the things they believed up there might seem crazy, but they were a long way off.

  ♦

  Rachel poured me some more apple juice and gave me some more Certs mints to eat while she told me about her early memories of life in that cabin.

  “There are just so many things that people don’t understand,” she said. “When I was little I would go out and watch a wasp dig a hole in the ground for hours. Then I’d follow him and he’d go and paralyse a worm or a cricket and he’d drag it into his hole and he’d lay an egg and the egg would feed on it and it would hatch and crawl out of the ground. Little things that nobody would ever notice. But I noticed.”

  She passed me some strawberry twisties.

  “The media said we were crazy up there and had landmines everywhere and all we cared about was guns. I do like guns. I still do. I did then. But it’s not weird or crazy.”

  Rachel showed me photographs of her family. Sammy looked about ten, a little skinny blond-haired boy, but he actually was fourteen when the photograph was taken.

  “What are your early memories of Sammy?” I asked her.

  “That would have to be me being called a tag along.” Rachel smiled. “Sara and Sammy were closer in age. They went hiking. They had horses. They’d go and hang out in a tree fort. I was just tripping and falling. So I’d have to pacify myself by playing with lizards and bugs. I remember the day before everything happened, Sammy went down to collect the seeds from his radish plants, and I followed him down to watch him and talk to him, and he was all, ‘Leave
me alone. Quit following me.’ And I went behind this blown over tree and I was sitting there crying and he came over and apologized to me and told me he loved me, and I remember that because he’d never said anything like that to me before.”

  She showed me more photographs. Her father Randy was dressed in a biker jacket, the big sky behind him.

  Her mother Vicki looked like a Bible scholar.

  Rachel and Sara looked like typical American children, pretty, long black hair.

  Elisheba was just a baby.

  Rachel picked up the photograph of her mother.

  “She was dainty,” she said. “Petite, very feminine, never burped in front of anybody. Just wonderful. Dad was always the final yes or no, but Mom was always very persuasive. She was the brains, and she just let him think he was running the show. Dad probably still doesn’t know it.” She laughed. “When you see him you’d better not tell him that I told you that.”

  ♦

  It was Vicki’s idea to move to the cabin. As much as Randy shared his wife’s beliefs about how the separatist Weavers needed to isolate themselves from the tyranny of the impending world government and so on, Randy liked to cut loose once in a while and go drinking in populated areas.

  Unfortunately, one of the populated areas he chose was the nearby Aryan Nations, a militant neo-Nazi community and gathering place for skinheads and racists. They wore their hearts on their sleeves, in the form of swastika armbands.

  Aryan Nations holds a big summer camp every year, and Randy visited four years running, sometimes taking the children along. He says now that he would invariably get into fights with the neo-Nazis about their beliefs. (He says their disagreement centred on who, exactly, constituted the secret clique of global elitists who were implementing a planetary takeover. The neo-Nazis blamed the Jews exclusively, whereas Randy felt that focusing antipathy onto a single race was a mistake. He didn’t consider himself to be a white supremacist. He was a separatist. This may sound pedantic, but it wasn’t pedantic to him. But, still, he liked the neo-Nazis as people, and he thought their countryside and picnic areas were nice.)

  Randy was finally kicked out of the place for smuggling in a six-pack of beer. Aryan Nations is terribly intolerant, about beer drinking too.

  But he did make friends there. One of his friends was Gus Magisano. Gus asked Randy to rob banks with him, and hoard machine guns. Gus told Randy that the New World Order, the secret clique of international bankers, could be overthrown only with ordered violence. Randy told Gus that he wasn’t interested.

  One day Gus asked Randy to sell him two sawn-off shotguns. Randy said OK. He asked Gus where he wanted them sawn. Gus pointed to a spot on the barrel which was a quarter of an inch outside the legal limit. Randy sawed away.

  Gus wasn’t his real name, of course. He was an undercover informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The plan was to entice Randy into sawing off the shotguns below the legal limit, and then offer him a deal. He could either become a government informant and spy on Aryan Nations, or he could go to jail for illegal gun running.

  “I don’t understand it,” said Rachel. “We were just good people who didn’t even have any intention of doing anything wrong. I totally don’t understand why they even came to my dad to ask him to saw off shotguns. It makes no sense to me. It just blows my mind that they’d even care.”

  For the government, though, Randy had the makings of a perfect informant – a slightly crazy person who was friends with far crazier people, a family man with bad finances. How could he turn them down?

  He didn’t just turn them down, he made a great big burlesque show of turning them down.

  “Hey, Vicki!” he yelled. “Come out here. Take a look at these guys! Guess what they just asked me to do! Write down their names.” And so on.

  Six months later, Randy was indicted on the shotgun charge. In a preliminary hearing, the magistrate told Randy that he’d lose the cabin if he lost the case. Randy and Vicki considered themselves to be in a no-win situation. They would lose the cabin if they failed to appear, but they were bound to lose the case so they would lose the cabin even if they did appear. They decided not to show up in court any more. They buried their heads in the sand. A young family friend, Kevin Harris, moved in with them. The family took to carrying guns at all times. They became increasingly convinced that the New World Order was watching them from the bushes.

  They discovered that they were, in fact, being watched from the bushes. They found a surveillance camera and tore it down. Randy let it be known that he would not be taken off the mountain alive, although most of the people who knew him considered these words to be just bravado. Vicki gave birth to Elisheba.

  And then, one day in August, it all began.

  ♦

  “I remember the first part,” said Rachel. “I was out on the back porch with Mom and my little sister Elisheba who was at that time ten months old. Sara came through the house and said the dogs were going crazy, and Kevin and Sammy were going out to see what it was.”

  Sammy grabbed his gun. Rachel grabbed Elisheba and a mini .14. She tagged along as far as the front of the cabin.

  “I had only ever had a glimpse of a mountain lion. I loved mountain lions. The dogs didn’t usually go crazy wild when people came up. So I was hoping I’d see a bear or something. Then I remember hearing gunshots.”

  This was 21 August 1992. What had happened was this: three US marshals had been staking out the cabin for weeks, hoping to arrest Randy for failure to appear on the shotgun charge. That morning they got too close to the cabin door. Striker the Labrador began barking and running after them. Sammy and Kevin followed the dog down the hill. Suddenly, an agent jumped out from the bushes in jungle camouflage and shot Striker in the back.

  Sammy yelled, “You killed my dog you son of a bitch.”

  He fired two random shots, which hit nobody. He was 4 foot 11 inches tall, and his voice hadn’t broken. The US marshals then opened fire, nearly blowing off Sammy’s arm.

  Sammy yelled, “Dad! I’m coming home, Dad!”

  He turned around to run back to his father, but the US marshals shot him dead in the back.

  Kevin Harris opened fire. The marshals shot back and one of them was killed, either by Kevin or by friendly fire, as they call it.

  “We were all standing on that rock that overlooks our driveway,” said Rachel. “Mom and Sara and Dad and I. Kevin came running up the hill and said that Sammy had been shot and he was dead. And it was just…we just let out a cry and broke down. Dad fired Mom’s .223 into the air. Full clip. And Mom asked Kevin if he was sure, and he said, yeah.”

  For Randy and Vicki, the responsibility for Sammy’s death lay not with the US marshals, not with the government, but with the New World Order, the Secret Rulers of the World, the clique of world bankers and globalist CEOs and media moguls who meet in secret rooms to plot the carve-up of the planet.

  Vicki Weaver wrote in her diary that night that Striker and Sammy had been killed while chasing the ‘servants of the New World Order’ down Farnsworth Road.

  The US marshals called for back-up, and an army of four hundred troops was dispatched within the next twenty-four hours to surround the cabin and the nearby roads and the meadow below. There were US marshals and FBI snipers in gas masks and face paint and camouflage, local police, state police, the BATF, the Internal Revenue Service, the US Border Patrol, Highway Patrol from four states, City Police and the Forestry Service. They had tanks and armoured personnel carriers.

  The FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team took control. They sealed off an area of twenty square miles at a cost of a million dollars a day. More federal troops were flown in by helicopter. They built a new road up the mountain for the tanks. Martial law was declared by the state governor, who called the Weaver cabin an ‘extreme emergency and disaster area’.

  Two local journalists reported seeing the FBI load fuel into cylinders and load the cylinders into a helicopter which they flew above
the cabin. Perhaps they intended to firebomb the family to eliminate the witnesses (Randy, Rachel, Sara, Vicki, Kevin and Elisheba). It is a matter of debate. Whatever, the FBI saw that the journalists had witnessed the manoeuvre and the helicopter landed again.

  This military operation was undertaken with such stealth, such silence, that – besides from hearing a few sirens down in the valley – the Weaver family had no idea that they were now surrounded.

  The neighbours came out of their houses and saw the army roll past them up the hill. They scribbled messages onto placards and held them up at the troops. The placards read:

  “Death To The New World Order!”

  “New World Order Burn In Hell!”

  The morning after Sammy’s death, Randy wanted to see his son’s body one last time (they had carried him from the road and wrapped him in blankets and placed him in the tool shed) so he opened the cabin door and looked around the hillside and saw nothing (the snipers being heavily camouflaged).

  He walked the few yards to the shed. As he put his hand on the latch, an FBI sniper called Lon Horiuchi yelled, “Freeze, Weaver!” and then he shot Randy in the arm.

  Rachel saw this as she stood at the cabin door with her mother, Vicki, who held the baby Elisheba in her arms.

  “You bastards!” yelled Vicki.

  Then the sniper shot Vicki through the face.

  The bullet went right through Vicki’s head, taking with it fragments of her skull, which embedded themselves in Kevin’s arm and rib cage and lungs. Vicki dropped dead to the floor at Rachel’s feet, with Elisheba underneath her. Randy ran back to the cabin.

  “Dad picked Elisheba up off from underneath Mom and handed her to me,” said Rachel. “She had blood and stuff all over her head and we were afraid she’d been shot too, but she was OK. It was just Mom’s blood. Dad brought Mom in and put her on the kitchen floor. That’s when we drew the curtains around all the windows and shut the door, obviously, and we didn’t come out after that.

  “I remember feeding Elisheba a whole box of sweets so she wouldn’t cry, poor girl.

  “I remember having to crawl through Mom’s blood every time I needed to go into the kitchen to get food.