From the LA Times:
COLUMN ONE
A watcher sees across the divide
By Christopher Goffard, Times Staff WriterJune 23, 2007
Minuteman without a country.
Campo, Calif.
HE senses them out there in the dark, making their moves, trying to outsmart him. He's planted on a hill in the cab of his mud-splattered, jacked-up truck, a greenish 1976 Silverado with roof-mounted motion sensors, holes in the floorboard and a "Don't Tread on Me" sticker in the window. From the cab, he studies the valley below with night-vision goggles, Ruger revolver strapped to his ribs.
"I own the night, brother," says Max Kennedy, a lanky, sunburned man with a scraggly goatee and a voice like a fistful of desert gravel. In his 53 years, he says, he has driven a cab in Miami and ferried fur coats in New York, peddled marijuana and jewelry, played bass in a punk bank and marched with 1960s radicals. He has been a Gingrich Republican and a pagan, a seeker of meaning in the Kaballah and the sayings of Chairman Mao.
In his latest incarnation, he's a Minuteman staking out a small stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border in the beautiful, inhospitable mountains of southeast San Diego County. Untethered to job or family, he's one of three or four hard-core members who camp out here full time, trying to catch illegal immigrants as they cross.
But after 14 months living "in exile from the United States," he might be the most ambivalent of border warriors. His relations with other Minutemen are uneasy, his faith in the mission fraying, his sense of the migrants' desperation increasingly keen. Plus, the desert has its privations. He misses women and chicken cutlets and good conversation.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-max23jun23,1,4441386.story?coll=la-headlines-california&ctrack=2&cset=true
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