Dear Friends,
I’m sharing another ‘travel’ piece — this one on Idaho and a glimpse into the military-industrial complex. By the way, it’s been interesting for me to pair short stories with these ‘travel’ essays, the idea being that one is more inner life and the other more a quick snapshot of external life in different parts of the country.
Best,
Sam
208: MOUNTAINS IN TEXAS
I’ve written about Felix before. He had left the military, after 15 years in the infantry, with a debilitating lung condition. We’d filmed with him in El Paso when his PTSD — a concept he didn’t believe in — became apparent. We’d filmed with him as he told his therapist about the “five minutes” that he felt had defined him — a fellow sergeant stepping on a pressure plate in an abandoned house in Afghanistan, which he felt he had missed when he was reconnoitering the house. And we’d filmed with him as he ran away from home, worked at a construction site in Louisiana, drank beers, tried to get away from everything basically, before he returned to El Paso and he and his wife Anna tried to restart their marriage.
We seem to have reached — surprisingly enough — a happy ending in his story. The director and I have always felt that, in so many words, Felix needed to get a job. His lungs really are in bad shape — a casualty of the Afghanistan burn pits — and he had been rendered ‘non-deployable,’ a tremendous blow to him, before being medically retired. We’ve seen him discreetly reaching for his inhaler in the house, and we’ve seen him wheezing through a pulmonary check-up at the VA, but the feeling had been that he could get some kind of a job as like an instructor at a firing range — all he does is go off into the desert and shoot at targets — and, in his footloose Louisiana period, he’d started working some crappy security job. Through the grapevine he’d heard about a position at a nuclear waste facility, read the description of it — it involved small arms, involved commanding small teams, and he was like, “Yep yep,” just couldn’t believe how tailor-made it was for him. Also couldn’t believe the pay —jumping from a grunt’s salary to $40 an hour; and with the work mostly being sitting in a facility staring out a window, as opposed to trying to pacify Afghanistan.
To be fully certified for a commanding role, he has to do a training at Idaho National Laboratory. It’s serious stuff — nine weeks; hard work — but he says it should be no problem at all. “Unless I have an accidental discharge on the range, or my lungs give out, I’ll be fine,” he says.
That’s where we pick up with him — about to graduate the program, looking just completely at home in his gear, with his dip, surrounded by his boys. His four-year-old daughter broke her leg and he’s leaving early to tend to her, but he’s already completed everything he needs to complete — it’s hard to imagine seeing someone more at home. “This is as close to the army as you can get without being in the army,” he says.
Eduard the cameraman and I have a difficult journey to get there. We’re supposed to meet for a connecting flight in Salt Lake City — Eduard is coming from L.A. — but his plane is delayed, and I end up driving through a snowstorm at 4 in the morning while Eduard sleeps beatifically in the back seat. That’s a good introduction to Idaho — where about two thirds of the conversations I have are about weather. “We have so many ways of telling shitty weather apart,” one of the INL press people says when I meet them. “There’s heavy rain and mud rain, and wind — that’s a bad word here —and there’s pretty much just two seasons, winter and construction.”
But after the snowstorm, we’re at a clearing in the weather, and it really is very beautiful, an endless blue sky, and these demure little mountains in the middle of the plains that turn out to be a geographical feature called buttes. In the middle of nowhere — the towns with evocative names like ‘Craters of the Moon’ — there’s suddenly a sign saying “historical landmark,” which catches us by surprise, and then there’s a gated outpost with the sort of guard I’m too shy even to say “How are you doing?” to, and then another vast expanse, this the territory of the Idaho National Laboratory, which is three times bigger than New York City, completely flat, with specks of buildings off in the distance and road signs saying cheery things like “Lethal Force Authorized” and “Official Business Only Past This Point.”
The press person explains to us that when satellite maps came out, the navigation used to take motorists straight through the facility, and that was always sort of a funny standoff for everybody working there, the drivers pointing haplessly to the blue line on their phone maps, the holstered security guards, with the ‘lethal force’ signs behind them suggesting that they might want to take a detour.
It turns out that this is really a very important place. The historical site is EBR-1 — the first breeder reactor, which demonstrated to the world that civilian nuclear power was feasible. This is also where nuclear-powered submarines were developed, and the Navy, surreally enough, has a facility here. Our handlers talk about the experience of having passed by a sliced-up submarine, but, really, the Navy does its own thing, everything here is very compartmentalized, everything classified. For the handlers, though, this seems to be a fairly easy gig. They’re used to taking people around the nuclear reactor or the Materials and Fuels Complex. The training ground for security guards is a bit of a sideshow and everybody there is pleased — in spite of the various bureaucratic hurdles — to have press attention.
But their facility is, also, very well turned-out. They have a shooting range, they have an — as far I can tell — state-of-the-art ‘house’ for the guards to practice room-clearing in and a catwalk up above for supervisors to shout instructions from. They are all tricked out, with assault rifles, with sensor vests and headbands, so that they can play a kind of high-end version of laser tag.
That’s what we spend the first morning there doing. The seven guards-in-training are practicing vehicular ambushes, which is really fun. The press officers and I stand off to the side in our orange vests. We talk about the weather — one of the press officers moved recently from Denver to try to bring costs down and is having real second thoughts after the most recent winter — and talk about sports, and it turns out that there are no sports teams really close enough to support. Eduard is crouched in ambush with Felix. The vehicle carrying the ‘bads’ moves down a snowy road and then at some point the ‘goods’ — Felix’s team — pop out of their ambush and, without ceremony, fire away at the vehicle. It’s meant to be an opportunity to explore stopping a vehicle that breaks into a facility as well as just to practice a good old firefight. After not very long, the bads have scattered, are taking their positions in snowpiles along the side of the road, and the goods, who are dominating, pick them off one by one. “Pop pop pa-pop,” says Felix doing his clearance.
“That’s how you can tell that Felix is from the military world,” one of the administrators, who’s with my gaggle, says to me. “In our world, finishing them off is frowned upon.”
When the sides reverse, one of the press people and I, just for the fun of it, get in the back of Felix’s van. His group, now become ‘the bads,’ is ahead 2-0, but the van would seem to be a disadvantage. Felix is driving, and as he comes to a turn in the track, he, or someone else, spots one of the ambushers up ahead. They try to back out of it but the vehicle is stuck, so they clear out of the van, Felix uses it for cover while his two squad mates take position behind snowpiles. There’s been no discussion about who’s in command, but it’s clearly Felix who takes charge. He tells the squad mates when to lay down covering fire and when to advance, sends reports every few seconds back to an imaginary HQ. For a full year, as I’ve been working on the documentary, I’ve heard him talk about how much he misses the military, how it’s this drug you never get back — the camaraderie of it, the excitement of it — but here, sitting in the back of the van in my orange vest, I for the first time really feel what he’s talking about. It just seems like the best sport in the world. Everybody is completely dialed in, the objectives are so clear, reliance on one’s team so vital.
Felix is by far the most experienced person there. The others all seem to be local Idaho boys, but Thatcher on their right flank — a guy with glasses, who says that he’s gotten tired of working in marketing and has wanted to do something else, registers three kills. That leaves one overmatched enemy, the last of the ‘goods,’ to deal with. There’s a large bern — a ridge — on their left flank. The enemy makes for that, although Felix has already posted one of his squad mates there. When it’s clear that there’s where the enemy is, Felix clambers up it as well, and both he and the squad mate are there to greet the enemy coming over the top and to conclude the massacre.
Felix is the star of the occasion. He seems to be called upon to say something, but he’s wheezing, clearly out of breath from his scramble up the bern. “We ain’t got mountains like this in Texas,” he says, and in the satisfied laugh from everyone around he has a moment to catch his breath.
As enjoyable as the ambushes are, the after-action report is just as fun. The two instructors on the range, Nearing and Cowell, are about the two biggest people I’ve ever actually seen in real life. I think of them as the Mountain and the Hound. Both are about 6’6”, 250 lbs, heavily bearded. Nearing, the Mountain, used to be a professional football player, in Canada or the XFL or something like that. Cowell, the Hound, is maybe a little smaller but more frightening, with his face partially disfigured by a motorcycle accident.
Both can really talk the talk. Nearing lets the ‘goods’ have it for the overcomplicated ambush that they laid out. “The best laid out plans are the most simplistic,” he says. “And do you know why? ‘Cause of this little thing called Murphy. Murphy doesn’t care if you’ve got this beautiful plan for if everything goes right. On the other hand, Murphy cares very much that Connor is 6’9” and can be spotted from the road.” And Felix, the only one to take a knee as the instructors are speaking, is the star of the after-action report as well. He knows what an ACE report is, for instance — Ammo, Casualties, Equipment — he gets full marks for having sent back reports all through the engagement.
The truth is that he’s just at another level from everybody else. They’re local boys, in their 20s, overemphasizing their mustaches. Connor — the wayward tall man — had been in the police. But Felix really had done four combat tours, had been drilling like this constantly for 15 years. If not for the lungs, I’d assume that he’d been doing some kind of contractor if not quasi-mercenary work. As is — although he’s far too much of a team player to admit to this —he probably is a cut above the instructors themselves. They speak the language of it wonderfully, but, as they admit to me, they’re pretty much just southeast Idaho boys themselves. All the administrators and instructors here seem to have grown up in Idaho and then to have worked at the INL their entire career. Felix has experience that they don’t. Not that this reflects wonderfully well on Felix. Nils, the film’s director, is amused that after fifteen years in the Army he made it only as high as platoon sergeant. He’d always had bad learning disabilities, repeated ninth grade twice, is having trouble with the written portions of the INL program — he says that the spelling of the word ‘assess’ is a real stumper for him. He seems to be a bit perturbed that some of the guys he’s training with are in their early 20s; that this, a kids’ game with high-tech gear, is fundamentally where he feels most at home, but what can he do. He says that he’s wanted to be a soldier for as long as he can remember. He’s always been so funny, always been one of the boys — he attributes his failure in not getting promoted more to spending too much time ‘paling around’ — if it weren’t for a security position like this it’s hard to know what else he would do except hang around at home, drink too much, watch reality TV. “When I’m doing this it’s like the lightbulb goes on,” he says during one of the breaks.
After lunch, we do the house. The press gaggle and I stand on the catwalk up above. Nearing and Cowell spend a while explaining how best to take a corner, how best to clear a hallway. There’s something about the way Cowell moves, as he’s acting it out, hand in front of his face simulating a gun, that’s what has most stayed with me from this trip — the huge man, the graceful motion, at once moving fluidly and sharply, snapping the corner, how perfectly focused he is.
It’s a whole world in here, and a lot to learn. Everybody is treating it as a school — although of course a very kinesthetic one, all about exactly where to hold your weapon, how to optimize your movements in space. The idea is to move through the house in a four or six-man team, and every time a door is tagged “open,” to move through it and then fire at a series of targets on the walls (some hajjis, some white women, for the sake of diversity), and then to keep moving until all the “open” doors are shut. The notes, as shouted by the instructors or by an administrator from the catwalk, are all about the position of one’s body, the position of the muzzle of one’s gun. “I’m going to put my plate carrier between you and my brother,” Nearing will say, with Cowell demonstrating the right movement. “That’s what it’s called: masking your brother.” The harshest reprimands are when the muzzle is up when it shouldn’t be. “You cannot unsee what you see,” says the administrator. “If something comes out at you, and you are pointing at your buddy’s back, you will not be able to unsee what you unsee, and your shot is going to take off the back of his head.” And the next harshest criticism is for failures of communication. “Use your man voice,” says Nearing to one of the Idahoans. And, again, “If you see an open door, and you are on your own out here, you tend to be hollering at the top of your lungs until your brothers finish what they’re doing in the rooms and then come out and join you.”
When there’s a good rhythm going, the instructors introduce stun grenades into the exercise. This throws Felix more than I would have expected it. “Oh, we’re going there,” he says.
“If something draws you in a particular direction, head that way,” says Nearing cryptically.
“Move towards the explosives,” says Felix with a great weariness.
“I’m not going to lie,” he says, when he’s hanging out outside, waiting his turn. “If I’m not throwing them, I hate grenades, That first one had me hanging from the catwalk.” And maybe he is a little flustered. He has a ‘brain fart’ in the next exercise, misses a wide-open door. The instructors don’t give him a hard time about it, although the other guards — ever-mindful of the camera and Felix’s special treatment — do. But nobody, in the entire time we’re there, is able to out-raz Felix. “This is where you want to be when Jesus come back,” he says, “picking on poor old Felix?”
They clear the house the last time. They shout out “Safe and let ‘em hang.” The administrator — who I’m almost positive is paying attention only because of the camera — gives them a lecture from the catwalk. “You will know your facility better than anybody who can possibly attack it,” he says. “What I’d suggest is that as you do sweeps on a day to day basis, you play out these scenarios, you think about how you would take any one of these doors, and that will help you to stay engaged during the mundane.”
And, in the middle of all the stun grenades and the small arms tactics, that’s a bit of home truth. What they’re really training for is to be security guards. It’s extraordinarily unlikely that Al Qaeda is going to attack southeastern Idaho. What they’re really warring against is boredom — trying to get themselves engaged in a job that, as likely as not, is going to be the same-old sweep of a super-safe facility for the rest of their careers. And at the end the administrator’s talk, Nearing asks, “Let me ask you this, you all have any fun today?” and that’s another bit of home truth. “Oh yeah, I could do that all day every day,” says one of the guards.
***
For Eduard, who is French and whose main hobby is to critique the American way of life, it’s this send-off at the end of the drill that really encapsulates the whole day. Everything about the guards’ training strikes him as the most perfect waste of resources. He is very struck that he has just left LA, where he lives, during a teachers’ strike. The teachers are upset because their entry level salary is $39,000, which is less than the cost of living in Los Angeles. Fox News — as we saw on a hotel TV — has taken the position one would expect of them, with a screen crawl saying “Failing Our Children.” And, meanwhile, Felix has, in nine weeks, merrily fired off 4000 rounds of ammo, at $4 a round, into walls and snowbanks in southeastern Idaho.
We have, with some trepidation, accepted Nearing’s recommendation for dinner, but it does turn out to be the place where the locals eat in Idaho Falls. The food is crappy, but there’s no reason to be sticklers — it’s like where all the misfits of Idaho Falls have gathered, and both Eduard and I are very enthused. The waiter is in a tie-dyed t-shirt, the bartender for some reason has the top of her shaved, leaving hair on the sides. No one is wearing name tags. The waiter tells you his favorite thing on the menu without fear of its being like a liability.
As is standard whenever Eduard and I are on a shoot together, it falls to him to rip apart America and for me to defend it. Yes, it’s completely insane, I find myself saying, but this is the system we’ve come up with. Much of the rest of the world — Europe above all — has more or less given up on their willingness to defend themselves. They’re able to put their money into sensible things, like schools and health care. Meanwhile, America has gone in a completely different direction. The real America — the place that matters internationally — has nothing to do with the sort of places where Eduard and I live. It’s in facilities like the Idaho National Laboratory, testing facilities, Army outposts. This is what we’ve decided to put our national wealth into — and Americans, in their daily lives, accrue no benefit from it and, for the most part, will never get to see it. But it does provide force protection insurance — umbrella coverage — for the rest of the world. We’ve seen what that does in Ukraine, and we may well see it in Taiwan, South Korea, any of these other flash points.
I talk like this for a while, and Eduard doesn’t really buy any of it, and I have to think about whether it makes any sense to me either. I am still a patriot and I would like to think that it does. Civilian nuclear power is important. They developed it here and it continues to pay dividends — one of the administrators tells us that they’ve been developing micro-reactors that can power whole cities. But energy is of course secondary to the real thing, which is defense — the Idaho National Laboratory is technically part of the Department of Energy, but one of the defense contractors runs it, so, really, says one of the administrators shruggingly, “It’s DoD.” From thinking about Ukraine, from thinking about China and Taiwan, I’ve become convinced that this is what the American project really is, it has so little to do with ‘democracy,’ so little to do with anything that we vote on or write newspaper articles on or argue about. There’s the military budget of $858 billion, the Pentagon’s endless spending, 60% of which is unaccounted for as per its latest audit, there’s the vast world of bases, of national labs, of subcontractors, all of it just sitting around in readiness, and the only justification for it that there are people in the world, like Putin, like the CCP, who are even worse than we are.
As always on our shoots, Eduard and I have a very nice conversation, a very pleasant day. We talk about the security state and we talk about capitalism — how nice it is, for once, to be eating at a mom ’n’ pop restaurant as opposed to a chain, how much you can feel the difference. And then we get to the hotel, try to do our media download in the lobby, and find that the drive just isn’t mounting on my computer. “This is a big problem,” says Eduard.
But this is Idaho and the ways of tackling this are different than they would be elsewhere. The kid at the front desk — a Mormon who had done his mission to L.A., been very taken with Eduard’s driver’s license — says that he’s “good with computers,” and Eduard gets very excited about that, but after suggesting that we power down and restart he doesn’t have much else to offer. A couple in the lobby actually offer to let us plug in to their laptop, which is not the kind of thing that would have happen in New York. That does seem like a real solution. I play a game of pool with them while we’re waiting — really to buy time and goodwill so that we can copy over the next card as well. It’s a bit hard to understand what they’re actually doing. They’re from Manitoba, taking videos of motorsports events, but also looking to set up a shop in Idaho Falls. They carry themselves like they’ve been on the road a long time, like waiting a half-hour or hour for a stranger to copy over footage is nothing to them.
But their computer is really slow, and in the morning we hit up a computer repair shop. The tech has a faster computer, so we just wait and talk with him, and that’s a good chance to get a lowdown on the political situation and youth culture of Idaho. It’s really an exciting time, he says, “a lot of the unpreferables are moving to Idaho.” The dynamic recently has been that people from the West Coast have been clearing out, mostly fleeing high taxes, and have settled in Idaho. I’ve had the sense that that means that a place like Boise is an interesting place to be for a young hipster, but Jason the computer tech makes it seem like the reverse. “Idaho used to be very religion-driven, now it’s more extremism-driven,” he says. Basically, the politics have gotten very Trumpy, and the transplants, with their tales of the horrors of the West Coast, have only added to that. It’s become very difficult to have a political conversation in Idaho, Jason says — there are a few topics, Trump, abortion, etc, that his extended family has agreed not to speak about when they’re together. “I think we’re at a turning point,” he says. “America will become a completely different country. I don’t know what but it will.”
I’m curious for more on this prophecy, but that seems to be all Jason’s got for the moment. The conversation turns to the computer tech business — Jason’s pleased to have the Idaho Falls market covered — and to Jason’s plans for the weekend. “I took a turn in my life when I was about 14 and I discovered Slipknot and heavy metal — that and EDR,” he says, and he’s planning, pretty much as soon as he’s done with us, to drive out of town, chase down a concert. I’d admit to having had some hope that, since we’ve had such a good rapport with Jason, that he’ll throw us the use of his computer for a few bucks, but instead the invoice comes out to $75 an hour for the time we take there.
We meet up with our press person, head back out to INL. We’ve missed the morning, which is just as well. They were in the shooting range — and, for the film, we already have eight gazillion hours of Felix shooting. After lunch, there’s a graduation ceremony, which is a big ball of bullshit. There really is a graduation ceremony planned, with lots of bells and whistles, but Felix is leaving early to take care of his daughter. The plan had been, I think, to send him a certificate in the mail, but, because we’d asked if there’s anything, a ceremony just for him materializes, with some of the higher brass showing up. They go around around the room and everybody one by one says really nice things about Felix — all the ammo he’s shot, all the leadership he’s demonstrated, all the phrases, ‘roger that’ and ‘clearer than two pickles in a jar,’ that will stay with them for months, and one of the guards actually cries saying how much Felix’s mentorship has meant to him.
Then there are lots of handshakes, Nearing says how invaluable it’s been to have his military experience. For the afternoon they practice on a video simulator. It’s different law enforcement-type situations that could potentially come up. A woman gets into a fight with her boyfriend at a bar and reaches for a knife. A guy is trespassing and goes to his car to grab something. The question is when do you shoot — and the answer, at least in this simulation, is often. Two thirds of the time, the actors in the simulator reach for a weapon, and the guards gun him down. When the classroom portion is over, they switch over to target practice on the simulator, shooting at cans and bottles. The crew and all the press people take turns as well, and Eduard is only a few seconds off the pace of the guards. “Get this man a uniform,” Felix says, and in all the time I’ve spent with Eduard I’ve never seen him quite so happy.
There’s some thought of asking for Felix to be excused early and getting some sort of moody shot of him driving back to his hotel in Idaho Falls, but I don’t push it. He doesn’t want any special treatment. He wants to stay at the facility until 5pm when the facility closes, shooting cans and talking shit with the boys.
Names have been changed for this essay.
Back in the 1990s, the Aryan Nations were terrorizing North Idaho. They got brought down by a lawsuit from people they'd assaulted. But there are still white supremacy groups there. Also, there was the perhaps apocryphal belief that dozens of ex-Los Angeles cops had moved to North Idaho. The infamous Mark Furhman, the cop at the center of the OJ Simpson trial, lives in North Idaho.