As the stub of his cigar burned steadily, the thick white smoke that wafted my way delved me into the comfortable old memories of an America as Preston had known it. This is a nostalgia for a place where he said he remembered people had had values and morals, and a dedication to serve in order to keep their country safe– a quality he feels has been lost over the years.
“Most of our members just love America,” he said. “They’re not doing this because of personal reasons, but just because they remember what America used to be like. It was a different place then, and the values got lost in the shuffle. Now it’s just out of control.”
A retired parol officer and a Vietnam veteran with degrees in Criminal Justice and Ethics , Preston is the state director of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corp. in Oklahoma who traveled to King’s Anvil Ranch for the September muster. With an air of grand-fatherly wisdom, albeit arrogance, Preston explained that he felt first compelled to join the group when he began noticing the government had failed in “taking a stand on our southern borders.”
Since then, he said witnessing the mistreatment of the illegal immigrants by their coyotes has only encourages his opinion that the group is taking the right actions on the border.
“It’s so sad that these people are being victimized and in many cases, turned into slaves,” he said. “What upsets me, is that more people need to wake up and get involved to end some of this chaos.”
