The angry patriot

I got to know Simcox in the winter of 2003. I was in Arizona writing about a group of border "vigilantes" called Ranch Rescue, a heavily armed militia led by the baby-faced blowhard Jack Foote, who talked of invading Mexico and killing the leaders (though Foote, a former U.S. Army officer, had himself never seen action). The Ranch Rescuers wore camouflage fatigues, painted their faces, and tracked down migrants on midnight forays, carrying Kalashnikovs, Glocks and extra ammo. Occasionally their hunts went awry. One of Foote's militiamen was arrested in 2003 on assault charges after allegedly pistol-whipping a migrant waylaid deep in the desert. Mostly, though, the militiamen drank beer and whiskey and ate beans out of cans and smoked a lot of pot, which I found strange, as much of their mission was to interdict drugs. "Only if it comes in legally do we want it," the men told me, not realizing the ridiculousness of the logic.

But the drunken GI Joes weren't really Simcox's scene. He was a loner. In December 2003, I camped out with him for a night of watch in the desert plain near Palominas. He regaled me with the long arc of his life that brought him to the desert.

For 13 years, he taught kids at the private Wildwood School in Los Angeles. The school was "famous for teaching tolerance and diversity to the kids," he said. But he didn't mean that in a good way. Liberalism, he said, had produced the kind of tolerance that allowed illegal immigrants to pour into L.A. and form gangs. When he was young, he said, he produced rap albums in New York City, where, twice, he got mugged by people who didn't speak English.

After 9/11, Simcox confessed that he went crazy. He got fired from the school, his wife divorced him and took their teenage son. "My life collapsed," he said. He exiled himself to the Arizona desert, to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a remote and hallucinatory place where the cactus looked like men with guns, or women dancing. He began to call himself a 21st century Paul Revere, certain that terrorists were creeping across the border.

One hot night, Simcox said, he was hiking and saw a convoy of troops in trucks and jeeps moving fast, escorted by jogging men carrying AK-47s. Simcox hid in a pinnacle of rock, terrified, awed. He went to the park rangers, who shrugged. "They're drug dealers," the rangers said. "Calm down." "Calm down!" Simcox told me. "No! This was an army! September 11! They're crossing the border! And these guys aren't gonna do anything about it!"

Simcox lived in the desert alone in his tent for three months, watching the drug convoys come. "I wanted to join the Border Patrol," he said. "They said I was too old. Too old? Our country is under attack! I applied to the Army, the Navy, Air Force, Marines -- too old!" A few days before Christmas, 2001, while camping in the high desert, the cold morning froze the zipper on his tent and so he melted it open with his cook stove. "That was it for me," he said. "I came in from the wilderness."

Simcox drained all his accounts, even those he'd saved for his child, and bought a local newspaper, the Tombstone Tumbleweed. He front-paged his plea: "A public call to arms! Citizens border patrol now forming! Protect your country in a time of war!" He exhorted Americans to "wake up" because "we cannot rely on law enforcement to enforce the laws." In an open letter to George W. Bush, Simcox warned: "You can stop me by throwing me in jail, killing me or otherwise ... What you cannot change is my passion."

Simcox enlisted a handful of men to his cause and they called themselves the Civilian Homeland Defense. They were disorganized, though, and Simcox often went on search missions by himself.

One cold morning, when I was with Simcox on the Palominas plain, he tracked a group of migrants through the arroyos, up the berms, through the mesquite and the spiky ocotillo plants. Finally he came upon a family of round little Indians with babies. They were country folk, farmers, who had fled Mexico after their chief crop, corn, had crashed in the debased market for Mexican agriculture. Simcox called in the coordinates to a Border Patrol unit, which arrived on foot and took the Indians away.

"There's only one way to stop this," Simcox said slowly, like a man about to hit an insect. "Mo-bi-li-za-tion! Militarize the border! It would create a boom economy! Think about it. A binational workforce that builds towers and surveillance and video cameras and sensors. I'm tired of this wishy-washy pussy country we've got. Republicans are stuffed suits! Pussies! Why is America not standing up and enforcing the law down here? Cause everybody's a victim, right?"

He scowled and scoffed and huffed. "I got dual feelings about migrants," he said. "I'm pissed at 'em because they're breaking into my country. But I feel for 'em because they're dying in the desert for a minimum wage, being exploited by two governments. Cheap labor! Capitalism! Exploitation! What in god's name is going on in this country? Who mows your lawn, washes your laundry, picks your food in the field, so you can sit around and watch 'Friends'? This is a psychosis."

Next page: "Every time I walk up to the Minutemen they say, 'You a citizen?' What are they judging me on? Skin color?"