TERROR IN OKLAHOMA CITY : Tale of Junction City’s Two Cultures : Bombing: Military and rural lifestyles meet in this Kansas Army town, where anti-government groups may be found spreading their gospel.

This dreary Army town is aptly named, the meeting point where two rivers, the Republican and the Smoky Hill, converge into the Kansas River.

But it is also the confluence of two cultures, military and rural, that come together in a way that may have provided both the logistics and the ideological nutrients for the perpetrators of the bombing in Oklahoma City.

Junction City, population 26,000, is the place where the truck that became the bomb in Oklahoma City was rented. It sits snug like a fattened leech up against Ft. Riley, where bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh was once stationed, drawing economic lifeblood from the sprawling military compound that is home to 14,000 active-duty soldiers.

It is also a place where church socials and American Legion parades are complementary rites, where the Just For You bridal boutique offers frilly gowns to farm brides while a few doors down, the Club Malibu features topless shake dancers for GIs out for a good time.

The embittered fusion of those two cultures is not easily found. But seeded among the young soldiers and older veterans who window-gaze at gun shops are outcasts who dress their children in battle fatigues and spread their views through one-on-one encounters and apocalyptic videos. They are few in number but they are here, self-proclaimed “militiamen” who spread the same fevered gospel that is now suspected to be a common denominator among the men sought in connection with the tragedy in Oklahoma City.

“They talk and talk until you want to join them,” said David Batsell, the owner of a discount military surplus store a block from the police station. “They talk about how the government is going to take your guns and money away.”

His business is one among 7,500 civilian jobs that depend on the military base for sustenance. There has been talk in recent years that the base might be vulnerable to budget cuts, a move that local leaders say would prove a disaster to the town’s frail economy.

“There’s been a great deal of concern whether we’d be on the base closing list,” said Gaylynn S. Childs, president of the Geary County Historical Society. “To put it bluntly, we’re afraid that if the base closes, the town will die.”

All along Washington Street, the town’s main drag, and winding along Grant Street near the base, strip joints, pawnshops and squat taverns depend on a steady stream of soldier customers. But just as the prostitutes and drug dealers who loiter there at night thrive on servicemen’s loneliness and boredom, so do fringe group recruiters, who prey on their patriotism and frustration with despised government policies such as gun control and affirmative action.

“There’s no organizing you can see,” said one private who thumbed through camouflage hats at Fatigues and Things, a used military goods store near the base. “You hear it in political discussions, you know, people of like minds talking together.”

Some of the recruiters are reportedly members of the Kansas Militia, a statewide group of anti-government gun owners whose numbers are strongest in the countryside around Topeka and in northwest Kansas, according to Laird Wilcox, founder of the Wilcox Collection on Contemporary Politics Movements at the University of Kansas Library, one of the nation’s largest collections of American extremist literature.

Batsell and others familiar with the movement say there are at least five rural residents in the Junction City area who swear allegiance to the Kansas Militia. Holed up in the countryside, they are a secretive group, suspicious of outsiders and careful of who they approach, though one of them, Batsell said, has tried “to recruit me 200 times.”

These farmers form the core of a larger subculture of men and women who may not be militiamen, but who are sympathetic to their extreme beliefs and share their fascination for military trappings. As they move through Junction City and, when they can, into Ft. Riley’s more-constricted base life, they occasionally find eager listeners among the soldiers stationed there.

“I’ve seen different types of propaganda floating around,” said Staff Sgt. Glen Popejoy, 32, a muscular Ft. Riley veteran who is transferring to a base in Germany.

Pro-gun bumper stickers and survivalist magazines are not unusual in the bunks, he said.

Connections are made at gun shows, where soldiers seeking private side arms make transactions with collectors who provide everything from vintage World War I side arms to blasting caps.

They meet in the littered aisles of military surplus stores. And they stoop side by side as they check out old uniforms, blackened stoves and broken typewriters at public auctions of used military equipment held each month inside Ft. Riley.

Among them was Terry Lynn Nichols, held as a material witness in the Oklahoma City bombing. He frequented Ft. Riley auctions, according to military surplus dealers, and also showed up at gun shows nearby.

“He was set up (at booths) with other dealers,” selling wet weather gear, fatigues and a few guns, Batsell said.