Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West

by James Pogue Narrated by Alex Hyde-White

Overview

In Chosen Country, listeners are given an extraordinary inside look at America's militia movement that shows a country at the crossroads of class, culture, and insurrection.

In a remote corner of Oregon, James Pogue found himself at the heart of a rebellion. Granted unmatched access by Ammon Bundy to the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Pogue met ranchers and militiamen ready to die fighting the federal government.

He witnessed the fallout of communities riven by politics and the danger (and allure) of uncompromising religious belief. The occupation ended in the shooting death of one rancher, the imprisonment of dozens more, and a firestorm over the role of government that engulfed national headlines.

In a raw and restless narrative, Pogue examines the underpinnings of this rural uprising and struggles to reconcile diverging ideas of freedom, tracing a cultural fault line that spans the nation.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

01/01/2018
Journalist Pogue’s uneven first book uses a novellike style to expand on his embedded reporting for the New York Times Magazine on the 2016 armed occupation of an Oregon federal wildlife refuge by rancher Ammon Bundy and his followers. His firsthand access to the antigovernment extremists at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge results in a unique perspective, but Pogue adds in vignettes of memoir that too often feel tangential and mostly focused on creating a hard-living persona (“I remember getting a text from him, lying in bed at the Standard Downtown LA, stoned and drunk with a girl I’d met at the archery range along the Arroyo Seco”). The book doesn’t need it—Pogue has a knack for winning the trust of his subjects and eliciting memorable and sometimes chilling quotations, as when one occupier tells him, “We’re like ISIS or something, but American.” His description of some of the subjects as friends, the lack of any perspective from the federal agents on the other side, and overdramatic assertions such as “evil was being actively loosed on the land” do raise some questions about his impartiality. Pogue manages to shows the humanity of his subjects, but doesn’t quite get to the bottom of the motivations behind their reckless actions. (May)

From the Publisher

"In Chosen Country, Pogue does an exceptional job of explaining how one of the most bizarre and divisive events in recent U.S. history came to pass...His book is remarkably evenhanded, but he doesn't shy away from exploring his own history and emotional response to the events in Oregon."
—NPR

"Out of dissolution Pogue has crafted a memorable account of an event that transfixed a nation and presaged the convulsive politics of an election year. Crucially, in his fallen state, he doesn't hold himself above his subjects.”
—The Oregonian

“There is an extravagant verve to his writing...Pogue gets in amazingly deep with these western rebels.”
—The New York Review of Books

"At a time where right and left, urban and rural seem hardened into distinct sides, Pogue serves as a translator."
—L.A. Review of Books

"Part Graham Greene, part Ed Abbey by way of Vice, James Pogue is the unlikely reporter-narrator of this compulsively readable, incisively written exposé of the homegrown American militia movement and the mini-insurgency it waged at Oregon’s remote Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January, 2016. Embedded in the standoff as it unfolded, Pogue straddles a fine ethical line between maintaining friendships with the participants while reporting for the New York Times. But his disarmingly casual tone masks a deeply thoughtful analysis of the movement’s historical antecedents and its messianic Mormon roots. Chronicling with empathy the widespread rural powerlessness and alienation that gave rise to the Bundy family, Pogue never loses sight of the movement’s devotion to its own victimhood. He is particularly effective in revealing the cult of personality that built up around Ammon Bundy, who sees angels directing his actions and lets others take the fall for his grandiosity. Whoever you are, whatever side you’re on, if you care about the American west and what’s happening to it, read this book."
—Caroline Fraser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

"Keenly reported and rendered in novelistic detail, James Pogue’s Chosen Country provides an intimate and troubling portrait of American discontent."
—Emma Cline, New York Times bestselling author of The Girls

"Chosen Country is an urgent and captivating dispatch from inside an American insurgency led by self-made prophet Ammon Bundy. But at its most compelling, it also provides a window into the psyche of white men searching for a cause and finding it in the mythology of the West, which has always been our most potent vision of American freedom."
—Karolina Waclawiak, author of The Invaders

"Courageous"
—Kirkus Reviews

"Pogue, a journalist and raconteur, provides a firsthand account of the 2016 anti-government standoff at Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. . .Pogue’s personal anecdotes and brief history of western land-use conflicts add flavor and context. . . .Although he did not agree with their tactics, Pogue was able to portray the central characters with more dimension than found in news accounts."
—Booklist

Kirkus Reviews

2018-03-06
A contributing editor for Vice delivers on-the-scene, first-person accounts of the Western standoffs involving the Bundy family and their followers.Pogue, a freelancer for the New York Times Magazine at the time, takes us with him inside the armed camp of those who were protesting the Bureau of Land Management—and the government in general—during the confrontations with the feds in Oregon early in 2016. He met and interviewed the Bundys, became close with a number of those encamped at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and felt his emotions ebb and flow, darken and lighten. A young man from Cincinnati, the author does not ignore his own youthful passions and weaknesses, including accounts of his drinking, drug use, sexual adventures, lassitude, and wanderlust. But he is interested principally in understanding the players in the movement led by the charismatic Ammon Bundy. Some, says Pogue, considered Bundy a prophet (many involved were Mormons), and the author is deeply sympathetic to the notion of increasing public access to public lands. He describes one experience, walking around a New Mexico site, camping, drinking, and firing his gun. (He had bought a big truck and some firearms and confesses a long fondness for both.) Pogue does allow some of his stories to drift past the point of interest, and throughout, he criticizes liberals who, in his view, don't get what's going on in the West but nonetheless, in ignorance, disdain it all. He also blasts—again and again—what he sees as the blindness of many Westerners who do not recognize the white male power that lies quietly behind so many of these issues. If public lands are sold off and used for mining and other endeavors, who will benefit? And who will suffer?Courageous on-site reporting underlies all, outweighing some excess and irrelevance.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169198249
Publisher:	Macmillan Audio
Publication date:	05/29/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Best People You Could Possibly Imagine

It was snowing the night I got to the refuge. It had snowed for almost the entire drive from Portland, and it was only with some difficulty and by the use of tire chains that I'd made it over Mount Hood and through the desert. The drive to Burns, where I checked into what the clerk told me was the last room at the local Days Inn, had taken eight hours, which is not so much longer than it takes to drive in any direction from the town to a city of any size — by measure of distance from an interstate it is the remotest corner of the lower forty-eight. The snow was six inches deep on the streets and falling fast, and there were hardly any cars on the road aside from deputies' cruisers, bearing the markings of counties from all across Oregon. These reinforcements and the riot of rented SUVs in the parking lot at the Days Inn were the only indication that the little town had become the host of an insurrection, suddenly one of the biggest news stories in the world. The dingy Thai restaurant on the silent main drag was closed, with a sign in the window like something out of a western, reading "Sorry Gone to Bend for Supplies."

I was in bad need of a hamburger, a few beers, and bed before midnight — but before I'd managed to eat or even set foot in my motel room I'd gotten a text from my mom, who was watching CNN. "James," she said, "they're moving all kinds of bulldozers and things out there and it sounds crazy." She asked me to stay in for the night. I hadn't had any service since I hit the mountains and had no idea what was happening, but on the strength of her worry I immediately pulled out my atlas of Oregon and set off on the thirty- mile drive down State Route 205. In the snowstorm and the dark the road was almost indistinguishable from the flat sage rangeland, which in turn was entirely indistinguishable from the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge itself, which I would have never been able to find if it weren't for the dozens of news trucks idling on a little rise at the entrance to the refuge headquarters. I parked, shook out a cigarette, and wandered into the halogen-lit portion of the snowstorm. LaVoy Finicum, who had fashioned himself a spokesman for what was going on, was sitting on a camp chair under a tarp with a cowboy hat on his head and a rifle across his knees, having just finished giving the live interview that would make him famous. "They're not going to just come up to a guy holding a rifle and put cuffs on him," he had said, and when asked what exactly he meant by that he went on. "I have been raised in the country all my life. I love dearly to feel the wind on my face, to see the sunrise, to see the moon in the night. I have no intention of spending any of my days in a concrete box." The message that the occupiers were ready to die before being arrested was reported in papers all over the world.

We greeted each other with a nod. Past him was Jason Patrick, who was on the phone and smoking a cigarette. I waved to him, and he recognized me and waved back, indicating by sign language that he'd catch up with me when his call was done. He was wearing, as he always did, apparently even in the cold of a desert snowstorm, a cheap and oversize suit jacket, with a baggy, blue button-front shirt and khakis. He had salt-and-pepper hair to match a salt-and-pepper beard and bore a plausible-enough resemblance to a much thicker George Clooney that during the standoff "Clooney" became his radio call sign. Eventually it just became his name. He smoked constantly. A friend of mine who knows him once described him as "the smokingest dude on the whole planet." It's hard to imagine what he must have done during his various stints in jail.

"Hey, man," he said and lit another cigarette. We caught up for a few seconds before my phone rang. It was a friend of his and a friendly acquaintance of mine named Brandon Rapolla, a giant, Guamanian marine whom I had met the same day I met Jason, at a different standoff the previous April. I mentioned to Jason who it was and he asked for my phone. I shrugged and gave it to him. "Sup, bro," he said, and there was a brief exchange while Brandon realized who was talking. "Yeah," Jason said, "I'm just up here watching LaVoy's back now."

A man in fatigues approached and pulled me aside. "You know how dangerous it is here tonight?" he asked. I said I didn't. "They're talking about coming in," he said, giving me to understand that by "they" he meant the FBI. I said I hadn't known that, and he indicated with his head to the north end of the rise where an earth mover was being positioned by some enthusiastic occupiers to block a possible assault party from coming down the icy access road to the refuge headquarters. Beside the access road someone had dropped off about half a cord of dried hardwood, and three or four men holding rifles and wearing camo and balaclavas were standing around in the snow, slowly feeding a fire and watching the gravel lot, where we were standing and where LaVoy was out under his tarp. High above us, in a creaking, steel fire tower, ninety feet high, the shadow of a sniper could be seen pacing. The sat trucks and rented Ford Explorers used by the reporters began pulling out of the front lot, and the feel of the place was intensely dark and paranoid. "There's a drone flying around — watch out for that," the man said. All the people who said they saw it described it as a black object with about a six-foot wingspan. I never saw the drone.

I turned back to Jason, who was now in a biting argument with Brandon on my phone. "You know they're not going to do anything, right?" he said, meaning law enforcement. "They're going to wait and wait and wait and wait."

He went quiet for a moment and there began a long and bitter exchange about how Brandon's militia hadn't shown up yet.

"I would say right back that I'm not happy about the beginning," he said into the phone. There were more words. "You know I don't want to hash that out because I'm not going to lose sleep over it. You have to understand I'm just here."

There was a pause while Brandon talked. "Well, listen," Jason said. "Think of the last sentence of the Declaration of Independence: a strong reliance on divine providence." He paused. "It happened how it happened. There's a bunch of ranchers on board, so get in here."

Brandon spoke for a while, presumably saying something about how poorly equipped the occupiers were to conduct an armed rebellion, because Jason suddenly got angry.

"I'm going to come and motherfuck all you military types," he said. "Because your security ops stuff? In America? It's a bunch of bullshit. All you can do here is stand up with pitchforks and torches and you say fuck no. So just put that fucking shit down, stop playing at GI Joe, and listen to the civilian who knows. We can win, but you guys have to stop buttfucking each other and we'll fix it."

He turned to me and winked. "Especially with those purple panties you wear," he said into the phone. He turned back to me. "See? We're in deep now."

Brandon said something and Jason laughed. "Yeah, well, fucking get here and we'll get real deep," he said. "Okay. I'm going to give you back and go see how LaVoy's doing."

I got back on the phone with Brandon, who said he had to work but was planning on coming down in a couple of days. He was obviously conflicted about what was happening, which seemed out of character. He had been at the standoff at the Bundys' family ranch, in 2014, and he had been the "head of security" at the militia standoff where I'd met him, the year before at a gold mine in southern Oregon. That one, despite being no smaller and no less crazy to witness, had barely made the national papers — which was partly a product of the fact that it didn't have any wild-eyed charmers like LaVoy doing interviews at the front lines and partly, at least so far as I could figure it, because until the ferment of 2016 a wild standoff in the middle of nowhere had seemed too strange and random to mean much in a national sense. Now, just a few months later and a few counties over, the Malheur refuge looked like an expression of exactly where the country was headed.

But both of the earlier events, from Brandon's perspective, had gone well, and from a tactical standpoint there wasn't anything all that different about this one — except for a feeling of heaviness and foreboding that even Jason, who had been in on the plan since the beginning, seemed to share.

Brandon asked if he could call me back. The last time I'd seen him, six months earlier, I had encountered him by chance in his blue Dodge pickup on I-5 south of Eugene. We had convoyed through a rainstorm for an hour or so and then given each other a wave when we parted, the entire thing passing at seventy-five miles an hour without us exchanging a word, and we had a general sense that we could each trust the other. A few minutes later he called. "Listen, man," he said. "I've just been calling around. We have really good intel that the FBI is going to move in there tonight. And I'm wondering if you want to stay overnight with Jason, to be a sort of witness if some bad shit goes down."

This was only the first of many times over the next weeks and months that I'd be asked to put myself in a compromising position, and I realized only later how irretrievably compromised a position it was. In any case, I said yes, knowing that he was asking me to be, essentially, a human shield. I wandered over to the fire, where a few people were still getting the dozers in place to block the road. I asked if they really thought there'd be a raid. "That's the intel we got," one of them, a Mormon extremist and HVAC contractor from Las Vegas named Brand Thornton, told me. "Our leaders briefed me on it. And the way I think it happens is we move this stuff up here" — he pointed to the dozers — "make a show of force, and I think they say to the superior officers, you know ... I'm not sure this is such a good idea. ... We have a lot more people here than you see."

We spoke for a minute about how many people were at the site, how little sleep they were getting, how everyone looked out for one another and loved one another. A thin young man in fatigues and a balaclava interjected, speaking so slowly that at first I thought he was stoned. "And we're good people," he said, nakedly baffled that the FBI had not chosen to see it this way. There was a long pause. "We're, like, the best people that you could possibly imagine."

CHAPTER 2

Our Government Is Completely Fucked

We loaded up into a government-owned F-250 diesel, manual transmission, that Jason had trouble getting into gear because of the AR-15 he'd jammed down next to the gearshift. It was January 5, 2016, and by then he'd spent almost a month in Harney County, a vast expanse of yellow-gray sagebrush basin interrupted rudely by a few basaltic uplifts colored with juniper and ponderosa in the higher elevations, an area almost the size of Massachusetts but counting only seven thousand residents. He had come, like many others, to participate in a countywide upheaval over the sentencing of two local ranchers — Dwight and Steven Hammond, father and son — over two illegal backburns they'd allegedly set — either to keep approaching fires away from their property and to control noxious weeds, as they said, or to cover up evidence of poaching, as prosecutors said. The fires burned a few hundred acres of federal land. The ranchers, who'd had problems with the Bureau of Land Management and the management of the refuge for decades, had originally been sentenced to a year or less in prison, but federal antiterrorism law requires a minimum of a five-year sentence for any arson of federal property. This provision, somewhat ironically, was originally designed to target ecoterrorists. A federal judge refused to sentence the Hammonds to the statutory minimum, but after they were released the government managed to get the original sentence overturned on appeal, with the result that the two were being sent back to prison. Almost everyone in the county was outraged, and most of the county believed they had reason to be outraged at the federal government for reasons far bigger than the Hammonds.

On January 2, Ammon and Ryan Bundy had broken off from a protest in Burns and asked anyone who was willing to drive out and seize the empty collection of one-story sheds and offices that housed personnel at the refuge, a 187,000-acre, flat expanse of sagebrush desert centered around two so- called lakes, each a vast puddle with a muddy bottom and in most places only a few inches deep, that collected runoff from the mountains and supported in good years a large population of insects and tiny brine shrimp, which in turn were fed upon by migrating cranes, swans, and geese, and which the refuge now existed to protect. "It's time to take a hard stand," Ammon had said, standing on a snowbank in the parking lot of the Safeway in Burns, across the street from the Days Inn. His plans, which would take some time to become clear, were almost indescribably grandiose, and his motivations were so deeply spiritual that very few people outside his inner circle seem to have a handle on them even today.

Jason was one of only a few loyalists who followed Ammon to the refuge. And now they had made a curious pinprick on the American timeline: an armed pageant in which very little seemed to be at stake until things turned very grave, very quickly; a political protest that became world news without anyone managing to explain to the world what the whole thing was about; a standoff that was no larger or more aggressive than earlier militia actions in the West, but that came at a time when insurgency and political disintegration in this country had stopped seeming like the remote possibilities they had been in the years before. Suddenly, the young men with guns and tactical gear foretold of something disturbing — or hopeful, if you were of that state of mind — about the future of the country. Ammon and Ryan became famous to a degree that not even Ammon in his grandiosity could have anticipated, and there began a hysterical drive in the newspapers and by a sort of comical and pompous parade of supposed experts who followed the movement mostly by monitoring Facebook posts to analyze, categorize, and denounce it, feeding off one another until it seemed like eastern Oregon really was under some kind of mass assault.

* * *

I did not really think this was the case, though I did think something alarming and probably sinister had suddenly come to this corner of the world. But I'd spent much of the last few years bumbling around the West — sometimes reporting but mostly just drinking in smoky bars and living out of the back of a sturdy little Ford pickup — developing a sense that I'd found a society in the midst of a social breakdown. I'd fallen in love with the West a few years before, at the beginning of my twenties, less because I had any special idea of cowboy life or big landscapes and more because I was rootless, and because public lands afforded me a way to live basically for free on permanent vacation. I could load up the truck with nothing but a few cans of beer and beans and a few books about botany and geology, and drive out and live for free until I got bored or lonely, which rarely took long, and then I'd trundle on into some strange town and talk to girls and weird old miners and get drunk and make friends. As long as I could remember, I'd been of the persuasion shared by a kind of grouchy old enviro type who would be mostly happy to see the vast zone from the Pacific Coast to Colorado reconverted to wilderness and turned back as a paradise to Indians and anyone else who could confine themselves to using arrowheads and hafted axes to make a living. But in the meantime I found that I rather liked hanging out and getting into trouble with tough rancher ladies and outlaws and weathered miners, who, at least at their best, basically seemed to express a wildness just as enriching as you'd get alone out in the woods.

Over time I felt myself more at home there than I'd felt in any of the dozen or so places I bounced around to in my early twenties, trying to find a place to settle, and so I took on a very personal distress when I began to notice how much the place was dividing itself into irreconcilable camps. This was roughly along the political and cultural lines on which the whole country was dividing itself, and the process was driven by the same forces, but in the West the public lands — half the region's surface, a third of the country's — and the question of how they should be managed had become an easy test for where you stood in what was starting to feel like a civilizational conflict. And even before the standoffs, when the issue was just the odd firebombing of a ranger station or sniper attack on Forest Service employee, the arguments were so personal and laden with the threat of violence that at first I simply wanted to understand what was going on. So I sought out militia guys and people on the angrier fringes of the rancher subculture. I wanted to document what I thought was an early slip in a national fault that was about to really come loose, and in part because I found it fascinating to watch an insurgency grow up on American soil, with mostly everyone outside the rural West totally unaware.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Chosen Country"
by .
Copyright © 2018 James Pogue.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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