As we finish up our drinks at the Winghouse, I ask if I can meet Forrest again while I’m in the city, which is for just another three days. “I’m working tomorrow, and with the kids on Saturday,” he says. Thinking quickly, I suggest taking them all to the local zoo, the first attraction I can remember from my hotel tourist pack. “Yeah, why not,” he says, and we set a date for Saturday afternoon.
A Narrative of Mistakes
Driving out from downtown Tampa, it takes twenty minutes to arrive at the fifty-six-acre Lowry Park Zoo, tucked away behind the tree-lined highway. The place is overrun with kids and their parents even as the inclement weather beats down rain and hail. Forrest turns up a bit late with his two kids and we set off around the enclosures. Before the rain gets too much we take in the seals, the tigers, and the camels. “Goddamn camels,” says Forrest, looking peaked, “I hate them things.” We talk candidly about his racism and violence in front of his kids, who are a smart pair, not yet set on the same political trajectory as their dad. “There’s nothing they don’t know. I just tell them it’s OK to be white,” says Forrest. “In school they teach about slavery and the Holocaust, they teach them about indiscriminately murdering Jews. I say there’s two sides to every story, you’re hearing from the people who won the war. I don’t care if they have non-white friends, but they will become gang-bangers and not like you when they are older.” The younger kid is “hardcore” according to Forrest, but his ex-wife doesn’t want him joining the military. The older one is obviously very intelligent, outlining the evolutionary reasons for various animal quirks to me effortlessly.
After a good period, the rain sends us all to seek refuge under an umbrella-covered table by a restaurant. While Forrest’s sons play by themselves, he delves deeper into how he joined the military in the first place, with his five-star neo-Nazi credentials. He knew back then that the tattoo he had riding up his forearm could be a problem when it came to enlistment. In a neo-Nazi underworld obsessed with secrecy, racist tattoos remain one of the biggest indicators of extremism for a recruiter, and in an effort to police the matter the US military requires recruits to explain any tattoos. An army manual published in 2000 notes, that “Extremist groups frequently use tattoos to show group association” and offers recruiters a list of specific images to look out for, among them “lightning bolts, skulls, Nazi swastikas, eagles, and Nordic warriors.”5 It instructs recruiters that any would-be soldier who refuses to remove an offending tattoo should not be allowed to enlist. Fogarty’s are quite clearly the kind written about in the manual—a Nordic warrior and a Celtic cross. This didn’t hinder his application. “They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo and I made up some stuff and that was that,” he says, chuckling. Maybe it’s not so surprising. According to the military itself, the education of recruiters about how to identify extremists fell by the wayside during the War on Terror. A 2005 report by the Defense Personnel Security Research Center (DPSRC), which is a DOD entity, concluded that recruiting personnel “were not aware of having received training on recognizing and responding to possible terrorists”—a designation that includes white supremacists— “who try to enlist.” It found, on the question of extremist tattoos, that recruiters lacked “completeness, accuracy, timeliness, and accessibility of intelligence for screening tattoos.”6
After hanging out with Forrest, I decided to test it out. I contacted a random pool of recruitment centers and found that the level of awareness was low to minimal. I spoke to five different stations around the country pretending to be a prospective soldier, with the caveat that I had a pair of “SS lightning bolts” tattooed on my arm. Despite being outlined in army regulations as a tattoo to look out for, none of the recruiters reacted negatively and, when pressed directly about the tattoo, not one of them said it would be an outright problem. The conversations began in the usual fashion: I told them I wanted to join the military, and covered up for my British accent by saying I was just married to an American. The recruiter at Houston station hadn’t heard of SS bolts. “I don’t know what they are; you’ll have to come in. They might be OK, might not be OK,” she said. At the Houston Willowbrook office I was told, “I don’t know, will have to crack the regulation open.” At Waldo in Kansas City the recruiter’s response was again ambiguous. “I’m not saying it means you can’t get in,” he said.7 No wonder Forrest found it so easy. Not long after, my suspicions were given further validation when I was flicking through a long 2009 Newsweek profile of army specialist Terry Holdbrooks, who converted to Islam after being positioned at Guantanamo Bay. Deep into the article, with breathless ambivalence, the journalist recalls being at Holdbrooks’s Phoenix apartment when “he rolls up both sleeves to reveal wrist-to-shoulder tattoos.” Holdbrooks goes on to describe the “ink work as a narrative of his mistakes and addictions.” These “mistakes” include “religious symbols and Nazi SS bolts, track marks and, in large letters, the words BY DEMONS BE DRIVEN.”8 The journalist fails to raise the obvious question: How did someone with a tattoo of Nazi SS bolts get into the US military in the first place?
But even if the tattoos are missed for whatever reason, it’s not the last chance the military has to rid itself of a neo-Nazi soldier. An Army Command Policy manual devotes more than one hundred pages to rooting them out. But no officer appeared to be reading it. It states the policy generally: “Participation in extremist organizations and activities by Army personnel is inconsistent with the responsibilities of military service.”9 Specifically, soldiers are prohibited from participating in such organizations through public demonstrations or rallies, attending meetings or activities, fundraising, recruitment or training, taking a visible leadership role or distributing literature. The options available to a commander should these rules be transgressed are involuntary separation, reclassification action or bar to reenlistment actions, or other action “deemed appropriate.” None of that appeared to be of interest as the War on Terror raged.
Medals and Everything
Soon after Fogarty was approved, he was stationed in the Third Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart, Georgia, the largest army installation east of the Mississippi River. Once at the base, the army got a helping hand from an unlikely source who alerted them to the extremist in their midst. As we stroll on again around the zoo, Forrest recounts the story of how his ex-girlfriend and mother of his eldest child was livid when he joined the military and tried to scupper his plans when he was positioned in Georgia, away from the family. “She hated that I was in the military,” he says as he looks at his kids. Her anger became so acute that, according to Fogarty, she sent a dossier of pictures to his military command that showed him at white supremacist and neo-Nazi rallies, as well as performing his racist rock with Attack. “They hauled me before some sort of committee, and showed me the pictures and asked me what they were. I just denied it and said my girlfriend was a spiteful bitch, which is true.” Although he talks a lot about chasing all sorts of women, Forrest claims he doesn’t go for women who are like him, which might explain her exasperation. He is currently single but says, “I try to keep some chicks, but I don’t like skinhead girls, I don’t like girls with tattoos.”
The committee, he says, “knew what I was about, but they let it go because I’m a great soldier, and they knew that.” The investigation, Fogarty tells me, was headed by Command Sergeant Major Tommy Dunne, now retired. When I contact Dunne by phone, he initially denies knowing Fogarty, but when I try again some months later he acknowledges that he remembers the soldier. I ask if he recalls seeing Fogarty’s prominent racist tattoos. “I didn’t see any tattoos like that,” he says. At one point in our conversations, Fogarty claimed that Dunn had told him “The only reason I like you is you’re racist!” I ask Dunn about this. “I don’t remember saying anything like