A Brief Catalogue of the Dead II (1994)
A Brief Catalogue of the Dead II (1994)
The two weeks of fighting between Kanne’s death and the final evacuation of SATPO’s forces in Northwest Montana were the bloodiest of the First Northwest Montana Insurgency: as the NWF and Reconstituted Nauvoo Legion finally pried the last areas of government control from the military mission’s withered grip, more dead and missing persons are recorded than during the first three years of the Insurgency put together. As with the two hundred and eighty-three dead in 1988, a selection of ten indicative casualties (chosen from among the eighteen hundred killed between 27 February and 15 March 1994) should give a general impression of the scale of the disaster confronting SATPO. There is less of 1988’s black humour in evidence here: the past five years of counter-insurgent activity had seen to that.
Mike Newell (54): A machinist employed in a collective outside Polson, Newell was doomed to a slow and unpleasant death when his supplies of insulin were cut off by the NWF’s seizure of the road leading to Missoula. By the time refills of medical supplies had resumed, Newell had slipped irreversibly into a diabetic coma.
Nora Witt (87): Witt passed away in her sleep unexpectedly the night after civilian authorities in Butte had announced a further decrease in civilian food rations. Her family failed to notify their block commissioner of her death, continuing to accept her food parcel on her behalf for several weeks. Amidst the chaos of the insurgents’ spring offensive and due to her age, no investigation was conducted regarding her death: in 2014, however, Nora Witt’s granddaughter (eight at the time of Nora’s death) wrote a memoir of the First Northwest Montana insurgency in which she recounts watching her father smother his mother with a pillow.
Dennis Finch (17): Like the rest of Eureka’s civilian population, Finch had endured four and a half years of daily reminders of SATPO oppression: his life a never-ending cycle of pass inspections and petty humiliations, he and three friends saw the collapse of government authority as an opportunity to get some revenge on their own and prove themselves to the rapidly approaching forces of the NWF by attacking the forward operating base slightly outside the town. Unfortunately, the FOB in question was manned by of the few platoons actually willing and able to defend itself at this late stage: armed with fifty-year-old deer-hunting rifles, and attacking across open ground, Finch and his friends were killed almost offhandedly. Eight hours later, on the arrival of an insurgent unit, the SATPO platoon negotiated a surrender, handing over their heavy armament in exchange for an escort to Great Falls.
Eugene Morgan (51): The boss of a lumber compound in Darby, Morgan had received his current position by denouncing his superior to SATPO and had embarked on a programme of enthusiastic collaboration with local military authorities: although never officially proven, rumours had circulated around the compound for years about his extorting sexual favours from typists under the threat of being reported for aiding insurgents. Finally acknowledging the writing on the wall after the death of Kanne, Morgan managed to get a place on a truck evacuating key military personnel. At a roadblock outside Darby, the SATPO infantrymen accompanying him stopped the truck and handed Morgan over to a NWF unit (as agreed under a prior arrangement to secure safe passage of the truck to the PSA border). On the NWF’s official entrance into Darby the next day, Morgan’s flayed corpse was prominently displayed from the captured IFV employed as a mobile headquarters by the local NWF commander.
Audrey Lutz (12): Lutz’s parents sent out their daughter to scavenge food from an abandoned building near to their house in Missoula, under the assumption that the authorities would be more lenient to a female pre-teen looter. In this, they had badly miscalculated: Lutz was publicly shot, along with five other captured looters, as Missoula’s military administration desperately tried to prevent the collapse of any sort of order in the face of the general insurgent advance.
Tony Becker (33): A low-level bureaucrat in Helena, Becker was coscripted into a “popular defence unit”, a desperate attempt by Helena’s local government to slow the Reconstituted Nauvoo Legion (by now advanced as far as Deer Lodge and with a couple of hours from Helena) . Given half an hour of cursory firearms training, he was loaded, along with a dozen other civilians, into a requisitioned APC. On the drive to Deer Lodge, he discovered that the clips of ammunition that he had been issued were the wrong calibre for his antiquated army surplus rifle. He was in the middle of pointing this out to his “unit leader” (in civilian life a slightly higher-ranking bureaucrat) when the APC hit a landmine: Becker and the other dazed survivors were killed in the ensuing ambush fifteen seconds later.
Thomas Schafer (26): an unpopular SATPO lieutenant, Schafer was shot in his Seeley Lake FOB by own men who, unpaid and unsupplied for three months, judged that they were more likely to survive as unaffiliated bandits than as members of a functionally dead military structure. Ultimately, this brought them six extra months of life – running into a joint NWF-RNL anti-bandit sweep in September, they were overpowered after a brief firefight, with the survivors being hanged by the side of the road as a deterrent to any other would-be looters.
Jane Locklear (2): Locklear’s parents were part of the initial wave of volunteers from the Appalachian CSR seeking a better life in Northwest Montana: born in the Dillon “civilian facility”, her entire life had been spent in what were essentially prison conditions. The Locklear family, along with about thirty other civilians, abandoned the Dillon facility as part of a convoy headed by a low-ranking SATPO officer, who reasoned that he could almost certainly buy his way through any roadblocks they might encounter. This worked on the first two units of insurgents, who were quite happy to wave the truck through in exchange for dried food and jerrycans of petrol (the CSA’s paper money having no real value under the conditions prevailing in Northwest Montana). Unfortunately, the third roadblock was manned exclusively by insurgents who had lost wives, parents and children in the Plains Massacre. After the handful of men of fighting age within the convoy had been disarmed, the SATPO infantrymen and civilians were marched to a clearing fifty feet from the road: there, they were all quietly and systematically shot. This massacre was one of several similar cases brought before the 2007 Commission on the Northwest Montana Insurgency: like the others, the unwillingness of any of the insurgents to incriminate each other meant that prosecution of any of them was essentially impossible.
John O’Connor (44): A logger and outdoorsman, O’Connor was commissioned by a half-dozen “sensitive persons” held in the Dillon civilian facility to guide them over the border into the PSA. Abandoning their vehicle at Jackson, he led his escortees down a vaguely-remembered thirty-mile track which should bring them into Salmon in Idaho after two days of strenuous walking: fifteen miles into this track, he stumbled upon a small anti-personnel device set up in 1986 by People’s Militia patrolmen fighting the cross-border drug trade. His body was found three months later by a trapper – it is assumed that the people accompanying him, hopelessly lost, succumbed to the elements shortly thereafter.
Brian Jankowski (38): One of the first NWF insurgents through the perimeter at Aalto AFB (abandoned under the conditions of truce established with SATPO’s airborne brigades on 15 March), Jankowski was killed when attempting to open a seemingly overlooked ammunition locker which turned out to have been booby-trapped by retreating government forces in a final, spiteful gesture.
These deaths (largely unremarked outside the victim’s immediate circle) were mostly forgotten in the years to come. It is, instead, another killing with which the last death agonies of Operation Mountain Lion are indelibly associated: one occurring sixteen days after Kanne’s and just as shocking, but infinitely more sadistic.
The two weeks of fighting between Kanne’s death and the final evacuation of SATPO’s forces in Northwest Montana were the bloodiest of the First Northwest Montana Insurgency: as the NWF and Reconstituted Nauvoo Legion finally pried the last areas of government control from the military mission’s withered grip, more dead and missing persons are recorded than during the first three years of the Insurgency put together. As with the two hundred and eighty-three dead in 1988, a selection of ten indicative casualties (chosen from among the eighteen hundred killed between 27 February and 15 March 1994) should give a general impression of the scale of the disaster confronting SATPO. There is less of 1988’s black humour in evidence here: the past five years of counter-insurgent activity had seen to that.
Mike Newell (54): A machinist employed in a collective outside Polson, Newell was doomed to a slow and unpleasant death when his supplies of insulin were cut off by the NWF’s seizure of the road leading to Missoula. By the time refills of medical supplies had resumed, Newell had slipped irreversibly into a diabetic coma.
Nora Witt (87): Witt passed away in her sleep unexpectedly the night after civilian authorities in Butte had announced a further decrease in civilian food rations. Her family failed to notify their block commissioner of her death, continuing to accept her food parcel on her behalf for several weeks. Amidst the chaos of the insurgents’ spring offensive and due to her age, no investigation was conducted regarding her death: in 2014, however, Nora Witt’s granddaughter (eight at the time of Nora’s death) wrote a memoir of the First Northwest Montana insurgency in which she recounts watching her father smother his mother with a pillow.
Dennis Finch (17): Like the rest of Eureka’s civilian population, Finch had endured four and a half years of daily reminders of SATPO oppression: his life a never-ending cycle of pass inspections and petty humiliations, he and three friends saw the collapse of government authority as an opportunity to get some revenge on their own and prove themselves to the rapidly approaching forces of the NWF by attacking the forward operating base slightly outside the town. Unfortunately, the FOB in question was manned by of the few platoons actually willing and able to defend itself at this late stage: armed with fifty-year-old deer-hunting rifles, and attacking across open ground, Finch and his friends were killed almost offhandedly. Eight hours later, on the arrival of an insurgent unit, the SATPO platoon negotiated a surrender, handing over their heavy armament in exchange for an escort to Great Falls.
Eugene Morgan (51): The boss of a lumber compound in Darby, Morgan had received his current position by denouncing his superior to SATPO and had embarked on a programme of enthusiastic collaboration with local military authorities: although never officially proven, rumours had circulated around the compound for years about his extorting sexual favours from typists under the threat of being reported for aiding insurgents. Finally acknowledging the writing on the wall after the death of Kanne, Morgan managed to get a place on a truck evacuating key military personnel. At a roadblock outside Darby, the SATPO infantrymen accompanying him stopped the truck and handed Morgan over to a NWF unit (as agreed under a prior arrangement to secure safe passage of the truck to the PSA border). On the NWF’s official entrance into Darby the next day, Morgan’s flayed corpse was prominently displayed from the captured IFV employed as a mobile headquarters by the local NWF commander.
Audrey Lutz (12): Lutz’s parents sent out their daughter to scavenge food from an abandoned building near to their house in Missoula, under the assumption that the authorities would be more lenient to a female pre-teen looter. In this, they had badly miscalculated: Lutz was publicly shot, along with five other captured looters, as Missoula’s military administration desperately tried to prevent the collapse of any sort of order in the face of the general insurgent advance.
Tony Becker (33): A low-level bureaucrat in Helena, Becker was coscripted into a “popular defence unit”, a desperate attempt by Helena’s local government to slow the Reconstituted Nauvoo Legion (by now advanced as far as Deer Lodge and with a couple of hours from Helena) . Given half an hour of cursory firearms training, he was loaded, along with a dozen other civilians, into a requisitioned APC. On the drive to Deer Lodge, he discovered that the clips of ammunition that he had been issued were the wrong calibre for his antiquated army surplus rifle. He was in the middle of pointing this out to his “unit leader” (in civilian life a slightly higher-ranking bureaucrat) when the APC hit a landmine: Becker and the other dazed survivors were killed in the ensuing ambush fifteen seconds later.
Thomas Schafer (26): an unpopular SATPO lieutenant, Schafer was shot in his Seeley Lake FOB by own men who, unpaid and unsupplied for three months, judged that they were more likely to survive as unaffiliated bandits than as members of a functionally dead military structure. Ultimately, this brought them six extra months of life – running into a joint NWF-RNL anti-bandit sweep in September, they were overpowered after a brief firefight, with the survivors being hanged by the side of the road as a deterrent to any other would-be looters.
Jane Locklear (2): Locklear’s parents were part of the initial wave of volunteers from the Appalachian CSR seeking a better life in Northwest Montana: born in the Dillon “civilian facility”, her entire life had been spent in what were essentially prison conditions. The Locklear family, along with about thirty other civilians, abandoned the Dillon facility as part of a convoy headed by a low-ranking SATPO officer, who reasoned that he could almost certainly buy his way through any roadblocks they might encounter. This worked on the first two units of insurgents, who were quite happy to wave the truck through in exchange for dried food and jerrycans of petrol (the CSA’s paper money having no real value under the conditions prevailing in Northwest Montana). Unfortunately, the third roadblock was manned exclusively by insurgents who had lost wives, parents and children in the Plains Massacre. After the handful of men of fighting age within the convoy had been disarmed, the SATPO infantrymen and civilians were marched to a clearing fifty feet from the road: there, they were all quietly and systematically shot. This massacre was one of several similar cases brought before the 2007 Commission on the Northwest Montana Insurgency: like the others, the unwillingness of any of the insurgents to incriminate each other meant that prosecution of any of them was essentially impossible.
John O’Connor (44): A logger and outdoorsman, O’Connor was commissioned by a half-dozen “sensitive persons” held in the Dillon civilian facility to guide them over the border into the PSA. Abandoning their vehicle at Jackson, he led his escortees down a vaguely-remembered thirty-mile track which should bring them into Salmon in Idaho after two days of strenuous walking: fifteen miles into this track, he stumbled upon a small anti-personnel device set up in 1986 by People’s Militia patrolmen fighting the cross-border drug trade. His body was found three months later by a trapper – it is assumed that the people accompanying him, hopelessly lost, succumbed to the elements shortly thereafter.
Brian Jankowski (38): One of the first NWF insurgents through the perimeter at Aalto AFB (abandoned under the conditions of truce established with SATPO’s airborne brigades on 15 March), Jankowski was killed when attempting to open a seemingly overlooked ammunition locker which turned out to have been booby-trapped by retreating government forces in a final, spiteful gesture.
These deaths (largely unremarked outside the victim’s immediate circle) were mostly forgotten in the years to come. It is, instead, another killing with which the last death agonies of Operation Mountain Lion are indelibly associated: one occurring sixteen days after Kanne’s and just as shocking, but infinitely more sadistic.
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