Photo by Robert Burroughs

“Long as you got ahold of that bomb, it’s yours, but if another junker comes along and grabs it, even if you saw it first, why, it’s his.”

In late January of this year, during the same moonlit nights when the United States military was bombing Iraq, the U.S. was also bombing California. Not the mythical California of simulated tropical paradises and never-ending abundance. The California that was being bombed was a nearly ignored but mysteriously beautiful mountain range in the rugged desert of Imperial County.

Chocolate Mountains. Many homes in towns like Niland and Calipatria have hanging over their mantle a set of deer antlers that came out of the Chocolates.

While the civilians of Iraq, we are told, were fleeing into Jordan to escape the pestilence from the sky, the citizens of Imperial County — or at least a considerable number of them — were waiting not so patiently on the early-morning fringes of the Chocolate Mountains Aerial Gunnery Range.

If the military built a fence around the range today, it would be in shreds tomorrow.

Within minutes after the bombing stopped and the dark planes turned and flew almost silently to their aircraft carriers waiting 100 miles away on the coast, ragged crews of homeless, impoverished, drug-addicted, or simply brain-addled “range runners” grabbed their plastic buckets and raced each other to the target areas, where they began greedily picking through the rubble of wealth that the United States military had rained down upon them.

These brass, 40-miliimeter machine-gun shells, these aluminum fin mounts from 500-pound bombs, these twisted shreds of aluminum shrapnel would feed their children and put gasoline in their tanks.

These brass, 40-miliimeter machine-gun shells, these aluminum fin mounts from 500-pound bombs, these twisted shreds of aluminum shrapnel would feed their children, put gasoline in their broken-down machines, and, at least for some of the range runners, would calm the horrible drug cravings already pounding in their veins. In some ways the scene was like the biblical Israelites going into the desert each morning to gather up manna.

Ken Hines of K&W Metals: “There are maybe four or five dealers in Imperial County who buy scrap off the range, and so far none of us has been harassed by the law."

By midmorning, the rattly old Bonnevilles and El Caminos, with their mufflers bellowing and their leaky head gaskets spewing clouds of blue smoke, come limping up to the loading dock at K&W Metals, on the outskirts of Niland, California. K&W Metals consists of a sunny but badly battered warehouse beside the railroad tracks and an oil-stained parking lot littered with pieces of dead machines. A hand-painted sign out front reads: "Buying aluminum, copper, brass, batteries, iron. 7 days.” In the eastern distance, rising up colorfully into the blue sky, are the Chocolate Mountains.

Inside the warehouse at K&W Metals, several workers are busily laboring over heaps of twisted metal, sorting aluminum shrapnel into one blue-plastic barrel, brass shells into another. On the floor of the warehouse, there are at least 100 of the 60-pound aluminum fin mounts, which only hours earlier guided 500-pound dummy bombs filled with cement on their brief journey through the night sky.

The proprietor at K&W Metals is Ken Hines. He is fiftyish, gray-haired, and has a good-natured beer belly peeking out from under a red Kenny Loggins T-shirt. “There are maybe four or five dealers in Imperial County who buy scrap off the range,” he says warily, “and so far none of us has been harassed by the law. But you oughta talk to the range runners. They’ve really been harassed. They’ve had their vehicles impounded and then had to pay two or three hundred dollars to get them back.”

None of the sullen and bleary-eyed range runners unloading his manna at the K&W dock will admit to knowing anything about this highly illegal activity. So Ken Hines gets on the phone, and in a few minutes another rumbly pickup truck appears in the parking lot.

This range runner is thin and blond, apparently in his mid- '30s. He has a look of pained intelligence and wears a freshly laundered white shirt, which adds a professional element to his appearance. With his milky-blue eyes and wispy beard, he looks something like a down-and-out Jesus, and for this reason he might be nicknamed “Jesse.”

“Sometimes I think it’s just like the military is dropping them bombs into a big old net,” Jesse says regretfully. “That’s how fast the junkers snatch them up.”

The range runners call themselves “runners,” “scrappers,” and sometimes “junkers.” This last title is probably intended as a pun. A lot of heroin enters the United States from Mexico by way of Imperial County, and a lot of the heroin gets consumed in Imperial County, which is said to have the highest rate of heroin use in the country.

“Long as you got ahold of that bomb, it’s yours,” Jesse says, explaining the first rule of range running, “but if another junker comes along and grabs it, even if you saw it first, why, it’s his.”

The tough competition out on the range has gotten Jesse a bit depressed today. “Some of the junkers out there are getting greedy. I mean, if I see another junker out there broken down. I’ll stop and help. Hell, I’ll even give him the spare tire off my truck just to get him back into town. But some guys.... Christ, if you leave a broken-down rig out there, by the time you get back to fix it, the battery’ll be gone, the tires, the radiator. Your rig’ll just be sitting there on the ground.”

Jesse has been scrapping hard almost every day since last April, getting up every morning at three o’clock so he can be on the range by dawn, which is when the military usually stops bombing. He’s been averaging about $100 per day, though his best day was 2300 pounds of aluminum, or roughly $900. But a lot of what Jesse earns he ends up spending on gas and on repairs to his fleet of throwaway trucks.

Even before the current recession, the unemployment rate in Imperial County was nearly 30 percent. And now, with a lot more people in Imperial County out of work, more and more of them are turning to range running for a source of income. Jesse estimates there are at least 50 range runners working the Chocolates right now, and that competition means he has to take greater and greater risks to bring back a load.

“I’m not worried about getting caught,” he says. “Everybody’s been caught. They take your picture and give you some kind of military ticket that says, ‘trespassing on government property and larceny of government property.’ I know guys right now that got 18 of them tickets, and most of ’em never show up in court. Even if you’re convicted, all they do is give you two months’ probation. Big deal.” Jesse speaks with a curious mixture of enthusiasm, bitterness, elation, and anger. “One time we got stopped off the range by the border patrol,” he says. “They looked under our tarp, saw we had a load, and then made us sit there for six hours waiting for the military police. Freezing! Starving! That Marine base at Yuma is only 100 miles away! Where the hick was their military police!

“And what else I’d like to know is, what business do they have looking under my tarp when I’m off the range? That’s just like coming into my house to see what I got! That’s illegal search!” Jesse says he would have fought the illegal search in court, if he’d bothered to show up in court.

No, what bothers Jesse is not the risk of getting caught but other dangers of the job. More and more he is worried about the possibility of being accidentally bombed while working in the target areas. “It happens, believe me. Sometimes you can’t hear them planes till they come over the mountains, and by then it’s too late, they’re already on top of you. I’ve had close calls. Everybody has.

“Last year this one guy, Eddie, was coming off the range with a load of scrap when the planes started coming over. He jumped out of his truck and started running. The planes thought his truck was one of the targets, and they dropped a live 500-pound bomb right into the bed of his truck. Eddie was lucky. He took some shrapnel in his leg, walked off the range, and had his old lady pull it out.”

One of the most notorious range runners, a fellow named Ricky, is in jail in Arizona right now for a charge other than range running. “Ricky is kind of an idiot,” Jesse shrugs, “but then he’s a drug addict. He needs the money for drugs, and $100 a day ain't shit to him. He used to sit there on the edge of the target areas, and the second the planes dropped their loads he’d be out there taking them apart.’’ Jesse shakes his head with disgust. “Huh-uh, that’s too gutsy for me. 1 got people who depend on me.”

Standing beside Jesse is his wife. Young, sweet, a bit plump, she declines to comment on her husband's profession, except to say that she went along one time but will never go again. Now she stays home and takes care of their four young daughters.

“There are guys who take their whole family out there,” Jesse says, “give the kids a bucket and tell ’em to go pick up shrapnel.”

Suddenly the air is filled with a strange, acrid odor. Jesse’s eyes widen, then relax. “Oh, that’s just rocket fuel,” he says, and points to the side of the warehouse where a man with a welding torch is working on an aluminum tube. “They gotta get the steel bolts off the aluminum before they can sell it,” Jesse explains. “Sometimes there’s a little bit of unspent fuel inside the tubes and it has to burn off. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt you.”

Jesse explains again that he has four young daughters at home. “Somehow I gotta put food in their mouths. I work my ass off as the manager of an apartment, but no way I can make 100 bucks a day doin’ that. Times are hard around here. There ain’t no jobs. There’s farm work, but a white man can’t get a job working in the fields no more. I gotta do somethin’. ”

“But one thing I won’t do is mess with live bombs,” he says. “Noooo!” The majority of the bombs dropped on the range are dummies filled with cement, but the military planes also drop live bombs to create what they call “the fog of war " Inevitably, a certain number of the live bombs do not explode. “It's real easy to tell the difference,” Jesse says. “Live bombs are green, dummy bombs are blue. It’s that simple. It even says ‘dummy’ right on them.”

There are also live missiles on the range, as well as machine-gun rounds that have misfired. At one time Jesse had collected buckets full of live rounds, but he got rid of them when he came to understand that one of the unwritten agreements the range runners have with the military is that collecting live rounds is strictly taboo. “That’s a whole different offense,” Jesse says. “ ‘Transporting live explosives.’ I guess they’re worried about terrorists getting it or something.’’ Still, there are range runners who will deal with live explosives. “There are a lotta guys who take the unexploded missiles apart to get at the C-4 –that’s the plastic explosives. They sell it on the black market. In fact, there’s a guy right here in town who would buy it if he had the money. Anything that comes off that range, you can sell one place or another.”

Like other range runners, Jesse doesn't believe the military really wants to stop the runners from scavenging the target areas, suggesting that perhaps the military believes the scrappers are doing the job more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently than military personnel could do the same work. “I’ve met military guys on the range, and they'll stop and chat and tell me where there’s a bunch of junk. One time we were waiting outside a target area until they’d finished bombing. This one plane flew right over the top of us, and I guess he saw us. Anyway, he flew up the canyon and tipped his wing like he was signaling. We drove to where he’d signaled, and we got a whole load of junk."

Other scrappers on the range have been stopped by the military and ordered — somewhat reluctantly, as if it were all a tiresome game — to drive to the military’s dump and unload their scrap. Once it was unloaded, the soldiers drove away. Then the scrappers helped themselves to not only their own scrap but the military’s scrap as well. Two hours later it was all sitting at the loading dock of a local recycler.

Ken Hines adds, “It was the military guys who started the scrapping! Years ago, every time the military boys wanted some money to party with, they’d gather up a load of scrap and bring it into town.”

Even though Jesse is working as hard as he can at hauling scrap off the bombing range, compared to some range runners, he’s just an amateur at this game. “The vast majority of the stuff is going out the east side of the mountains,” he says. “The people over there are real professionals. There are people over there who own private land next to the bombing range. They sit there on their front porch and watch the bombs drop, then the second the planes are gone, they’re out there grabbing up fin sets by the truckloads.”

Just the thought of a truckload of fin sets causes the sadness on Jesse’s face to turn to elation once again. “I go junking for the money, but there are guys who do it for the thrill. I know one guy who swears it’s just like being high on cocaine.”

Behind the sheriffs substation in Niland rests an ugly piece of steel, which tells the story of just how dangerous the work of a range runner can be. It’s a foot-long section of steel I-beam, which at one time had been used as a homemade anvil. Now the top rail of the I-beam is bent at a 45-degree angle and is scorched to a blistered shade of white.

To understand the story of that anvil you have to drive a few miles east of Niland, to what is known locally as “Drop 9” an unofficial campground along the Coachella Canal, where homeless range runners and other desperados have a makeshift camp of broken-down trailers and plywood lean-tos. Here a fellow named Mike, a Vietnam veteran and a heroin addict, made his home beneath an exceptionally large and shady mesquite tree.

Mike earned his living as a range runner, and in his own way he even prospered at it. Underneath his bed he kept his bank account, which consisted of plastic buckets filled with brass machine-gun shells and aluminum shrapnel. Each bucket could be traded for about $20, and anytime Mike needed to buy groceries or a fix, he’d take a couple of buckets and drive the three or four miles into town.

Then one day last summer, somebody broke into Mike’s shack and stole all his buckets. Panicked at the loss of his bank account and the possibility of not having the money for a fix, Mike did a very foolish thing.

“Mike was no dummy, and he was a great guy, but he knew better than to do what he done,” Jesse explains. “All loaded up on heroin, sitting out there in the sun, he took a hammer and started beating on a live round.”

Apparently the shell was an anti-tank round with a mercury detonating switch — something Mike hadn’t seen in Vietnam and apparently didn’t understand. Nobody knows for sure, but perhaps he was after the live explosives inside, which would have brought a good price. When the round exploded, Mike was blown to pieces.

Another fellow, Jim, was sitting in an automobile nearby, and the impact from the explosion crushed his jaw. Now months after the accident but still dazed, his jaw held together by a plastic brace, Jim spends his days sitting outside the Niland post office, just another homeless person too addled to tell his own story. He has no comment about the accident, if in fact he can even recall it.

And Mike is just an ominous memory to the other range runners, a worrisome reminder of their own possible fate. Almost reverently, Jesse says, “His hat was still hanging up in that mesquite tree until the wind blew it away a few weeks ago.”

There are a lot of people in the Imperial Valley who are still bitter, after 50 years, over what the U.S. military' has done to the Chocolate Mountains. Besides the obvious environmental catastrophe that results after you turn a fragile desert into a bombing range, the Chocolate Mountains once served as a major source of recreation for the people who lived in the small, isolated farm towns of the Imperial Valley. Many homes in towns like Niland and Calipatria have hanging over their mantle a set of deer antlers that came out of the Chocolates. There are rusted souvenirs from the old gold mines that once operated in the range; rock collections fill entire front yards. But, most importantly, there are cherished memories of family camping trips spent roaming through those mountains. When the locals lost the Chocolate Mountains, they felt almost as if they’d lost part of their family heritage. As far as some of them are concerned, their country has been invaded and occupied by hostile military forces.

But the people of the Imperial Valley also learned a long time ago that the government is too clumsy and too inefficient and too indifferent to really keep them out of the Chocolates. The locals know the gnarled washes and ridges much better than any military personnel ever will, and in many of the older families of the valley, violating the government’s restrictions in the Chocolate Mountains has become a family tradition.

The Chocolate Mountains Aerial Gunnery Range has been used for military training exercises since 1942. The range is managed and controlled by the Marine Corps Air Station at Yuma but is used by all branches of the military, primarily for training pilots in bombing, strafing, missile firing, and laser targeting. The boundaries of the bombing range are well marked. In fact, the military spends more than $50,000 per year on warning signs for the range. They also patrol it occasionally by helicopter, but they admit this is mostly useless in keeping people out. If the military built a fence around the range today, it would be in shreds tomorrow.

Every three months or so, Marine Corps gunnery crews go into the Chocolates to clean up the mess left by the bombing exercises. Often they find that much of their work has already been accomplished by the diligent citizens of Imperial County. Still, the crews locate whatever live bombs are left — some of the bombs are burrowed ten feet into the ground — and they detonate them on site. Then they rebuild the plywood simulated tanks, trucks, railroads, and villages that the pilots destroyed in the previous weeks.

The bombing is limited somewhat to certain target areas — usually broad gravel washes. These areas have been completely denuded of vegetation and are littered with tons of shrapnel, shells, bomb casings, rusted vehicles, machine-gun clips, and missile parts. Much of the remainder of the range, however, consists of strange and twisted peaks and canyons of red and brown rock, dotted with brilliantly green palo verde trees and cholla cacti. The mountains are also home to bighorn sheep, mule deer, coyotes, mountain lions, and feral burros.

On the corner of a quiet side street in Niland is the small apartment complex where Jesse serves as manager. The place doesn't look like much; in any town but Niland it would probably have been condemned and torn down a long time ago. But it is certainly better than having no place at all. Jesse’s towheaded little girls run around the front yard, dodging in and out of his broken-down trucks, truck parts, busted furniture, dead TVs, and the other assorted junk that adorns much of Niland in the same way that landscape plants adorn more affluent communities.

A group of range runners has gathered here this afternoon to help Jesse get one of his trucks back into service. You might call them shade-tree mechanics, though there is no shade and there is no tree.

One of the range runners sits majestically in a cherry-red Naugahyde recliner, backed up against the base of a stubby date palm. He is missing one arm and is crippled in one leg — the result of an electrical accident. He pulls up the back of his shirt and shows his bum scars to gauge your horror at his disability. He talks with a Southern accent so rich and colorful that it’s hard to imagine how it has survived this late into the 20th Century. This fellow bears a strong resemblance to Festus, on the old Gunsmoke series.

“They ain’t never goin’ stop it,” Festus says. “People been scrappin’ out there on that range for 40 years, and they goin’ keep on scrappin’ as long as money is paid for alum’num. Just look at the traffic on the highway ever’ morning. There’s more people heading into the range than is heading into town.”

“Why, it ain’t no problem. It’s good for the ’vironment,” another scrapper points out. He has a grin like a coyote, and his forearms are covered with intricate scrolls of tattoos. “Why don’t you do a story about overcrowded prisons? Now that’s a real problem.”

Yet another scrapper peeks out from under the hood of Jesse’s truck and bellows forcefully, “A lot of people around here go out to the range to get 20 or 30 bucks to feed their family, and they don’t appreciate the law fuckin’ with ’em! They ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong.”

Festus nods in agreement. “Long as nobody gets hurt, why, they’re doin’ a good thing,” he declares. “It’s recyclin’. And now with this war over in Iraq, the gov’ment gonna need all the alum’num they can get.”

Like some other people around the country, the scrappers have high hopes for what the war in Iraq will do for the economy. “We saw the price for aluminum go all the way down to 9 cents,” one of them says. “But you watch. With this war on, it’ll go back up to 60 cents a pound.” At that price, one aluminum-fin set would bring $36 at the local scrap yard.

“If I stopped scrappin’ tomorrow, there would be three more guys to take my place," Jesse says. “The military has said they gonna take our vehicles away. Well, what good is that gonna do? I still got four kids and a wife to feed. You go to that goddamn grocery store in town, and one bag of groceries costs 50 bucks! Hell, if people get desperate enough, they’ll go out to the range on foot and haul the junk back in plastic buckets.”

“Look around this town,” another scrapper says. “There’s people goin’ hungry. Why, hell, you ain't gonna just lay there starvin’ if you can go out to the range and pick up $20 worth of aluminum.”

“Down in El Centro,” Festus says, “the winos are pulling down the ’lectrical wires so they can sell the copper.” Then he adds thoughtfully, “Copper’s up to 80 cents a pound.”

Jesse gets a pained look on his face, then explodes into anger. “At least I ain’t on welfare! The other day I was out salvaging at the dump, and some guy was complaining about me being there. So I told him, ‘I can either be here salvaging at the dump, or I can be over at your place stripping you of everything you got. Now which would you rather it be?’ ”

A moment later Jesse has a burst of exhilaration, and his face is filled with a broad smile. “Sometimes you go out there on the range and dig and dig all day long, and you come home with almost nothin’. You drive back and forth over some of the bumpiest, craziest roads you ever saw, and when you get to the target area there ain’t nothin’ left. Some scrapper done cleaned it out. But it’s a high you get. And there ain’t nothin’ like bein’ your own boss ”

Festus nods in agreement but adds judiciously, “Yeah, but you ain’t never gonna get rich out there, like some of ’em think. It’s hard work. I’m all crippled up, so I’m kinda slow, but it takes most guys about an hour to get one bucket of alum’num. But I swear I put more money into my rigs than I ever took offa that range. It just tears your truck up. The shrapnel wrecks your tires, and lemme tell ya, you don’t call the Triple A out there. And if you got a two-wheel drive, why, it’s in the gutter in less than a week.”

Festus leans out of his chair and points to the fellow with the tattoos. “This boy here was carrying the stuff out in the trunk of his car. You went through what? Five cars in a month?” The tattooed man gives his coyote grin, shrugs, and says, “Yeah, but I had to have it.”

All the scrappers agree that the military doesn’t make a serious attempt to keep them from salvaging on the range. “When you take your garbage to the dump, are you worried about who’s gonna get it?” Festus asks. “Well, it’s the same thing with the military. When they drop it, it’s garbage, and with all the money they got to waste, they don’t care who gets it. The only thing they worry about is if somebody gets hurt.”

To illustrate his point, Festus tells about the time he got busted for being on the range: “I got stopped by the border patrol down by Glamis. They saw what I was carr-yin’, and they called the army boys. When them army boys showed up I said, ‘Now lookie here. I'm all crippled up and I don’t wanna go to no jail.’

“That army boy said, ‘What this is, mister, is just a precaution. That may be a bombing range up there, but as long as you don’t mess with live explosives or tear up the targets, nobody’s gonna put you in jail. Once you get your picture taken, you’re at your own risk.’

“I was kinda scared at first, see, but then I figured it out. They take your picture so’s in case you get all blowed up they ain’t liable. They done warned you! Your family can’t hire a Philadelphia lawyer and sue their ass! That’s all they care about.” The others nod in agreement. Some of them have already had their picture taken more times than the Golden Gate Bridge, but none of them has ever gone to jail for being on the range. They claim that one guy in town has been stopped on the range 30 times and gotten 30 citations but has never even appeared in court.

A few months ago, a female investigator, apparently working for an attorney, came into town and started asking the scrappers questions. It seems that a load of scrap from the range had been shipped to Mexico to be melted down. There were some live rounds in the scrap, they blew up, and several people got hurt. None of the scrappers will admit to telling the investigator anything. “She was just looking to get a buncha guys in trouble,” one of them says.

“Or looking to get the gov’ment in trouble,” another suggests.

Since the range runners believe they are operating with the government’s complicity, they have no interest in seeing the government get sued or otherwise pressured to stop bomb parts from leaving the Chocolate Mountains.

“The gov’ment could stop it if they really wanted to,” Festus insists. “These scrap dealers have to stop at the border patrol check stations when they haul that stuff to market, so the gov’ment knows what’s goin’ on. If they really wanted to, they could stop the range runners by making it illegal to buy or sell bomb parts. But they don't want to. It’s just like railroad irons. You pull up a railroad iron and try to sell it at a scrapyard, you’ll go to jail right now.”

By late afternoon, the repairs on Jesse’s truck have been made, and he’s ready to make a run into the range if the planes fly tonight. He looks to the horizon and points to his favorite junking spot, at the northern end of the Chocolate Mountains, one of the areas most heavily bombed by the military. “That’s called Deadman Canyon,” he says. “There’s a place there called the ’Village,’ a whole town made of plywood. We always find junk there. Always.”

“You can tell by the sound of the planes, without even getting outta bed, if there’s gonna be junk,” Festus says, bragging just a bit. “And if you don’t hear no more planes after three o’clock in the morning, you know them fly boys has gone home for lunch.” In other words, it’s time for all hard-working range runners to get up and go to work.

Lately the military planes haven't been quite as active, and someone suggests that with the war in Iraq, the military might have other things to do than bomb a bunch of plywood targets in the Chocolate Mountains.

“Huh-uh,” Jesse says, maybe trying to sound more hopeful than he really is. “In a war there’s gonna be pilots going down. They gotta train new pilots. They’re gonna fly.