James Rawles - Founders

The Monroe Ranch, Raynesford, Montana

Late March, the Second Year

Joshua Watanabe was well settled in his routine of helping with the cattle at the ranch and patrolling his assigned silos and LCC. One morning in late March, he drove the Unimog through patchy snow to MAF A-01. As was his habit, he stopped 550 yards short, behind an intervening low hill. He parked the Unimog and ambled to the top of the hill, carrying his deer rifle cradled in his arms. Unlike past patrols, he was surprised to see three vans and a pickup in the MAF’s parking lot. He dropped prone and popped open his rifle’s scope covers. Looking through his scope, he could see several men in civilian clothes. They were walking in and out of the building carrying boxes. He watched for several minutes, and jotted what he saw in his notepad. The vehicles had three different colored license plates. He crawled off the top of the hill toward his truck. Once he had gotten below the military crest of the hill, he rose and ran back to the Unimog. Per the security SOP, he first tried the Malmstrom security frequency on his issued handie-talkie. Just as he expected, he heard nothing but static. From this locality, the VHF radio had line-of-sight communications only when a helicopter was airborne. Then he tried the Great Falls repeater at 155 MHz. He got a response from a police and fire dispatcher. Because they lacked communications patching capability, the dispatcher had to take down a message by hand, and relay it to the 341st Security Forces Squadron at Malmstrom. Joshua asked the dispatcher to read back the message to him, which emphasized that he was the “friendly” with the vehicle, 500 meters southeast of the MAF.

As a precaution, Joshua rolled out an optic orange marker panel on top of the Unimog’s radio shelter and pinned it down with a tire iron and a tow chain to ensure that it didn’t blow away.

A few minutes later, Joshua was back on the hilltop, again glassing the MAF. The looting was continuing. With his other radio, Joshua made his first direct contact with a security detachment pilot, reminding him that he was located on the hilltop to the southwest of the MAF, and advising him of the local wind and cloud cover.

Soon, he heard helicopter rotors in the distance. The looters heard this, too, and they ran for their vehicles. Joshua thumbed off the rifle’s safety, and centered his crosshairs on the fogged driver’s side window of a van that was parked perpendicular to him. Trying to control his breathing, he squeezed the trigger. A moment later, as the crosshairs settled back down after recoil, he could see that the window had shattered.

All four vehicles started to roll out of the MAF parking lot. Joshua fired again, not expecting a hit. A UH-1N helicopter came into view to the north, flying low, following the undulations of the terrain—what the pilots call nap-of-the-earth flying.

Joshua was alarmed to see that the vehicles turned left after exiting the MAF gate. They drove south down the road toward him and the Unimog. Although he was twenty yards from his truck parked on the shoulder of the road, he felt very exposed.

He had time to fire only one more hasty shot before he heard on the radio, “We’re coming in hot.”

Joshua snatched his radio and shouted, “Danger close! I’m the guy twenty meters east of the vehicle with the marker panel.”

He heard in response, “Roger that.”

The three vans and the pickup were gathering speed. Joshua was able to line up a shot and squeeze the trigger when the lead van was only seventy yards away. They were approaching him nearly head-on. His shot was lucky, punching through the windshield and hitting the driver in the neck.

The van swerved to the left and then sharply to the right. Only sixty yards after passing the parked Unimog, the van went into the snow-filled barrow pit ditch and began to porpoise. It glanced into a three-strand barbed wire fence, and then rolled, throwing huge clods of earth into the air, tearing out T-posts, and spraying up a rooster tail of snow. The van came to a stop with its wheels tangled in the fence wire, resting on its left side.

The other vehicles continued on, still accelerating. The helicopter’s 7.62mm NATO Minigun began to fire in short bursts when the pickup and the two other vans were 250 yards south of Joshua and when the helicopter was almost directly overhead. The results were horrendous. The cyclic rate of the electric Gatling gun was so high that individual shots could not be heard. It sounded like a deep, throaty animal growl.

Fired brass and links showered down on the road near Joshua like a hailstorm. In just four bursts of about two seconds each, the three vehicles were absolutely shredded. They all coasted to a stop, flopping on punctured tires and spewing smoke and steam from their engine compartments. Surprisingly, none of the three vehicles rolled over or left the roadway. Nor did they catch fire. They simply were riddled with holes and they came to a stop at skewed angles.

As Joshua watched the strafing in fascination and horror, the rear door popped open on the van that he had stopped. A man and a woman spattered with blood crawled out. They were both carrying SKS rifles. Joshua shot them deliberately, once each through the chest, and they fell to the ground. The woman lay still immediately, but the man thrashed violently and screamed as he hemorrhaged. After twenty-five seconds, he lay still.

Joshua’s attention was diverted to the helicopter, which had orbited to the east and slowed to nearly a stationary hover. The door gunner gave each of the three smoking vehicles another two-second burst from the M134 Minigun. Its 4,000-round-per-minute cyclic rate was astonishing.

“Overkill,” Joshua said to himself.

As Joshua watched for any further movement from the closest van, the helicopter orbited slowly. Joshua and the pilot radioed back and forth. The pilot said that “giving it another squirt” would be a waste of ammo, so he held his fire.

They waited twenty-five minutes until the Backup Force arrived. They came in a pair of up-armored M1116 Humvees mounted with .30 caliber M240 machineguns. The vehicles stopped alongside the Unimog. The ground team, armed with M4s, dismounted and in bounds advanced to the overturned van. They approached cautiously, but found only the dead driver inside and the dead man and woman behind it. The team leader shouted, “Three looter KIAs!”

They left one man at the van and one of the gunners in the turret of the forward-most Humvee, while all the others advanced, again in bounding overwatch formation, to the remains of the other three vehicles.

The airman standing next to the van looked toward Joshua and asked, “Are you Watanabe?”

Joshua answered, “That’s right.”

He rose to his feet. His hands were still trembling. He refilled his rifle’s magazine from a box of cartridges in his coat pocket, doing his best to look nonchalant. He closed the rifle’s bolt and thumbed back its safety. He walked toward the airman, carrying the rifle muzzle down.

The airman, whom Joshua had never met, was wearing interceptor body armor (IBA) and Oakley sunglasses. He said, “Looks like they broke into the ‘wrong dang rec room.’”

Joshua chuckled, recognizing the reference to the movie Tremors .

The helicopter departed, leaving the scene strangely quiet. Joshua’s ears were ringing.

For the next two hours, Joshua and the airmen assessed the damage and searched the vehicles. Most of this could best be described as simply gawking. The destroyed vehicles looked like colanders. Two of the looters’ vehicles had Wisconsin plates, one had South Dakota plates, and the other had North Dakota plates. There was little that could be salvaged from the three that had been savaged by the Minigun, but the one that Joshua had stopped yielded five serviceable guns, more than 400 rounds of ammunition (much of it in odd calibers for other guns), and a road map with markings that gave some clues about the looters’ history. Two driver’s licenses indicated that the gang had originated in Madison, Wisconsin. They had apparently spent the last nineteen months hopscotching through Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Montana.