John Fain is another. A soft-spoken and more thoughtful character, he spent two years fighting in the War on Terror, but has none of the bravado of other military extremists. He tells me he joined up “Not to learn combat, but to make myself a better person. I wanted a better work ethic, not just the training to be a soldier. It wasn’t so much for a political thing when I joined the military . . . I’m concerned with the welfare and wellbeing of white Americans,” he continues, “but the main thing with me is not so much how people look, but there’s a particular interest that there is in the media, most of the people are Jewish, they’ll admit it. It’s not good when you have a population of three percent brainwashing the rest of the populace. People should be made free to have information, because the masses are stupid.” His neo-Nazi affiliations did nothing to stop the military trying to reenlist him. Fain claims he has never been a member of the National Alliance, but considers himself a “patriot, which liberals in the military deem as extremist,” and admits that he “support[s] the National Alliance” and “agrees with most of what they say.” Erich Gliebe, the leader of the Alliance, seems surprised when I tell him Fain wasn’t a member. “He isn’t?” he asks. “I’m a separatist,” says Fain. “I’d be willing to state it out in the street. I’ve worked with a black guy who had been member of the Black Panthers; he said, ‘I don’t have problem with white people but I don’t want my daughter bringing home white men.’ I feel the same, we’re both racists. We had an understanding.”
Fain joined the military in 1999 when he was eighteen years old, and since he had no tattoos or criminal convictions, he passed through recruitment easily. “I was kind of at a crossroads in my life, doing a dead end job,” he says, in a familiar story. “I wanted to try to better myself, and I thought about joining the military. I was going to join the Navy but when I was there the army recruiter said, ‘Can I talk to you in a sec?’ ” Within a week Fain had signed up. Between 2003 and 2004 Fain served two tours in Iraq, going all over the country, from Baghdad to Basra. “Most people keep their opinions to themselves,” he says of fellow extremists. “But I’ve met quite a few of them actually. Last year I ran across a lot of people. I was sitting in the barracks in the US,” he says. “There were some guys I overheard on their laptop and they were playing music from Resistance Records [a neo-Nazi music label]. I never noticed people causing a ruckus; the unit I was with was what would be considered good ol’ boys from the country.” Fain is actually relatively pro-Arab, for good racist reasons. “It’s more what’s in someone’s head than color of their skin. Arabs aren’t European, but they are governing themselves. They are not coming over to mingle with us. And they are against Zionist control of governments; they just want to have their own country and own lands.”
When Fain returned from Iraq in 2004 he started to work for Vanguard Books, the literary arm of the National Alliance. It sells US army books: $9.95 will get you a tome on Explosives and Demolitions. And when Fain left the army, this spell working for the National Alliance came back to haunt him. The army refused him security clearance, which is a privilege conferred on soldiers and other civil servants after service that gives them access to classified information of a certain sensitivity. “They had found out information about me,” says Fain. “I had worked for National Vanguard books, and they were like, ‘Who owns it?’ and I said, ‘It’s owned by a corporation.’ So they said, ‘Isn’t it owned by the National Alliance?’ I said, ‘I don’t know,’ ‘Are you member?’ ‘No, I don’t hold membership but I work for them.’ ” The army had procured information on his employment through tax returns, and pursued their investigations of Vanguard Books. Despite this, Fain claims he was asked to reenlist. “I’m not going to do it, I’ve had enough now,” he says. Does he think they relaxed standards? I ask him. “It’s quite possible. I can’t say that it is, I don’t know what the government has issued, but I would say it’s quite possible. Before they could be picky, now that they need to keep troop numbers high they are accepting no high school diploma, which is more detrimental. I’d rather see swastika than an idiot with no tattoos.” Elsewhere the SPLC quotes Fain as saying, “Join only for the training, and to better defend yourself, our people, and our culture. We must have people to open doors from the inside when the time comes.”35
The discharge figures confirm the experiences of Fogarty and Fain. They show that the avenues the army guidelines stipulate for dealing with extremists already serving in the military have been drastically reduced since 1998, and increasingly so since the War on Terror was initially announced. One such avenue is the denial of reenlistment, which fell from a high of 4,000 soldiers rejected in 1994 to a low of 81 in 2006. Another is a soldier receiving misconduct charges resulting in discharge from the army. In the five-year period from 1998 to 2003 the number of discharges for misconduct teetered from a high of 2,560 to a low of 2,307. But by 2006 this number had fallen off to 1,435.36 Again, misconduct is a broad category but the decline shows clearly that standards dropped.
The US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) is set up to investigate criminal behavior by army personnel and their reports have often touched on the problem of extremist soldiers. A number of internal investigations into extremist soldiers I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that CID consistently ignored evidence of violent neo-Nazis and white supremacists. One case at Fort Hood included evidence that a soldier was making internet postings on the white supremacist site Stormfront.org. But the investigator seems to have been unable even to locate the soldier in question. Due to “poor documentation,” he writes, “attempts to locate with minimal information met with negative results . . . I’m not doing my job here,” he notes. “Needs to get fixed.”37 Another investigation into another soldier at Fort Hood is even more distressing. The investigators found that he belonged to the neo-Nazi Hammerskins and was “closely associated with” the Celtic Knights of Austin, Texas, another extremist organization, a situation bad enough to merit a joint investigation by the FBI and CID. The army summary states that there was “probable cause” to believe that the soldier had participated in at least one white extremist meeting and that he had “provided a military technical manual [Improvised Munitions Handbook] to the leader of a white extremist group in order to assist in the planning and execution of future attacks on various targets.” Of four preliminary probes into white supremacists I obtained, CID carried through on only this one. On March 22, 2006, the suspect provided the Improvised Munitions Handbook to the leader of the Celtic Knights, it notes, “to assist in the planning and execution of attacks on five methamphetamine laboratories in the Austin, TX area.” It adds, “these attacks were not carried out and the [Joint Terrorism Taskforce] indicated a larger single attack was planned for the San Antonio, Texas after a considerable amount of media attention was given to illegal immigrants. The attack was not completed due to the inability of the organization to obtain explosives.” The document notes that despite these grave threats the subject was only interviewed once, in 2006, and the investigation was terminated the following year because the action commander or prosecutor indicated intent to do nothing or at least only “action amounting to less than a court proceeding.” The report added, “no further investigative assistance of CID is required.”
Another internal report documented the case of an Army National Guard member who investigators believed was “the leader and recruiter” for the Alaska Front, yet another white supremacist organization. The summary describes the soldier as