Forrest maintains that a good portion of those around him were aware of his neo-Nazism. “They all knew in my unit,” he says. “They would always kid around and say, ‘Hey, you’re that skinhead!’” Did anyone rat on him? “No, I was hardcore, I would volunteer for all the hardest missions, and they were like, ‘Let Fogarty go,’ you know what I mean, they didn’t want to get rid of me.” He was confident enough of his carte blanche from the military that during his break from service in 2004 he flew not to see his family in the US but to Dresden, Germany, to give a concert to 2,500 skinheads, on the army’s budget. “What happens is you get to choose whether you want to go to Europe or America, and I put down Germany. The military didn’t care. My friends picked me up from Frankfurt airport and I played two shows.” What about getting caught? “Ah, fuck it,” he sighs. When he was at Camp Victory in Baghdad, Forrest even says a sergeant came up to him and said plainly, “You’re one of those racist motherfuckers, aren’t you!” Fogarty’s driver in Iraq was black and he rebutted, “Only I can call him racist!” I ask him how the sergeant knew about his racism. “The tattoo, I suppose. I can’t hide everything—people knew—even the chain of command.”
He starts getting really misty-eyed recollecting some of his close shaves in the warzone. “One time, I was pulling out of Camp Anaconda, which is about fifteen miles west of Baghdad. Some convoy had blocked lanes of traffic, so we had come out with a Humvee at 5 a.m. We were chilling, but there was this truck hauling at us and not stopping. I’m looking at my driver, he can’t see, but my gunner is up there; he said, ‘This guy’s not stopping,’ and I said, ‘You know what to do,’ and right when I said that, he was just hitting him up with a 50 cal, cha cha cha! Just shooting him up and it was coming towards at us and it was getting all blown to pieces, dude, and as we’re pulling out it missed us by like two foot and just fell into the ditch . . . My gunner let him have it with a 50 cal; the gunner was a cool guy. Once you papped him up, I didn’t get out the vehicle but I looked in, and there was nobody living.”
Another time he was at Camp Victory North at Baghdad airport. “I was in the chow hall, a mortar round came in and blew up a bunch of guys, cut some chicks’ legs off. Me and my gunner, I was drinking non-alcoholic beer for the 4th of July, we were like ‘Welcome to Baghdad!’” On another occasion he came across the soldiers who had leaked the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib. “Abu Ghraib was a torture center before the Americans, Saddam will cut your tongue out. Those guys’ lives are ruined for harassing a bunch of dirty scumbags, I guarantee when an Iraqi captures us it’s ten times worse,” he says. “I met them in Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. We were in the chow hall, we were talking, I forget how it came up, one guy was like, ‘I was pulled out of mission because I told someone about the pictures.’ I said, ‘You punk motherfucker’ . . . pussy faggots, I cussed them out.”
Although Fogarty gets excited talking about various operations in Iraq, he says he would never say anything “that would put the military in a bad light.” In fact, he has so much antipathy for people who denigrate the military he was arrested by police for breaking up an anti-war protest in 2006. “They threw shit at my dad when he came back from Vietnam, I mean who are these left-wing scumbags?” he asks. “They tried to say I had PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder] whenever I got arrested. The VA [Department of Veterans Affairs] said I had PTSD, but because I bust up the anti-war thing doesn’t mean I’m suffering from PTSD.” Despite all his pro-military rhetoric, Forrest is characteristically contradictory when he waxes lyrical about the hell of war. “You are trained to accept you are going to see dead people,” he says. “War is not pretty, there’s nothing good about war.” He concedes, “The niggarabs are human beings.”
After three hours trucking around we all resolve to head out of the zoo. We walk to the gate and I say goodbye. “I’ve got to get you the CD!” Forrest remembers. And before long he has run to his car and come back with his latest album, Survival. The jacket has a picture of him in military fatigues in Iraq. Back at the hotel I cast an eye over the lyrics, which are written in Gothic type on the inside sleeve. “Eye For An Eye” opens with the lines: A slow painful death I strive / Why are you still alive? The chorus goes: It’s our turn to watch you bleed / It’s our turn to tear you limb from limb . . . We will leave no survivors of this bloody war. Another one, “In Battle”: In battle there are no laws . . . It’s kill or be killed, die with the rest . . . Relief came when I pulled the trigger and watched you die / I can’t stop laughing everytime I remember you start to cry / Watch you cry!
Kill a Couple of Towel Heads for Me OK!
Perhaps ironically considering their general warmongering, the American neo-Nazi movement was for the most part virulently against the war in Iraq. Most of the groups hold to an updated conspiracy theory about Jewish power, which they call ZOG, or Zionist Occupation Government. It is premised on Western governments’ supposed submission to Jewish and Israeli power. On their internet forums, US soldiers are often greeted with incendiary comments about being “Jewish warriors” and “Zionist crusaders” for fighting in the War on Terror. This should not be surprising. The white supremacist movement across America has ebbed and flowed since the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s South. It is plagued by fissures and rivalries and ideological nitpicking that have always damaged its ability to form a large-scale and coherent movement. In 2008, there were over 150 different far-right groups—ranging from the Hitler worshippers to Christian nationalists—nestled all over the country. But as the War on Terror raged, extremism was increasing around America generally, according the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a group that investigates hate and racist groups. In its report Rage on the Right it said that in 2008 extremist groups had come “roaring back to life,” increasing by nearly 250 percent as well as building links to the mainstream right-wing.17 It was a grave concern given their willingness to kill innocent Americans (as Timothy McVeigh had demonstrated), even more so now that they had military training.
Charles Wilson, spokesman for the National Socialist Movement, tells me the group is “150 percent against the war in Iraq. It was a total mistake to invade Iraq; we can’t even secure our own borders. By 2015 white people will be a minority in America.” The IKA, or Imperial Klans of America, is based on the original KKK. “I am, as many of us are, a vet,” Truitt Lilly, the spokesman, writes in an email because he wants to remain faceless (and voiceless). “I do not encourage anyone to join any part of Z.O.G. However, military training is good training for anyone: tactics and physical and self defense and discipline are key to any Christian’s way of life and should be taken into one’s consideration.” The original KKK is against it too. “We have opposed the war in Iraq since day one,” national director Pastor Thomas Robb tells me. “If we are going to have a war then it needs to be done constitutionally.”
But none of this anti-war sentiment has stopped them taking advantage of the opportunities for training. “We do encourage them to sign up for the military. We can use the training to secure the resistance to our government,” says Wilson. “Every one of