I suppose before I go any further I need to talk about what happened to our little Lewis County expeditionary force. They made it through to Coeur d’Alene okay, right up to the last twenty miles or so, when they had to shoot their way through an Idaho state police roadblock, but no one was hurt, at least not then. The story of the first Republic and the Sixteen Days has been told countless times before, and I won’t re-tell it here, except that I always thought its greatest significance was that it showed us white boys still had the blood of heroes in our veins. Like the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland, the Sixteen Days in Coeur d’Alene were a glorious failure that inspired us to fight on to eventual victory so as to be worthy of our brothers and sisters who died amid the fallen leaves of orange and gold. Our guys from Dundee were in the thick of it. Willis was killed in the final assault on the central post office by his former comrades of the U.S. Marines. Sam Maxwell was wounded and captured and spent some time in a Federal detention camp, but he escaped and made it back to Lewis County, and got hooked up with Echo Company again. The other four broke out with Winston Wayne in the fighting retreat and ended up serving with him as part of the Sawtooth Flying Column. Two years later, Leah Wingfield was arrested doing a supply run into Boise. She was sent to Seattle and handed over to the FBI’s Special Counter-Terrorism Task Force, i. e. my old buddy Bruce Goldberg. For the sake of political correctness Goldberg used some nigger bull dyke as his puncher for female prisoners, who didn’t have Leon Sorels’ deft touch. Leah was beaten to death in her cell about a week after her arrest, but Adam never found out until after the Longview treaty. He and the other two spent the rest of the War of Independence with Wayne in Idaho, and he stayed there and got married again. He passed on a few years ago, but I still get Christmas cards every year from his children, and I send birthday gifts to his grandchildren.
After our six disappeared into the night headed for Idaho, the next job was to get us all armed and dispersed out of that shoe store. I ended up on a team with the Wingfields, surprise surprise, and about midnight we moved to a mobile home in the woods outside Winlock which remained our base of operation for the next couple of weeks while things went down. It had a satellite TV which we kept on the news channels all the time as we watched the Sixteen Days unfold. We might have been emotionally devastated through the defeat of the first Republic and the eventual capture of the Old Man, but by then we were too busy fighting ZOG to be depressed. Even if it was only as a support unit.
In the long run the Party and the NVA rejected the original idea of a centralized structure led by one General Officer Commanding—all other problems aside, if such an officer were to be killed or captured, the psychological damage to the cause of Northwest independence would have been unacceptable. The NVA adopted a very loose and informal and highly flexible structure that was a kind of combination of the Provisional I.R.A. and Cosa Nostra, the two most applicable models from the previous century. We were never a mass movement like Adolf Hitler had been able to build in Weimar Germany, because the conditions were completely different, although you’d be amazed how long it took some of us to understand that, including the Old Man himself.
Very loosely described, the Volunteer forces during the War of Independence consisted of three kinds of fighters. There were the active service units, the gunmen and guerrillas who actually engaged the Federal forces in combat. Of these the largest and most flamboyant were the Flying Columns of song and story, although they didn’t really get going well until the next summer after 10/22. There were the support personnel of every kind that kept the active service units functioning and fighting by keeping them supplied with food, ammunition, medical supplies, money, accommodation, vehicles, intelligence on enemy movements, propaganda backup, clothing and equipment. Support people also continued on with a lot of the very same low-level propaganda activities that we had done before 10/22; I think I went on as many spray-paint and nocturnal leaflet distribution runs in the year after the Coeur d’Alene uprising as I did in the year before. Only this time tossing leaflets on lawns carried the death penalty and we were carrying guns. The kind of leaflets we were distributing were also of more importance, since most of them were notices from the NVA advising the population of various things the Party and the Army wanted them to know. Historically, there is no question that the majority of people who ended up wearing the Northwest independence medal served in a support capacity as opposed to an active service unit, and quite a few of them never fired a weapon at a cholo or a Feeb during the entire five years, which is no shame at all. We couldn’t have won without them. Support cadres took the same chances as the gunmen, sometimes a lot more since they had to live and work within the belly of the beast, and when captured they ended up with the same electrodes wired to their balls and the same cyanide needle stuck in their arm as active service unit shooters with twenty ZOG notches on their guns.
Finally, there was a third kind of NVA activity, mostly run by the appropriately named Third Section set up by Matt and Heather Redmond, that old married couple from North Carolina who had interviewed me in Dundee the night Leon Sorels beat the crap out of me in school. Threesec did things that were coordinated on a national level by General Headquarters such as intelligence and counterintelligence, propaganda, computerized warfare, and the political and diplomatic echelons that directed the whole course of the war. A whole James Bond world of shadow warfare conducted all across North America and the world, and those Third Section guys sure as hell did get up to some heavy and romantic activity. Some of these definitely tended towards the spectacular and legendary, like the wide-ranging active service units in New York City and Washington D.C. who damned near shut both cities down and inflicted billions of dollars of economic damage on ZOG. The Threesec computer boys and girls pulled off all kinds of coups from periodically spamming every single e-mail address in the country with NVA propaganda, to computer viruses that destroyed whole government and corporate networks, to running phony government websites, to hack jobs into the most closely guarded Federal databases that gave us vital intelligence such as lists of FBI and FATPO informers among our ranks.
General Headquarters itself was thankful for the excellent practice in nomadic life they’d gotten in the year before the CDA rebellion, trundling around the Homeland with the Old Man stashed in that eighteen-wheeler, because GHQ had to move almost every week. General Headquarters was even located in Lewis County on two occasions, or at least sections of it were. Once the Army Council met for several days in the gingerbread and flower-garden Victorian home of a little old lady in Dundee who sat on her porch doing needlework and babbling like a senile dingbat, while she kept an Uzi on the chair beside her covered with a hand-knitted shawl, which I happen to know she was entirely capable of using to deadly effect. The second time was during the last months of the war when the Political Bureau took over the upstairs floor of the public library in Centralia; today there is a little memorial plaque on the outside of the library and the stairway has the original “closed for remodeling” sign that was stretched across it when the last negotiations leading to the Longview conference were being completed on the floor above.
An actual organizational table of the NVA would be almost impossible to assemble with any degree of accuracy, because it changed form and components almost like a lava lamp, through death and arrest and the constant need to make a fast break out of an existing structure and into a new one, one step ahead of ZOG. Very roughly, it went like this: General Headquarters consisted of whatever staff officers and members of the Army Council weren’t in jail or out on operations at the time. The Old Man was in prison, but even from his cell he was able to get occasional authenticated messages to the troops in the field, like the directive to strike at the enemy’s financial base by halting tax collection and dismantling the Internal Revenue Service. GHQ set overall strategy and policy with a view towards winning the independence of a sovereign Aryan Republic in the Northwest. GHQ then told the active service units what that strategy
and policy was through the Political Officers assigned to each unit, who then liaised with the unit commanders in the field to implement it. That’s the way it worked in theory.
In practice, it was an unholy mess. In a general way, we had our mission. Get rid of ZOG and anyone who supports ZOG, and that’s what we did. We assumed that in the absence of ZOG our political and military strategy would work itself out and the whole of society wouldn’t just collapse into chaos, and it turned out we were right. Any kind of hands-on micromanagement from GHQ was simply out of the question: we were the ones sitting in the bushes at night with the guns in our hand waiting for somebody to walk by who needed shooting, and we pretty much made the tactical decisions. There were occasional exceptions, of course, like the Samuel Rothstein hit that came down directly on orders from the Army Council with Pat Brennan sent to take charge, but generally speaking the ASUs were told what the political leadership wanted accomplished, and they accomplished it however they could on the local level. We thought nationally and acted locally. It was kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. GHQ showed us the cover of the box so we knew what the whole picture was supposed to look like, and then we tacked and pounded it together with whatever pieces we could find. If the pieces didn’t fit, then we did some trimming.
Communication was very compartmentalized, because it was a weak link, a thread that the Feds could pull on and start things unraveling. I’ve already mentioned that you rarely knew a fellow Volunteer’s real name or where they laid their heads at night. The only reason I myself knew the names of as many as I’ve mentioned so far is that I was in the Party and I met them before 10/22. This way, most of us who were arrested by the Feds had very little to tell, which was a vitally important tactical asset for us. The only vertical contact that the combat squads had with GHQ was through the Political Officers, and so a PO was always considered a prize catch by the Feds, with the biggest prices on their heads. At one stage they were offering $250,000 for Red Morehouse. Carter had $100,000 on his head. Me and Rooney and China and the boys never rated anything more than the standard $50,000 DT or domestic terrorist bounty. The Feds dreamed for five long years of that one big raid that would wipe out GHQ and cripple the NVA, which wouldn’t have happened because GHQ itself was split up into geographically separate teams, but never mind. The only contact most active service units had with other crews besides their own support people was through the company’s executive officer. In theory, anyway. I know Tank Thompson had his ways of getting hold of Terry Jackson in Longview and Mike Koltsov in Tacoma directly, and others if he had to. Of course he was also married to E Company’s executive officer. There were in fact cases where ZOG managed to pull on the one thread like Goldberg had described to me and roll up an entire company, but that didn’t happen often. Usually by the time they worked their way outward from one Volunteer who broke under torture or was bribed, the company had upped stakes, broken up, changed locations and safe houses, etc.
Within the company, NVA Volunteers were broken down into teams of between three to six people, enough to fit into one vehicle if necessary, although as I have mentioned before, we usually took two cars wherever we went. A team would get an order from the CO or XO to be at a certain place at a certain time and do a specific job, and it was up to the team leader to work out the details. For the first nine months or so, Lewis County didn’t even have an active service unit as such until Tank Thompson came up from northern California and was given command of Company E, South Sound Brigade. Adam Wingfield would have made a good CO, but he was in Idaho. We thought that Carter Wingfield should have gotten the CO slot, but he turned it down on the grounds that he had no actual military experience and he was better at support stuff anyway, gun-running and car stealing and things like that, so he ended up as quartermaster until he moved up and became quartermaster for the whole South Sound Brigade and his slot in E Company was taken by Smackwater Jack.
Now, about all those swashbuckling adventures we supposedly occupied our time with in the Northwest Volunteer Army. Bull...sheeeeeeet!
There has been an incredible amount of nonsense written and broadcast about the so-called romance of life on the bounce with the NVA, staying one step ahead of ZOG all the time, shooting it out in choreographed ballets of flaming gun muzzles and flying cartridge cases, with little mandolins and perhaps a cape, as I remember from somewhere. If you believe some of these movies and lurid books that have been put out since the war, it was all one long joyride of daring commando raids on ZOG, car chases, cloak and dagger skulduggery in smoky dens of iniquity, one-on-one duels with villainous FBI agents in deserted warehouses (with something throwing out steam, of course) and general swashbuckling, with frequent interludes of getting it on in picturesque hideaways with beautiful guerrilla girls wearing bandoliers of bullets, berets, and nothing else. Yeah, well, I had my own guerrilla girl and she’d sure enough made me an offer that once, but we also had one or both of her parents within sight at all times, and if not them her little sister, which combined with the fact that people were hunting us and trying to kill us kind of put a damper on the whoopie. Oh, I suppose it does look romantic and exciting for somebody looking in from the outside who’s never had to do it in real life. A lot of history does. I always thought I would have liked to sail with Columbus, but I imagine the smell of those wooden ships alone would have put me off, never mind the food and the sanitation. I can tell you that living history is a different story altogether, a large part of the problem being that you don’t know how it’s going to end. The people who admire you and who are so fascinated by it all seventy years later know how it all ended, but back then you don’t, and you never know when you wake up if you’ll ever sleep again or you’ll be dead in a day or an hour or a minute. The Chinese used to have a curse against their enemies: “May you live in interesting times.” Well, we lived in an interesting time, and the novelty of it wore off fast, believe me.
It was rough even after we had worked out a more or less live and let live arrangement with the local cops, and all we had to worry about was Feds. Life on the run from the law is always a very high-stress existence even for those of us who got an adrenalin rush out of the whole thing. You live on black coffee and whatever crap food you can get hold of out of fast food restaurants and cans. Somebody always has to be on guard duty and you never really sleep, you’re so on edge wondering if the door is going to come crashing in and you’re going to die in the next few minutes. Every time you step outside your safe house you’re inviting a catastrophe, and if you stay holed up you know they’ll find you, and they’ll shell you with artillery to dig you out if they have to. Even something simple like doing laundry or grocery shopping becomes a major military maneuver, complete with posted sentries, planned escape routes, code names, false ID and pistols stashed in the dirty socks. We moved around a lot, at night whenever possible, and we seldom stayed in one place for more than a couple of days. We hid and plotted by day and we struck by night, and then we bolted for a new hideout, sometimes leaving the old one booby-trapped for any inquisitive Feebs if we thought they’d tumbled to it.
Fortunately for us, western Washington is a large place and there were huge expanses of territory, especially in the eastern parts of Lewis County, where the population was very sparse and which were ideal for lying doggo. If Sasquatch could hide for generations in those forests then so could we, in any isolated trailer or cabin or house or barn we could find. A lot has been made of the Flying Columns allegedly camping out under the stars, and sometimes they did, but even the Flying Columns were very seldom all out on active service at once. Roughing it is never fun when you have to do it. Our comrades from the Columns liked to sleep in a bed with a roof to keep off the rain as much as the rest of us, and they usually found one. From the very beginning ZOG never had much real control of the Northwest outside the cities and the towns, and towards the end not even there. They simply didn’t have enough loyal cops and soldiers to make their presence felt in the huge rural
areas of the Northwest, and so we pretty much always had a warm dry roof over our head and some place we could run to. That’s one reason that the Northwest had been selected for the Homeland back in the 1970s. There is no way in hell we could have succeeded in establishing our own country for white people if we’d tried it in some little landlocked enclave or in a small area like New England, where ZOG could have concentrated their forces in large numbers.
Mobility, mobility, mobility and hit! hit! hit! Our primary tactic was to keep on the move and keep kicking ZOG in the teeth. “This is more a battle of mind and will than it is of weapons and equipment and people,” Red told us. “Think in terms of attack, people, never defense or concealment except insofar as these things are necessary so we can attack again! Burn this into your mind: we are the hunters, not the hunted. We are not running from ZOG. ZOG is running from us!” We were never idle, always planning the next attack or planning to meet the enemy’s counter-sweeps. We never really had time to sit and think about our situation. If we had, common sense would have dictated that we run like hell and never come back, but we never did.
Our main concern was that we never allow ourselves to be pinned down, in a house or a compound, because once we were trapped without any escape route, ZOG could bring its crushing, overwhelming force to bear. We had learned the lessons taught to us at Waco and Ruby Ridge in the 1990s. We learned early on never to give the bastards time to track us and a stationary target so they can break out the tanks and the napalm. The first rule of the NVA was to stay light. Live light. Stay mobile. Be ready to re-locate on three minutes notice. We knew we were headed for the fires of Waco or burial alive in the GULAG if we let ourselves be trapped. Move fast, hit hard, and then move faster. Avoid any routine or discernible pattern in our travels which might be deduced by a sharp detective or extrapolated by a computer.
A DISTANT THUNDER Page 27
