Spotlight Casts Sobering Glare on U.S. Militias : OKLAHOMA CITY: AFTER THE BOMB : Shaken but Steadfast

There is something touching in fledgling militiaman John Walters’ unshakable faith in the cause, in the way his hope triumphs over experience.

Ken Lippert, undersheriff of Osage County, coughs out a smoky laugh as he tells the story of the night two weeks ago when he encountered Walters and a tiny band from the Kansas Citizens Militia on a country road outside of town.

Walters, a 34-year-old Topeka auto mechanic and a recent convert, had donned his camouflage uniform, daubed paint on his face and gathered up his weapons without hesitation when the call came from Topeka militia leader Morris Wilson late on the night of April 17. Wilson had received a frantic plea for help from fellow militiaman Roger Thornbrough.

“They are coming after me. They are in the trees. They are stealing my pigs. They are shooting,” Thornbrough screamed. “The sheriff won’t help me.”

Wilson mobilized his troops--which consisted of Walters and two other men--and headed for Thornbrough’s isolated farmhouse 30 miles outside of Topeka. But when they arrived, they found Thornbrough shooting wildly into the empty bushes and trees around his house.

“See them? There they are, up in the trees!” Thornbrough would say, popping off a few more rounds.

Chagrined, Walters, Wilson and their comrades beat a hasty retreat. When the sheriff and his deputies stopped them a quarter mile from Thornbrough’s house and arrested Walters, Morris and a third man on concealed weapons charges and related gun violations, it marked the first time that the state’s brand-new militia had suffered a defeat in the field.

Walters joined the Topeka unit of the Kansas militia just as it was being formed in January at a time when the militia’s political theories struck a resonant chord with his eroding financial condition and his sense that the life he thought he could live was slipping away.

But what followed high school was only a life of grinding work. And once he married a woman with two children of her own--they now have a third together--the bills mounted and the paychecks were stretched thin. Fed up with public schools, his wife now teaches their older children at home. Walters’ job as a mechanic for a local tire retailer is their only income--and just barely enough.

“We’re not really middle class, we’re probably lower middle class. But I want something better for my kids. But I’m afraid of what’s happening in this country. There aren’t any jobs. They’re taking them all away. And when you don’t have jobs for people in the middle class, there won’t be anybody wanting to come to me to have their cars fixed.”

Through his church--Walters is treasurer of the Emmanuel Baptist Church in Topeka--he became an avid follower of self-styled biblical prophet Gordon Kah and his Prophecy Club Newsletter and radio talk show. Through Kah, Walters began to hear about the militia movement, with its vision of a secretive international financial elite bent on the economic destruction of the United States.

He decided to help start a local unit last October, after he attended a Topeka speech by Mark Koernke, the Michigan radio talk show host and mentor to radical militia members.

At home, Walters is a quiet, humble man, who loves nothing better than to spend his days with his children.

A New Recruit

Like John Walters, Larry Fischer got involved with the Kansas militia only recently. The Oklahoma City bombing is not the only thing about the militia that has given him--like Walters--pause. And like Walters, he too is sticking with the movement--even though his life seems worlds away from Walters’ exhausting struggle to make ends meet.

At 48, Fischer is a graduate of Kansas State University, a former Air Force officer and a respected veterinarian in Topeka with three children. He has so much at stake in the community that he has not told his clients about his militia membership. And he worries about their reaction. The Topeka police even contract with him to care for their dogs.

What’s more, he privately disdains the rural high school dropouts who fill the ranks of the Kansas militia. Although he owns three rifles, four shotguns and four handguns, he refuses to wear a militia uniform and he does not care much for target shooting. He fears that some members may be unstable, noting that last fall, while the militia was being set up in Topeka, one of the organizers was arrested and hospitalized for observation after making threatening statements about First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in a Topeka gun shop.

“I really don’t have much in common with a lot of them,” Fischer said.

Except in his beliefs.

Fischer’s journey toward the militia began in 1989, when the state of Kansas decided to reclassify commercial and business property for tax purposes, sending the taxes on his veterinary clinic soaring from $2,700 to $16,400 annually. Fischer got so mad that he launched an anti-tax political organization that made him a recognized figure in local conservative circles.

Gradually, Fischer grew cynical about working within the system. Today, he is a man filled with angry visions of a world that is closing in around him.

“I think the U.N. is a force to be dealt with,” he said. “But it will come gradually, it’s not going to be a military attack. They are already trying to erode us gradually, with the international convention on the child, and on this new biosphere treaty. I see the whole process of gradualism over time, that all power tends to go central.

“No government lasts forever and, when a government fails, it fails for a lack of morality,” said Fischer. “But I think when the time comes the Second Amendment and a well-regulated militia will bring us back to the Constitution.”

“We need the militia. As a backup. For when things get bad.”