The Plains Massacre (1992)
The “mixed” SATPO company (comprised of a combination of regular and irregular troops) deployed in southern Sanders county from late April 1992 had enjoyed an exceptionally unpleasant two months, even by the standards of the troops engaged in the slow and grinding counterinsurgency against the Northwest Front. As Operation Mountain Lion ran into a more and more pressing shortage of manpower, SATPO’s forward operating and patrol bases were relieved less and less frequently: three or four months of active operations became the norm for the progressively exhausted infantrymen.
The vast majority of these active operational periods would be spent in a state of at least some combat readiness, the monotony between the occasional “forward sweeps” in search of an enemy which was, by this point in the insurgency, more than capable of blending into the civilian population at the first sign of counterinsurgents, being relieved by an endless series of foot patrols to hunt for the increasingly common and dangerous improvised explosive devices which had slowed industrial and logistic traffic to a standstill in the area and to make SATPO’s presence known to a uniformly hostile local population, and a handful of running battles with SATPO insurgents which, it was felt by the troops, could kill unerringly and melt into the countryside, leaving nothing but shell casings and (occasionally) a dead NWF insurgent in their wake.
As the casualties suffered by the company steadily mounted through April and May (culminating in an IED’s fatal wounding of a popular sergeant while on a routine patrol in early June), the strain began to tell: the mutual distrust between the regulars and irregulars (most of whom were habitual petty criminals recruited from the Appalachia and West Texas CSRs) deepened to the point that fistfights had begun to break out between the two groups. The NCOs and officers, almost exclusively drawn from SATPO’s regular command structure, generally sided with the regulars.
A further fissure had developed in the company by early June, this time in its highest echelons. In accordance with the doctrine formulated by Kanne and Brennan, each company engaged in forward operations was to fall under the overall command of a regular Captain, assisted by an intelligence officer with the rank of Lieutenant whose responsibility was the coordination of local intelligence networks and the provision of advice on the overall scope and direction of the company’s operations. In this case, Captain A and Lieutenant R[1] openly loathed each other by this time: all communications between the two were made via intermediaries, with R taking advantage of the extent to which the powers of the Intelligence Lieutenant were undefined to undercut A at every opportunity, with the Captain in turn threatening a court-martial on their return to Aalto AFB.
The orders ostensibly received by Lt. R in the evening of 21 June 1992 came as something of a relief to the exhausted and paranoid company: on the morning of 22 June, they were to proceed to the small town of Plains (about fifteen miles away from their forward operating base), assemble those locals still remaining there and prepare them for transportation to a new civilian facility, in anticipation of the arrival of a detachment from the SATPO Mechanized Brigade. Unusually, the company would be permitted to use whatever force they deemed necessary to secure the pacification of the locals. In the last two months, the company had lost seven men in and around Plains: the removal of its population would at least allow them some more breathing room.
Virtually all of the events of the subsequent twenty-four hours have been the subject of dispute, the ensuing confusion only being partly unpicked by the findings of the 2007 Commission on the Northwest Montana Insurgency. The first key point of uncertainty lies in the briefings on the operational rules of engagement at platoon level in the early hours of 22 June 1992, which appears to have varied dramatically according to the temperament of the officer or NCO delivering the briefing: in at least one case, troopers were told that every civilian still present in Plains should be considered to be a member of the NWF.
Prior to the Insurgency, the small town of Plains had contained a population of around 1,000 people, mostly employed in the agricultural and logging collectives close by. To ensure compliance among the broadly NWF-sympathising population and to secure industrial supply chains, most men of working age had been moved onto these guarded collectives semi-permanently in 1991: by June 1992, the population of Plains had shrunk to slightly fewer than six hundred individuals, almost all women, children or the elderly. These civilians awoke at 0630 to find an entire SATPO company converging on Plains: they (and six exceptionally unlucky truckers who happened to have stopped overnight in Plains) were ordered to assemble in the community’s high school with their identity cards immediately while SATPO conducted a house-to-house sweep for hidden insurgents and weaponry. For this civilians, this was an irritation, but not an unprecedented one: multiple similar sweeps had been conducted in 1991 and the first half of 1992, and while it was rumoured that the population was to be transported to a purpose-built civilian facility, similar rumours had come to nothing in the past. Accordingly, it was in the expectation of several wasted and uncomfortable hours that the civilian population converged on the high school.
The processing of the population was properly underway by 0715: of the five hundred and eighty-three civilians examined at the school, fifty-five (including the truckers, the town’s doctor and two former People’s Militiamen), identified as potential NWF sympathisers or agents, were handed off to a small detachment under the command of Sergeant F to be temporarily held in Plains’ town hall (a multipurpose building which doubled as a grocery store under normal circumstances).
At some point between 0830 and 0845, a SATPO combat team, comprised exclusively of irregulars, which was conducting the door-to-door sweep of Plains heard a series of gunshots from close by: theories on their exact nature have ranged from a concealed NWF unit somewhere within the town attempting to disrupt the sweep to a jumpy member of another combat team firing at shadows to a simple accidental discharge. Whatever the cause, the combat team’s first course of action was to attempt to lay down supressing fire at the approximate source of the gunshots. To those members of the company guarding the civilians in the high school and town hall, it appeared, to all intents and purposes, that the NWF had chosen this moment to attack the overstretched and scattered SATPO troopers.
One of the truckers held in the town hall took the gunfire as an opportunity to try to escape: the first casualty of the Plains Massacre, he was shot by a SATPO trooper as he attempted to open the building’s first floor window. Confronted by what he believed to be a concerted attempt to overpower the badly outnumbered SATPO attachment guarding the high-risk detainees, Sergeant F gave his troopers the orders to open fire indiscriminately on the civilians, radioing the command post in the high school that his troops had been attacked by NWF elements among the detainees.
Demoralised, exhausted, paranoid and deprived for months of the chance for any real response to civilian hostility and NWF attacks, the remainder of the company collectively snapped. Several troopers started to shoot into the mass of civilians immediately, with others taking this as their signal to open fire themselves. Deafened by the firing and utterly unprepared for the rapidity of the company’s slide into anarchy (one eyewitness reported a trooper, who had expended all of his ammunition in the first couple of minutes of the firing, beating an eighty year old woman to death with the butt of his rifle), the officers present were entirely unable to maintain some sort of order, even if willing. Within five minutes of the first shot being fired, the two hundred or so civilians held for further processing in the high school’s gymnasium had been reduced to a mass of dead and severely wounded bodies, through which troopers walked, picking off survivors.
The shooting had spread to other areas of the school, in which civilians who were undergoing processing were held, by the time Captain A (commanding the operation from a vantage point outside Plains) was notified that anything was amiss. He arrived at the high school in time to see the final stages of the massacre: the gunfire had dwindled to a sporadic series of shots as any civilian who had attempted to hide in the high school was found and killed; one of the classrooms, into which about thirty civilians had been herded before a grenade was thrown through the door, was on fire; and several civilians who were attempting to flee were being picked off from a SATPO attachment on the school’s roof.
Captain A’s initial reaction to the scene is uncertain: although he claimed, in front of the 2007 Commission on the Northwest Montana Insurgency, that he was horrified at the events of the day, and immediately insisted that any medical attention available be provided to the handful of badly injured survivors in the high school before the spreading blaze from the classroom forced his men back, this account is badly at odds with the bland report that he and Lieutenant R drafted for the 1st SATPO Airborne Brigade in the afternoon of 22 June that Plains had been pacified, with multiple NWF and some civilian casualties being sustained in the course of a firefight, and that the population would no longer require processing to a civilian facility.
What is indubitably true is that the higher echelons of the company immediately embarked on a course of action designed to conceal the Plains Massacre to the greatest extent possible: bodies outside the high school were hauled into the gymnasium, the fire which ultimately gutted the building was allowed to burn unhindered, and the town hall was quietly demolished prior to the company’s withdrawal from Plains. The company’s casualties from the operation, tallied in the evening of 22 June were absurdly light: aside from persistent tinnitus on the part of the troopers in the gymnasium and one trooper lightly grazed by a stray bullet, the only casualty of note was one missing irregular trooper. Given the lack of serious civilian resistance, it was likely that he had become separated from the rest of his company and would make his own way back to the company’s forward operating base in the next day or so.
The trooper in question was one Paul Allemann: a drifter from the West Texas CSR, he was offered a position in the SATPO Irregular Division as an alternative to a brief prison term for habitual vagrancy. Disliking military discipline enormously, he had decided to desert prior to the Plains Massacre: the events of 22 June convinced him to flee immediately. Shellshocked and disgusted, he deserted his post on the perimeter of the high school and began walking in the vague direction of Idaho. Sleeping in the woods by day and travelling by night, he managed to make the seventy mile journey in three days, crossing the border somewhat north of Mullen. He was almost immediately apprehended by a PSA border patrol: detained for questioning, he proved all too happy to talk about SATPO and its recent actions. It became rapidly clear to the patrol’s commanding officer just how explosive Allemann’s testimony could become in the right hands.
[1] The 2007 Commission on the Northwest Montana Insurgency mandated anonymity for those troops who had participated in the Plains Massacre: it is known that Lieutenant R was killed in 1993 when his helicopter was shot down near Kalispell, while it is believed that Captain A was living somewhere in the Gulf Republic under an assumed identity, at least as of 2018.