Welcome to Home of the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier. Today I have an interview with one of the men occupying the headquarters of the Malhear National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon. I happened to be in the area when it started on January 2nd.

I was doing some ski reconnaissance of the Wallawa Mountains, minding my own business when I heard the story on the news.

Amundi, son of Claievin Bundy, along with some armed compatriots, had decided to begin the overthrow of the federal government by occupying a faraway bird refuge on the lonesome sagebrush prairie.

It didn't seem to make sense.

Then that night in a room at the Mingo Motel I saw a tearful YouTube testimonial by Ammon Bundy where he says he's following God's orders and I realized it didn't need to make sense because God told him to do it.

It took me a couple of days to complete my reconnaissance and then I drove over to the

Bird Refuge wanting to talk to Ammon about his religious experiences.

But when I got there, Ammon was busy being surrounded by reporters and cameraman answering questions, none of which had to do with religion.

I don't like being around reporters. They're actually very uptight people and there were

about a hundred of them.

Three satellite uplink trucks with their engines running.

Al Jazeera, the Guardian, MS NBC, Burms of cameras and microphones set up on the road leading down to the headquarters.

The headquarters was five or six sandstone buildings, surrounded by large trees

set next to a lake, now frozen and covered with six inches of snow.

It's a nice place, or it would be if there weren't men walking around with guns acting

like they own it, followed by a hundred reporters desperate for stories.

It was an absurd situation like a reality show where everybody's trying to figure out the rules, arguing about how to

interpret the Constitution. The cops, officers of the law, were nowhere to be

seen. Ammon was busy, so I started talking to this guy who said he'd been there from the beginning.

Yeah, this is Brand Thornton and here we are at the refuge outside of Burns, Oregon.

Brand Thornton.

Yes.

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