DAY 1 BY MICHAEL DIGREGORIO
My entry into the scrapper/outlaw survivalist subculture began less with a bang than three terrifying whimpers.
It was spring, 2002. Longhaired, gaunt Randy, the first scrapper I encountered offered the Cook’s Tour of the US Navy’s Chocolate Mountains Bombing and Gunnery Range. Well, so long as we drove my borrowed vehicle..
On a crisp Sunday morning the 670-sq. mile no-man’s-land stood eerie quiet. No jets. No helicopter warships. Huh, I thought to myself: do US and NATO pilots go to Mass before wreaking hell on Earth?…
Hauling into the range and the low mountains from the southwest, Randy and I met no resistance. Not the Global War version of Rat Patrol: the Marines running the range in Hummers topped by a heavy M-60 machinegun. Nor the undercover Homeland Security details; made all the more conspicuous by their shiny new, plain-wrap Dodge 4bys.On the other hand, signs of destruction loomed everywhere.
Eventually we reached a target or kill-zone, what Randy simply called “Airstrip”; but the cost was three tires ripped apart by shrapnel.It was only then that I realized we had broken down atop an enormous white X, maybe 20-25 yards in each direction.
The bulls-eye was chalked and painted across a slightly up-trending, horrifically scarred desert plain. As if it couldn’t get worse it did.
By terrifyingly loud orders of magnitude. US Navy F-18s, their wings pregnant with stocky bombs and long, thin missiles began to roar overhead.Randy then nodded west: a Navy SEAL team, firing heavy thudding weapons, advanced toward this same target.
While the only bailout or parachute a scrapper will ever see is that connected to a 2000-lb. bomb, they are a tenaciously resourceful bunch.Miraculously, after reaching another outlaw by cell-phone three truck tires arrived aboard a scrapped- out military vehicle.Sparking up a blunt, then exhaling with an ear-to-ear grin, Randy quipped, “…That’s what you call scrapper triple A (Automobile Club).”
DAY 1 (NIGHT) / DAY 2 BY OLIVIER HERMITANT
As a Frenchman, the American West has always fascinated me: the outlaws, Indians and cowboys. They have rocked my imagination as far as I remember, crawling out of my cradle, sneaking out to watch all the American Western movies. Then, later on, the outlaw-rebel movies like “Easy Rider”.
When Michael, Scrapper’s writer/co-producer first told me he wanted to write a book on this strange unknown outlaw subculture, I was working on another documentary about other group of outcasts in California's Mojave desert (SEE VIDEO LINK >>) FIND YOUR WAY HOME TRAILER
At that time, I asked myself: do I really want to venture on a second documentary while mine was not even done?
But, to contextualize that was a crazy time in the US, only a few months after 9-11.
Though what really struck me, from Michael’s anecdotes about the scrappers—beyond the crazy, Mad Max lifestyles—some of them apparently sought not just scrap metal but plastic explosive from the many unexploded bombs.
Did the military know about it?
Did they do anything about it?
Where was all that UXO (unexploded ordnance) going: On the black market for criminal cartels, outlaw motorcycle gangs, or perhaps to arm a sleeper cell of Al-Qaeda operatives already in the US?
So many questions came to mind; given the paranoia that swept the country I quickly put my other documentary on hold to pursue this one.
I phoned my friend Stephan, a longtime friend and fellow traveler. I explained that we’d be going way off beaten path, into a very marginal culture. Then I asked, rhetorically: “I have no idea how this will turn out, but I get a feeling that we are going to be on for a wild ride!”
When Stephan and I met Michael in Slab City, a sprawling welfare settlement/shanty town that edges the Chocolate Mountains bombing and gunnery range, Michael shared his first exposure to a scrapper named Randy.
Michael told us that when they finally reached the range, they almost immediately shredded three tires on bomb shrapnel. He placed an emergency cell call to AAA (the emergency tow company of Southern California).
The AAA operator replied, “Wait, hold on, excuse me sir but we have you on our On-Star radar now, it looks like you are stuck on… a bombing range! Can you verify that? Is that… correct?
”We all screamed with laughed, then headed to Randy’s place. Randy lives with his younger brother Ronnie on their deceased father’s five or six-acre patch of scrub just outside of Niland.
From his TV, against which a no-nonsense Remington shotgun leaned, Randy could monitor anyone approaching the property (transmitted from a small surveillance camera atop a telephone pole).
Walking us out to his yard Randy showed off piles of cluster bomb halves. He’d scavenged them from one of the deadliest impact areas or targets on the bombing range, called “Cluster Haven”. (In mid-air the water heater sized cluster tubes or halves split open, releasing hundreds of lethal bomblets just aboveground. Not all of them detach, or detonate though.)
Now who in their right mind shows off this kind of stuff to strangers? Maybe someone gacked up on meth!
Michael returned to LA that night to begin writing his first scrapper story. Stephan and I stayed, ending up on the floor of the brother’s trailer, a place as filthy nasty as anything I’ve experienced from Egypt to Peru.Before falling off to sleep amidst years of billowing dust and dirt, not to mention piles of cat, bat and dog shit and who knows what else, I pondered how many guns or explosives might lay beneath the floor.
I wondered how accommodating both of the brothers would be once their meth high wore off.
The next day we woke up in their doublewide mobile home, bombarded by as many sonic booms from Navy F-18 jets and Marine Corp Harrier bombers as strange feelings; now what?
At the same time we were very anxious to discover the bombing range. We tried to convince Randy to take us but he didn’t have a vehicle,
On the other hand, his brother Ronnie owned a beat-up, maybe 25-year old Chevy Suburban; but to convince him proved difficult. Compounding matters: the fact Ronnie’s driver license had been suspended.
Then again, do you really need a license to drive in a restricted area: for what, in all intents and purposes, is a war zone?
Randy was severely cash-poor. Nonetheless the action on the range had been hot and heavy over the previous two weeks. He hoped to score more metal. But, as he told us, you can't run the range if you don't have a really gnarly, battle-proven vehicle. No money, no scrapping. It was a vicious circle
Without cash Randy’s rig had been reduced to a dusty wreck, as forgotten and good-for-nothing as an old yard dog,
After both of them hit the glass pipe several times, Randy finally convinced Ronnie to bust out. We ended up siphoning gas from our car into the Suburban( (SEE VIDEO LINK>>) OLIVIER SIPHONING GAS FROM OUR CAR
When Randy stuck a screwdriver into the ignition, in lieu of a key, causing flames to shoot from the muffler, Stephan and I looked at each other.
My God, are we out of our minds?
We hopped in the truck with the whacky, tweaked out brothers, leaving a long trail of loud muffler backfires behind us. With Ronnie chugging one cheap beer after another—while driving—we headed towards the UPS-brown colored mountains in the distance… straight into a theatre of war.
As if things couldn’t get any sketchier, Randy and his brother fought nonstop.
Ronnie, already very high, kept the crazy amp on 11, looking mindlessly for unexploded tank-shells, turning the turret on a blown-up Viet Nam era tank and so on.
Yup, that was the sum of it all: Two brothers out of their respective minds on meth, unexploded bombs all over hell and back. Angry fighter-jets stuffed with 2000-lb. dumb bombs to $100,000 laser guided missiles roaring directly overhead. Eventually being chased from the range by either undercover Homeland Security agents, or a military patrol. (We didn’t stick around to get their badge numbers.)
As Stephan and I made way for home, we heard two songs on the car radio that all but framed that crazy-stupid adventure: “I Got You Under my Skin,” by Frank Sinatra, and AC/DC’s “TNT”. We were hooked!
As time went on, we went back for more. We wanted to go deeper inside this strange outlaw subculture, but had no idea what the consequences might be.
Heck, crazy as it sounds, many of the locals thought we were undercover FBI, ATF, or Homeland Security agents posing as filmmakers. Plus, we knew the military wouldn’t be at all pleased to know that not only were we trespassing, we were filming outlaws illegally accessing one of their most critical military ranges.
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