Organizations: The Minutemen

Shrouded by a dawn fog, twelve men and a woman with camouflage suits, steel helmets and M-1 rifles darted from bush to boulder while working their way up a narrow ravine in the hilly Illinois countryside. Before its exercise was done, the squad had fought off an imaginary enemy with a 57-mm. recoilless rifle, practiced stream fording, lobbed practice .shells from a 60-mm. mortar, and bracketed a yellow-box target 150 yds. away.

In another exercise, halfway across the U.S. in California’s Anza Desert State Park, a group of San Diego men wearing Army fatigue clothes and carrying hunting rifles swung their Jeeps off U.S. Highway 78 and bivouacked. For two days they lived on cactus wrens, roast coyote, baked alligator lizard, boiled hairless caterpillar (“The hairy kind is poisonous”) and mesquite-bean coffee. They scaled cliffs, silently stalked one another through the desert brush, tossed Molotov cocktails made from 10-02. beer bottles filled with gasoline and stuffed with kerosene rags.

“Wanted.” Despite their warlike equipment and behavior, neither group was an arm of the U.S. military. They were units of a civilian organization called the Minutemen. Membership, in secret squads of six, twelve or sometimes 25 men and women, has grown to an estimated 12,000, mostly in the Midwest and West, with a 1963 target of 1,000,000. Purpose of the Minutemen: to be able to live off the land and fight back as guerrillas if the U.S. is invaded.

The Minutemen were organized two years ago by ten Midwestern duck hunters. Recalls Robert B. (for Bolivar) DePugh, 37; “We got to talking about how bad off the country would be in case of invasion, and how a group such as ours could become a guerrilla band. We were just talking at first, kicking it around. But somehow the idea caught on.” DePugh, a World War II Signal Corps radarman who now runs a pharmaceutical company, was chosen leader, established a national headquarters in Independence, Mo., set up a guerrilla training program and, to keep Minutemen records secret, began treating them with a chemical mixture that bursts into flame when exposed to air.

Since that time membership has grown through classified ads in Western newspapers (“Wanted: outdoorsmen, riflemen, Jeep owners for local mountain man group”) and by assimilating similar organizations already in being under different names. The group tries, not always successfully, to keep out crackpots. Once accepted, the recruit swears an oath: “I will never knowingly put myself in a position which would place me in a category of a Communist, pink, fellow traveler or sympathizer.” Training covers such subjects as weapons and supplies, family survival; the Minutemen read works on guerrilla tactics by such masters as China’s Mao Tse-tung and Cuba’s Che Guevara, along with a primer by DePugh on partisan fighting. Sample, advice: Don’t fight pitched battles with regular troops; stay friendly with the civilian population. The Minutemen squads support themselves with self-imposed dues (Sample: $1 initiation fee, 70¢ a month).

Buried Ammo. So far, the Minutemen have attracted mostly middle-class people with an average age of about 30. Some saw duty as Army Rangers or in the O.S.S.; a handful are on active military service now. Although some Minutemen belong to the way-right John Birch Society, the two organizations do not see eye to eye. Leader DePugh talked with Birch Founder Robert Welch, now recalls: “I did not find him impressive. He didn’t think much of our program either. He doesn’t even think the Russians have atomic weapons.”

One problem of the Minutemen is that different units have different ideas about the organization’s reason for being. DePugh sees the Minutemen as a combat group. He sanctions such operations as last week’s Illinois exercise, where everything from land mines to 20 mm. antitank guns were made available by a Collinsville, Ill. member who, as an ordnance expert, is licensed to buy and sell weapons under the National Firearms Act. But others, like the San Diego Minutemen, stress survival. Says San Diego Photographer William F. Colley, 39, under whose leadership 2,900 California Minutemen have buried medicine, supplies and 10,000 rounds of ammunition up and down the state: “We hope we never have to use that gear up in the mountains. But it’s not hurting us to put it there. And if we ever do need it, we’ll be better off than those folks buried under radioactive ash in their concrete coffins.”