THE SHERIFF

He's red-faced and sweating, fresh off a treadmill. "Had a close call with the old ticker a few years back," he explains, thumping his chest. "Been religious about gettin' in my daily jog ever since."

He sits back into his chair and scowls.

"Mind you," he says. "It's not that I like running on that treadmill. I hate that thing more than Satan. But sometimes you just gotta do things you don't want to."

I just didn't believe it at first. The federales came and did their little briefing, and I thought they were pullin' our legs. I went up to the head agent doing the briefing and pulled him aside. I said, "Brother, you didn't just come down here to mess with us, did you?"

He said "No sir."

I told him if he was trying to make us look like fools, that wasn't gonna sit well.

That's when he took me out back to one of his vans and showed me a rep. He asked me for my glasses.

I handed them over, and he scanned them and started printing out copies. Like three of them.

He said, "Now you got some spares." (Laughs.)

After that, he showed me how quickly you could use a rep to print out and assemble another one. He explained how if even one man had access to a couple of reps, he could turn it into a hundred real quick. These things would spread like a virus.

I still wasn't really following, even at this point. Like, I didn't see why this would be such an issue. But then the head agent showed me a video of somebody using reps to print out bombs. Straight up C4 charges.

He told me, "This thing is a terrorist's dream come true."

It all started to click for me after that. But the full reality of the situation didn't settle in until the raids got going and we started seeing what people were doing with them.

How many machines were there in Montana at this point?

Oh… it was probably just a dozen or so, at first. That's what we thought at least.

It's hard to say, because some people were pretty good at hiding 'em. And the Mormons were bringing them in as fast as they could.

All I knew was I had to follow orders and get these things out of peoples' hands, no matter what it took.

As a sheriff in a rural state, did you have trouble convincing people in your unit to enforce the warrants?

At first, yeah. We're all small-government libertarians, you know. Very strong second amendment types. So the idea of widespread raids, coordinated with the federal government... it definitely rankled some people.

But, to be honest, the fourth amendment—you know, searches and seizures—I've always believed you ought to take a more flexible attitude toward that one, at least when it comes to dealing with criminals. If you've gotta crack down on the bad guys to keep the good guys safe, I think that's a sacrifice worth making.

Not everybody saw it the same way as me at first, but that changed after we had our little encounter with the grenade man.

The "grenade man?"

Yessir. This was only the second day of the raids. This guy was holed up in his house, way out in the middle of nowhere. Beautiful area, lotta old trees.

The driveway was long, probably half a mile. And he saw one of our guys coming from down the road, I guess with a camera setup or something.

He had definitely been fantasizing about some kind of "last stand" like this for years. This was one of those guys who'd never forgotten what happened in Waco, all those years ago. Really had shit like that seared into his brain, you know?

So he'd started preparing, built his whole property up to be perfectly defensible. He had a manmade lake surrounding his house, with a big dam that doubled as the last stretch of his driveway. It was basically an island. And the whole property was surrounded by thick woods, so you couldn't get any vehicles through unless you crossed that driveway.

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When the first truck of ours crossed over the middle part of that damn, he triggered some kind of IED. Big blast. Killed our man in the truck. Blew a big ol' hole in the top half of the dam, too, but not enough to drain the lake.

Later that evening the feds came swarming in and called in a bunch of us local lawmen so we could see how it was done.

We all parked right on the other side of the dam. It was maybe 75 yards long. And at first the feds had their negotiator guy holler through a megaphone to try to talk this fellow down. He wasn't responsive, so they decided they were gonna send in a SWAT squad across that dam. By this time, they'd done a flyby with a little drone with some kind of special bomb-detecting cameras on it. So they knew there weren't anymore IEDs.

Well, that SWAT squad got right to the end of that dam when all the sudden you could hear a quiet little noise, like thoop. And this little black object came shootin' out the top window of the house. It happened too fast for the SWAT guys to get out of the way.

The object landed right at the feet of the guy in front and pop! Blew his goddamned leg off.

It wasn't like in the movies, you know, some huge fireball explosion. It was just a little cloud of black smoke and that popping noise.

The blast was small, probably no more than a five meter radius.

Only the guy in front was hurt, but he was hurt bad.

His squadmates got to him fast and started draggin' his ass back across that dam.

The guy in the house shot off three more, thoop, pop, thoop, pop, thoop, pop. Just blowing up all around the SWAT squad as they made their way back across the dam.

We figured out pretty quick that we weren't safe on that dam, so we all backed off a ways down the road to reconvene.

Then we just waited on a med copter to come pick up the guy with the mangled legs.

The feds tried to call up one of their gun experts. They needed to figure out what weapon this guy was using. But I guess nobody was answering.

Instead, one of the good ol' boys on the force came forward. He walked right up to the lead agent, who was standing near me, and told him he thought it was 40 millimeter grenades being fired out of a M203 attachment on an M4 carbine.

The agents were kinda lookin' at him funny after that, but the ol' boy pulled up a video on YouTube to show him what he was talkin' about, and it looked exactly like what we'd seen.

About that time is when we figured out that the grenade man had a replicator in his house.

How did you know?

Because of all the grenades.

He just started firing them things as fast as he could load them. Probably one every couple of seconds. He wasn't really aiming at anything, just showing off.

After a hundred or so explosions, we all were pretty sure where he was getting 'em from. No way a civilian would just have that much ammo lying around, even in Montana.

So at this point, we were pretty much settling in for the long haul. The only way to pull off a raid on the house would be to wait for nightfall and then come in through the woods on the other side of the property. Of course, there was really no telling what sort of booby-traps he'd have set up in there.

We figured he probably had enough food and ammo to last a few weeks—paranoid types like this guy are usually pretty well stocked up on supplies.

Nonetheless, we decided the least we could do would be to cut off his power, to take his rep offline.

The feds started digging around and found where this guy had buried powerlines leading to his house. After slicing a few of those, the house went black for a few minutes. But it wasn't long before we heard a gas-powered generator crank up and a few of his lights came back on. This dude had thought of everything.

There was a big debate among the brass on-site. Finally the lead agent made a phone call to his superiors and requested a drone strike.

A drone strike on an American citizen?

Sure. What, you think that was the first time it's ever happened? (Laughs.) Besides, this was a guy with access to potentially unlimited explosives.

The reasoning the lead agent gave on the phone made sense to me: there was no way to get a squad within proximity of the house for a non-lethal takedown. Plus, they needed to make sure he wasn't compromising the broader search-and-seizure operation by recording or even broadcasting footage of our activities.

The lead agent got approval from whoever it was he was talking to, and it wasn't but ten minutes later that the strike hit.

It was dark, so none of us were even aware that the thing was in the air above us.

One second the house was there and the next it was just a tower of flames. Absolutely massive explosion—even the feds kinda jumped when it hit.

I think the guy had been saving up a good bit of explosive material in his house, so the boom was a lot bigger than expected. You know, I'm not gonna lie, I was kinda surprised at the violence of the thing. Not just the explosion itself, I mean. But of the whole situation, how violent it got. And how quickly. But in my assessment, it was merited. That's an opinion that only got reinforced in the weeks after our little encounter with the grenade man.

Why's that?

People just started gettin' crazy. The machines kept spreading. And the violence was going both ways.

You know, I wasn't really on the front lines for a lot of it. I was just a local sheriff, so I only had my one little window into the action.

But you ask me what I say about the whole situation.

And from where I'm sittin', I say that just about everything we did was fully justified.