There are experiences that don't announce themselves as formative while they're happening. You don't feel the ground shift. You just notice, months or years later, that you are standing somewhere different than you were before -- and you trace it back.
Two things happened to me in the late 1970s at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington that I have written about separately over the years. A book I couldn't finish. A church I couldn't get out of fast enough. I've been thinking lately that they belong together, because they were teaching me the same lesson from opposite directions.
The Book
Picture the young man who would read that memoir.
I was a parachute rigger in the Strategic Air Command, working with B-52 bombers at a nuclear alert base in Spokane, WA. Fairchild AFB. I had a secret security clearance. I also had the longest hair on the base -- kept in something approaching regulation shape by a daily application of Dippity-Do hair gel, worn under my service cap until I got home and showered, mostly to wash off the JP-4 jet exhaust from packing drag chutes all day, partly to get my hair back to something resembling human. That annoyed my friends to no end as they had gotten $50 ticket for hair out of regs and had to -- and this really annoyed them -- pay for the haircut.
To put this in perspective, I got awards for my work in the survival equipment shop, the parachute shop, which came with a three-day pass (not attached to the weekend -- WHY?), I received a Good Conduct medal. I wasn't a rabble rouser, but I questioned authority. At least internally. I got away with a lot. How? I read the manual. Literally. I knew what I could get away with and how far to go. When questioned, I'd state the regs and, I was always right (or I wouldn't do whatever it was).
Think, when higher ups give you grief, and you say, "Fine, I'm packing these chutes 100% by the T.O." Technical Manual, which they knew would take forever. I wasn't a wise guy. I had a sense of humor, I was likeable. I made other people look good. I played the game. I think when I got out of the service, it broke our Shop Sergeant's heart, seriously. He told me he saw me as a son. I miss the guy. But I wasn't staying in. I got out and went to college.
When I turned twenty-one I bought my first legal handgun -- a Walther PPK/S .380, from a department store in Spokane. Great firearm. I'd had a .357 Magnum since I was eighteen, acquired from a friend in circumstances that were not exactly textbook legal (see The Teenage Bodyguard, an award winning screenplay). But the Walther was mine -- properly. The older gentleman in a suit looked at me across the store counter at -- a young guy, hair tool long for regs -- and said he didn't believe I was actually in the service. I showed him my USAF ID with security clearance. He said, "Okay, I believe you. But, how--? He spent a moment marveling at the hair while he completed the paperwork.
That was who picked up Westmoreland's book. Not a naive kid. Not a credentialed analyst. A young man who read the newspaper, watched the evening news, carried a concealed weapon legally, worked with nuclear weapons delivery systems, and had been listening for years to his older brother's friends -- seven years his senior -- who had come back from Vietnam with stories that often bore little resemblance to official accounts.
Not My Lai level atrocities, but close enough to the edges of things to make a person skeptical. The Pentagon Papers had been public for several years by then. I hadn't read them cover to cover, but I had absorbed what they meant: that military leadership had been systematically misrepresenting the war to the American public while privately knowing better.
So, when I picked up General William Westmoreland's memoir when it came out, A Soldier Reports (Doubleday, 1976), I came to it with genuine respect. He was the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. Whatever you thought of the war, the man had carried an enormous burden. I gave him every benefit of the doubt a young reader could give.
I signed up Vietnam era service. Delayed enlistment until there was a job opening for Law Enforcement. September 1975. That summer the war ended. I got all the war benefits on the G.I. Bill but they eventually recategorized me, Post Vietnam Era.
So I got into Westmorland's book. And for a while, it worked. He wrote with authority and precision. He knew things I didn't. He was, by any measure, a subject matter expert.
But somewhere somewhere around the midway point, something shifted. The book began to construct a world I didn't recognize.
Westmoreland's argument, laid out with great confidence and considerable detail, was essentially this: the military had a sound strategy; the war was winnable; what went wrong was the failure of civilian leadership, the interference of politicians, the distortions of the press, and the damage done by the antiwar movement.
The military, he contended, had been betrayed from within and from without. Victory had been stolen.
I remember the feeling of reading that and thinking: but I was there for this. Not in Vietnam -- but alive, paying attention, reading the news, talking to guys who just came back from there, mostly -- messed up guys. I knew about the body count metrics that Westmoreland had built his entire strategy around, already widely exposed as manipulated and strategically meaningless. I knew that the same Pentagon Papers documenting civilian failures also documented military leadership providing falsely optimistic assessments to Washington while privately knowing the picture was far darker. I knew what those B-52s I worked with had been doing over North Vietnam and Cambodia. I knew the guys who had worked on them other there. I worked with them every day.
Westmoreland wasn't lying in the way a con artist lies. I don't think he was cynical. I think he genuinely believed his version. That was almost scarier. He had taken the enormous complexity of a failed war -- a war with deep strategic contradictions, moral catastrophes, and institutional failures at every level -- and recast it as a story in which he and the military were the heroes, and everyone else was the villain. He hadn't written history.
He had written mythology, dressed in the uniform of history.
I didn't have a word for it then. I do now. It's the stab-in-the-back thesis -- the same narrative structure that German militarists used after World War I, blaming civilian betrayal for military defeat, which fed directly into the conditions that produced Nazism. Applied to Vietnam, it became the founding myth of a certain kind of American right-wing grievance politics that is still very much with us.
What I knew, in my bones, before I had any of that language, was simpler: this doesn't add up, and he's asking me to forget what I already know in order to accept it. I wondered about the leadership above me at the time in the service, who were the same guys who were in Vietnam.
I put the book down.
That was when I discovered a theory. Conspiracy theory. Now when you have a theory of a group doing something unknown openly, and they are doing something bad, it may well be a conspiracy. They happen. Usually, they are uncovered for a variety of reason. One I noticed in the military. It doesn't run perfect, except through a lot of effort and determination. That's doing good things. If those were bad things? Different animal altogether.
THAT'S what the conspiracy theorists of today don't seem to comprehend.
I started studying not the conspiracy itself, but the nature of conspiracy thinking. Rather than diving into Westmoreland's specific claims and trying to refute them one by one -- which is the rabbit hole -- I started asking: how does this kind of argument work? What are the structural features that tell you something has gone from analysis to mythology? My older brother, encountering the same kind of thing, tended to defer to the expert. I went the other direction. Trust but verify. I became interested in the architecture of false certainty.
Also, it explains a lot about how I think. How I later ended up at university getting a psychology degree as what my department advisor professor had said (and I questioned him on this, but he thought about it and said that, yes, he was sure), I was one of the top psychology undergrads at any university in the nation. Damn. I mean, cool.
Anyway, that mental divergence has shaped everything I've written about politics since.
The Church
About a year or two after I set down Westmoreland's book, I was at the base gym as my friend in the shop with me and I did daily. One day racquetball. Next day, weightroom. We'd gotten friendly with the equipment room attendant over borrowing equipment from the gym (don't remember now, what?) -- the usual slow accumulation of gym friendship, guy talk, nothing remarkable. We made one another laugh. He seemed, cool. Normal. Mostly was.
Then one day he asked if I wanted to come to his church. He said I could bring my wife. My friend could come too (he begged off immediately). He also said later, I could bring my gun.
That last part was odd enough that I decided to actually bring it, obviously to carry concealed -- the Walther PPK/S -- which I was legally entitled to do. Something about the invitation had put me on alert without quite articulating why. Go to church -- with a gun. Not the old Slovak Catholic church I had grown up going to, had been head altar boy at.
He picked us up at my house and drove us out of Spokane on a Sunday morning, his wife with him, my wife and me in the back of his, what passed back then for an SUV. We crossed the state line into Idaho. I got nervous and asked about it. He said not to worry -- no concealed carry permit required in Idaho, and where we were going it wouldn't be an issue. Crossing the state line was only peripherally on my mind, why were we leaving the STATE?
But still. I held a secret security clearance. I worked with nuclear weapons delivery systems. I was crossing a state line carrying a weapon, heading to an unknown location. The math on that was not comfortable. Being in the service changes things legally for a military person. Breaking any law with a secret clearance is worse, with nuclear weapons clearance, much worse. he didn't have that. It never occurred to me about that disparity, honestly, until right now -- as I write this.
The compound was in the hills of Idaho. Locked gate. He had to call on a phone out of a box by the gate. Someone came down, unlocked the gate, let us drive and, locked the gate, and followed us up. We saw a traditional church with a steeple. A well in the center of the property. Several men in grey uniforms designed to look just different enough from Nazi uniforms that you technically couldn't call them Nazi uniforms -- except for the salute, which was identical. When I noted the resemblance, they were offended. "We're not Nazis!" (no, neo-Nazis, maybe)
The name of the organization was the Church of Our American Christian Heritage. I'll never forget it. I have since learned to treat any church name containing the words "American" or "Heritage" as a yellow flag. A church that has all the answers is another. I'm reminded of the last episode of The Boys, on Amazon Prime, where head sociopathic superhero Homelander has gone off the deep end and started the "Democratic Church of America." With Homelander himself as head, not as leader, literally as -- God.
But I digress...
Their national leader had come up from Georgia specifically to speak that Sunday. He didn't know my wife and I were there as complete outsiders. Newbies. He didn't filter himself. He let loose -- a full accounting of their beliefs, their grievances, their vision of a purified nation, their contempt for nonwhites, their specific disgust at Vancouver, B.C., which apparently represented for him a kind of living offense against nature and civilization. The old ladies of the congregation were the most virulent true believers in the room.
Let me be clear about Vancouver, British Columbie, Canada. I've been there and Victoria, on Vancouver Island since I was a kid, with my family. I love it there. Love Canada, like a cousin, or a brother even. I was OFFENDED, right off.
My wife spent the entire service sitting close to me, gripping my sleeve hard enough to nearly tear it from the shoulder, occasionally leaning close to whisper urgently: Get us out of here.
I heard my sleeve rip twice by the shoulder seam. Once in church, once as we were headed out of church.
The older woman in the back surrounded us and oh my God, I'd never met old people, anyone that racist. The national leader came up and introduced himself. Big smile. He apologized for cutting loose like that. He was just told we were new.
I smiled and shook his hand and said, "No, I'm glad you did. Good to hear exactly what you believe." I braced myself for his reading my meaning, if not sarcasm. I mean, I was being honest. The next second was interminable. Then he broke into a huge smile (it worked). He had decided he liked us a LOT.
We got out as soon as we could. Services were over. We all made out goodbyes, and my "friend" drove us home. We made small talk along the way, did all we could to keep him and his wife at ease -- he talked about getting together again. He dropped us at home and drove off smiling and waving.
The next day I considered reporting him and his group to the base authorities. They needed to know about this. I told my racquetball friend in the shop that day. He said he'd drop by after work at my house.
When he stopped by that afternoon, he had thought about it. He got me alone and talked to me about what he had come up with. He did his best to talk me out of telling anyone on base anything. I wasn't having it.
Until. He pointed something out, reasonably and chillingly. "They picked you guys up here yesterday morning?" "Yes." "They dropped you off -- here." "Yes." "So Those people know exactly where you both live. And when your wife would be home alone?" "Uh, yeah..."
I never went back to that window at the gym to get equipment. Neither did he. From then on, we brought our own. We never spoke to him again. Not long after, we noticed he wasn't around the gym anymore and we wondered about that, for a very long time.
What They Had In Common
It was a general construction of an alternate history -- of a war. They were a quasi-military white nationalist congregation in the Idaho hills. On the surface, very different things.
But the underlying structure was identical.
Both were communities of people who had taken real grievances -- about the war, about social change, about lost certainty -- and converted them into a sealed explanatory system that could not be falsified. In both cases, the complexity of the actual world had been replaced by a story with clear heroes and villains. In both cases, outside information was not evidence to be weighed -- it was enemy propaganda to be rejected. In both cases, belonging to the group meant accepting the story, and the story protected the group from reality.
The difference was one of degree, not of kind.
Westmoreland's version was respectable, credentialed, published by Doubleday, reviewed in major newspapers. The Idaho congregation's version came with grey uniforms and a compound with a well and a sheriff who wouldn't come onto the property. They passed newsletters about their grievances; there was no internet back then to help a subculture such as they were explode upon the American psyche.
But they were running the same cognitive operating system. Wounded certainty, calcified into mythology, defended against all comers.
I didn't know then that I was watching the seedbed of what would eventually become the American political landscape of the 2010s and 2020s. The stab-in-the-back Vietnam narrative fed directly into a politics of grievance and betrayal that never fully went away. The Christian nationalist militia movements of the inland Northwest were not anomalies -- they were early iterations of something that would eventually find mainstream political expression.
I didn't know at the time about the confederates who after the Civil War had migrated up to the Pacific Northwest and made a new home free of the government for the most part in the east of Oregan, the east of Washington state, and in Idaho. Especially in the back hills, the back roads, the roads less travelled certainly by government officials.
My late older right wing MaGA brother now gone about a month (miss ya big guy, sad as our interactions were this last decade of the Trump infection), had moved years ago to Home, across Puget Sound via the Narrows Bridge, the other side of Highway 16 from Gig Harbor. It's a community on the Key Peninsula and borders the waters of Carr Inlet, an extension of Puget Sound.
He had told me that those citizens who had enough of the "bullshit of Tacoma government" had moved there and called it "Home" because it wasn't Tacoma, it was, home.
What protected me about this kind of mind worm dynamic, I think, was not superior intelligence or education -- I was a young enlisted man without a college degree, smelling of JP-4 jet fuel exhaust by mid-morning after packing B-52 drag chutes, with my longish hair shellacked under my service cap, "white walls" of shaved skin surrounding my ears to put on a good show for the annoying "lifers", but not so much the "career enlisted" (who we differentiated, as they were just trying to get through to retire one day but not thoroughly "ate up" like some old codgers were).
What protected me was a combination of things: a grandmother who taught me that books demanded honesty, and to finish one when you started it; an older brother's friends who told me what Vietnam actually looked like from the ground; a willingness to trust my own perception when it told me something didn't add up; and the crucial decision to study the form of bad thinking rather than just the content of any specific claim.
You cannot fact-check your way out of a mythology. The mythology has already inoculated its believers against facts.
What you can do is recognize the architecture -- the sealed system, the designated enemy, the unfalsifiable narrative, the group that has all the answers -- and decline to enter.
I learned that from a book I couldn't finish and a church I couldn't leave fast enough.
Both were trying to sell me a story in exchange for my grip on reality.
I kept the grip.
Related posts: - A Book I Couldn't Finish – And How It Taught Me About Truth, Authority, and Conspiracy Thinking (January 2026) - Church and Guns (May 2016) - Conspiracy Theories – Incompetence More Than Insight? (April 2014) - America's Dezinformatsiya and компрометирующий (August 2019)
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
JZ Murdock is a filmmaker and author based in Bremerton, Washington. His novel Death of Heaven was honored with the New York City Big Book Award for Horror. His film Pvt. Ravel's Bolero has been lauded worldwide with many international festival awards. The film companion book is forthcoming.
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