The brave efforts of Fogarty’s girlfriend having gone unheeded, Fogarty remained in the reserves, until finally, in 2004, he was sent where he had always wanted to go: Iraq. “I’m a fighter, I love combat, I wanted to be in the action,” he says. At the time, the Tampa local newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, interviewed him at Fort Stewart. There was no mention of his Nazism. “We didn’t come over here to hang out at Fort Stewart,” Forrest told them.11 Before he left for the Middle East, Forrest joined the Hammerskin Nation—described by the Anti-Defamation League as the “the most violent and best-organized neo-Nazi skinhead group in the United States.”12 He was a probate for the Hammerskin Nation while in Iraq, a process that guards against infiltration, and on his return to the United States became a full-fledged member.
The degree of impunity encountered by Forrest and countless other extremists caused tensions within the military. The blind eye turned by the recruiters angered many investigators whose integrity was being compromised. Hunter Glass was a paratrooper in the 1980s and became a gang cop in 1999 in Fairville, North Carolina, next to Fort Bragg. “In the 1990s the military was hard on them, they could pick and choose,” he recalls, “that was after the Burmeister trial, so they were looking for anybody, they were looking for swastikas, they were looking for anything.” (James Burmeister was the army paratrooper convicted of murdering two African Americans in a 1995 racist gun attack in Fayetteville, while he was stationed at Fort Bragg.) But the regulations on racist extremists and fear of other Burmeisters did not continue with the inception of the War on Terror. “The key rule nowadays is ignore it until it becomes a problem,” Glass tells me. “We need manpower, so as long as the man isn’t acting out, let’s blow it off.” He recounts one episode in early 2005 when he was requested by the military police investigators at Fort Bragg to interview a soldier with blatant skinhead insignia—SS lightning bolts and hammers. “He was already in with this tattoo!” Glass exclaims. “I asked him about it, and he said he had dreamed it up. I asked, ‘Where are you from?’ He said Birmingham, Alabama.” But Glass knew what it really was. “He had a hammer above it; he was a Hammerskin.” Even so, the soldier claimed “it was because he was in an engineer unit.” Glass worked with the base’s military police investigators, who filed a report. “They recommended that he be kicked out,” he recalls, “but the commanding officers didn’t do anything.” He says there was an open culture of impunity. “We’re seeing guys with tattoos all the time . . . As far as hunting them down, I don’t see it. I’m seeing the opposite, where if a white supremacist has committed a crime, the military stance will be, ‘He didn’t commit a race-related crime.’ ” Former Department of Defense investigator Scott Barfield had a similar experience: “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don’t remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members.” Speaking in 2006, he added, “Last year, for the first time, they didn’t make their recruiting goals. They don’t want to start making a big deal about neo-Nazis in the military, because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they’ll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists.”13
The War on Terror produced no official acknowledgment from Pentagon brass that regulations have been loosened on neo-Nazis. Individually, however, officials seem to accept that it has happened by stealth. One is Douglas Smith, the public affairs officer at the Recruitment Command who spoke openly to me about the policy on extremists: “We don’t exclude people from the army based on their thoughts,” he explained. “We exclude based on behavior. But a tattoo of an offensive nature, racial, sexual, or extremist, might be a reason for them not to be in the military . . . The tattoo is a relatively subjective decision . . . We try to educate recruiters about extremist tattoos, but it’s going to depend on their general knowledge of tattoos.” He says that a racist tattoo shouldn’t automatically bar enlistment: “A tattoo in and of itself is not a bar to enlistment. It is behavior that would prohibit someone serving or enlisting. There are First Amendment rights . . . The concept seems to be if the tattoo is so patently offensive that it would cause disruption, it could require action.” Even a swastika might get through, he continues. “A swastika would trigger questions, but again if the gentleman said, ‘I like the way the swastika looked,’ and had a clean criminal record, it’s possible we would allow that person in.”
It’s in the interest of recruiters to interpret recruiting standards loosely, as failure to meet their targets means they have to attend a punitive counseling session, and persistent failure hurts their chances for promotion. When, in 2006, the army relaxed the regulations on non-extremist tattoos, such as body art covering the hands, neck, and face, this cut recruiters even more slack.14
Letting Everybody In
Leaders in the neo-Nazi movement agree that Forrest’s journey has become even more common as the military needs more fighters. One of those leaders is Tom Metzger, the seventy-year-old godfather of contemporary national socialism in the United States. “Ah, Metzger!” says Forrest, when I mention him at the zoo. “I know him pretty well, hung out a couple of times.” On the phone Metzger is quick to crack a joke, talk about his idiosyncratic political philosophy, and work out how he can help me with anything I want to know. Metzger’s journey around the white supremacist movements started in the 1970s with the Ku Klux Klan, for whom he served as Grand Dragon in California. He twice ran for the Senate as a Democrat, against the party’s wishes, and, when that failed, set up his own organization: White Aryan Resistance, or WAR. He has been in prison, declared bankrupt, and the subject of a BBC documentary. “Now they are letting everybody in,” he says of the US military. “All the gang-bangers, all the blacks, Mexicans, and white supremacists. I would say that 10 percent of the army and Marines—they are not in the navy and air force so much—are racist extremists of some variety.”
Metzger’s organization is not your typical white power outfit. “I run an association of independent people who work in cells to the best of their talents,” he says. “I would encourage them to join the military, if they have a scratch they can’t seem to itch. Then go in to bring some training back to the US to make the federal government aware of our existence.” Metzger’s philosophy is a strange mish-mash of the far left, far right, and, in fact, everything in between. When he starts dilating it sends the unsuspecting listener into an ideological daze. One minute he’s praising left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky—“we disagree radically on race but his opinions on transnational corporations and how we are destroying the environment are spot on”—while the next he’s on to Adolf Hitler. “I used to call it White Aryan Resistance. Now I call it The Insurgents,” he says. “We are now a non-violent insurgency, but we are prepared to turn violent if the need be. It’s up to the government. There are moves to suppress free speech and it won’t be too long before they get their hands slapped . . . I’m no military general, I meet military people; there are no plans, just an insurgency that could become hot I would say by any means. Like any unconventional warfare it would involve whatever we would be capable of using. The white working class don’t have jet planes and atomic bombs, we would work along other lines.”
One veteran neo-Nazi who agrees is Billy Roper, who left the National Alliance after a power struggle in 2002 to start his own outfit, White Revolution. While in Tampa meeting Forrest I decide to call Roper. “We have some members in the military,” he tells me. “There are a few in the 101st Airborne, some at Fort Campbell, and some Marines in Iraq . . . There’s about twelve in there, some of them have tattoos, because anyone can walk in and get in the military now.” Roper tells me he knew two members who had swastikas and were barred but had them re-tattooed into sun wheels and the military allowed them back in. One group who don’t shy away from swastikas is the NSM, or National Socialist Movement. It claims to be the biggest Nazi organization in the US but activists like Forrest and Roper call them “clowns” because of their propensity to dress up in World War Two fatigues. Someone calling himself Willem Herring, their spokesman, says he doesn’t believe swastikas are