George Saunders - The Braindead Megaphone

In time, as in a beautiful dream, we arrive back at the cars. Is our leadership crushed, humiliated, bitterly angry, ordering us not to tell anyone? On the contrary. Our leaders are cheerful, triumphant, hyped with victory, as if this Getting Lost never happened, or maybe as if, having been closely involved with embarrassing debacles all their lives, they have learned an excellent coping strategy: deny, smile, move on.

Through my mind runs the phrase: Shows Good Spirit.

WITH GUNS IT IS NOT SO FUNNY

At dusk, the same Good-Spirited crew that nearly met its doom in the Land of Infinite Fences arrives back at the ranch, heavily armed. We Media are kind of shocked into silence at the extent of the armament. Every Minuteman’s got at least a shotgun, a rifle, or a machine-gun-looking semiautomatic weapon. My Team Leader, Art (a fearsome biker-looking dude, six-one, 250, shaved-headed, bearded, tattooed, who is, in fact, a biker but is also a troubleshooter for a fiber-optic network and a member of Mensa), has, in addition to his semiautomatic: a.45 down each pants leg, a long, jagged knife he calls his “Arkansas toothpick,” and a two-shot Derringer designed to fire shotgun shells.

I tell him that because I’m a Liberal and he’s so large, I expect that, if there’s trouble, he will carry me to safety.

He gives me a look I would describe as: the ornery-eye-twinkle-of-possible-friendship , reminding me of my childhood friend K., who was equally happy explicating The Art of War or driving his head through a wall.

Darkness falls; the moon comes up. Our Team advances into the brush. Through a kind of willful mass hypnosis, aided by all this wishful costuming, things suddenly go very Vietnam, and a tense, watchful quiet falls over the group.

It’s scary — partly because we’re making it scary and partly because (1) real illegals really do cross here, led by real members of the real smuggling cartels, and (2) these are real guns.

Suddenly, weirdly, I find my eyes tearing up: How many times, through the long centuries of life on earth, has one group of men sneaked armed into the woods, hoping to surprise a second group not expecting them? And where has this gotten us? I feel sad for whomever we might catch (some little family even now timidly approaching in the dark?) and sad for the Minutemen, plodding forward like ghosts doomed to hunt That Which Causes Them Anxiety through all eternity.

We spread out in the dark, three teams of three Minutepeople each, about a hundred yards between each group.

This is the total extent of Operation Sovereignty: nine guys, four Media, along a few hundred yards of border, on one small ranch, in the huge state of Texas.

A tiny patch of Catcher in a thousand miles of Rye.

OUR TEAM MAY SURPRISE YOU

Our Team takes up its position: in some long grass, besieged by bugs. I wish we could sit over there, on that less buggish dirt road, but Art has positioned us here, and something in me is cheerfully rising to the faux-military discipline.

Soon the sky is crossed with parallel rivers of low milky stars.

Scott’s from Houston, the founder of the Texas Militia. He’s just out here getting some experience points, he says. This is his first Op, he can only stay a week; what with work (graphic design) and his Militia stuff (four membership applications at home waiting to be processed), he’s superbusy. Plus, of course, he’s got RenFaire coming up—

“RenFaire?” I say.

“Renaissance Faire,” he says.

“Do you…You do that?” I say.

He does. He does the whole deal. He’s got a twelve-hundred-dollar suit of leather armor, does an English accent but, no, has not developed a role-play, seeing as how he is merely a Playtron, and Playtrons are not paid to interact with patrons, i.e., Mundanes.

Our third Team Member, Lance, so far known to me only as an angry, frustrated voice piping up now and then to express a sense that everything is all fucked up and being orchestrated by sinister forces from far away, is sitting under a tree. I join him there, out of the moonlight, in what, in daytime, would be shade.

He recently married a Russian woman he met online, he says. For many years, he says, he was a—

The next bit is unintelligible. Or impossible. I ask him to repeat.

No, I’ve heard right: For many years he was a dancer with the Houston Ballet.

“Of course, you wouldn’t know it to look at me now,” he says.

He and his wife appeared on a Ricki Lake segment on Russian mail-order brides. He didn’t do what so many guys seeking Russian brides do, he says, i.e., go to a mass meet-and-greet in some St. Petersburg hotel; his wife is from a small town, and he went there to meet her, and they really connected, from the heart. She’s a great lady, and they’re so happy together, she’s just — he shakes his head, not quite believing his good fortune.

When he talks about his wife, the paranoiac quality of his political discourse drops away, and he becomes relaxed and confident. He owns a construction company but is thinking of doing something different with his life, making some investments. He’s thinking, in fact, of buying the RenFaire in Houston.

I’m a little confused. Does he know…Does he know that Scott also is involved with RenFaire?

“Sure, that’s how we met,” he says. “Scott’s in the Torturers’ Guild.”

We wait and wait for some Mexicans to blunder over the border and plop into the irrigation ditch.

But nobody comes.

NEARLY THE DEATH OF SOME GUY NAMED CARL

Waiting implies an eventual end to waiting, which produces dramatic structure.

Somebody radios: Team Two, a car is approaching your position.

A car is indeed approaching. Art’s whispering on the radio: Is it one of ours? Is it? Anybody read me?

No answer.

“You Media, take cover around the corner,” he says. The corner is, like, behind those trees, ten feet away.

I take cover by walking over, standing there, feeling a little stupid.

Scott drops to one knee, raises his shotgun. Lance goes down on his belly, sights down the barrel of his semiautomatic. Our Team suddenly looks like a Baghdad checkpoint.

I’m thinking: Hold on now, isn’t this probably a rancher, a lost rancher, a lost tipsy guest of a rancher?

The car — a white Oldsmobile — appears, slowly, slowly, just the way a drug smuggler or cartel pickup car would.

It seems to pause as it passes.

Somebody hisses: He just — Did he just drop something? Lance and Scott rush forward to have a look at the dropped thing. What is it? Drugs? A bag of, uh, narcotics?

Negative, it’s just a plastic bag they hadn’t noticed before.

A call comes from Team One, down the line: The vehicle was Carl. This makes us, Team Two, very angry. That stupid Carl! Why the hell didn’t Carl radio? Who is Carl, anyway? How many Ops has he done? Scott barks: “Carl better pull head out of rear, or next time he’s going to get his car filled with lead!”

“No, no,” Art says. “No free fire permitted, don’t get all—”

The Minutemen cannot detain an illegal. They cannot harass. All they can do is call the Border Patrol. So why the guns? They don’t, they say, want to be overrun by the cartel. Has a Minuteman ever been shot, or shot at, by the cartel? No. But conceptualizing the cartel dudes as Scarfacian monsters, the Minutemen come out armed to meet them in the night and thereby rev themselves up, and yet there’s no training — Art is the most experienced Minuteman on our Team (Lance and Scott are both first-timers).

So, a prediction: Eventually, somebody’s going to get shot. It may be a Minuteman, it may be a cartel dude, it may be some little kid standing scared at the back of a group of migrants — but eventually, I tell Art, all this tension and drama is going to lead to something tragic.