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The military veteran v. military veteran dynamic on January 6th on the Capitol is, alas, nothing new to American history. And I'm not just talking about the junior officers of the Mexican-American War fighting our Civil War fifteen years later as colonels and generals.
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Ruby Ridge, Idaho, August 1992. A long standoff between the feds and white separatist fugitive and former Green Beret Randy Weaver + his family turns into an 11-day siege. Weaver's wife, teenage son and one US Marshal died - W.F. Degan, a Marine vet who'd served in the Gulf War.
The FBI sniper who accidentally shot and killed Vicki Weaver was a man named Lon Horiuchi, a West Point graduate and former Army infantry officer. Horiuchi would also be involved at the events at Waco the following year, and would draw the ire of a Gulf war vet named Tim McVeigh.
Rather infamously, McVeigh earned the Bronze Star and the CIB in Desert Storm. After washing out of SF selection, he fell into extremist anti-government circles, and was particularly enraged by Horiuchi - he considered him an oath breaker, to use a pejorative from our time.
McVeigh started planning out an assassination of Horiuchi, and almost pursued that instead of bombing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.
168 people died in that bombing, to include 19 children, 6 military, and dozens of military veterans.
168 people died in that bombing, to include 19 children, 6 military, and dozens of military veterans.
This is just a short snapshot, of course, maybe relevant as it pits vets in gov't v. vets turned domestic extremists. If there's a point (is there ever with violence?) it's that it's likely we'll see more military veterans pitted against one another in the coming months + years.
And given the twenty-year forever war that shaped + molded our entire community, and led us to arriving at wildly different conclusions, sometimes, don't be surprised when one of these stories involve folks who actually served alongside one another.
It all breaks my heart. [end]
It all breaks my heart. [end]
