The Rocky Mountain News has a blow-by-blow recap of Marvin Heemeyer's bulldozer rampage Friday in Granby, Colorado, opening with these lines:

Rage slid into the armored cab of the giant bulldozer parked on the edge of town late Friday afternoon and slowly rumbled to life.

Sealed inside, rage released the brake to the black and yellow beast, and it easily plowed through the wall of the building it had been housed in for months. Rage was loose. Rage was Marvin Heemeyer.

With writing like that, I know someone's itching to make a movie out of this...but with the immediacy of today's media coverage, who needs CGI when you have the real thing? The Denver Post appears to be carrying the most direct coverage of the event, including this article on Marvin Heemeyer, with recollections from family and neighbors.

A lot of people in Granby (and elsewhere) will be having nightmares about that bulldozer attack for some time to come, a blind, dull-gray steel juggernaut thundering in on them before they wake in a cold sweat. There's something very primal, cunning and nightmarish about Heemeyer's deed.

I did have one thought, which I'm sure must have occurred to police as they tried to stop the "Armageddon Tank" (as townspeople have dubbed the monstrous bulldozer) - the only part of the machine that was really vulnerable was the caterpillar treads. If someone could have fired some type of explosive rounds into one of the treads (I'm sure in High Country Colorado somebody's got mortar rounds or a rocket-powered grenade somewhere, c'mon...), breaking some of their links, the bulldozer would have been unmaneuverable and limited to spinning around...maybe I'm missing something about the mechanics of caterpillar treads. Just a thought.

Everyman's Revenge

The elements that really grab people about this story, I think, are twofold: the revenge-fantasy-come-true aspect or "common man fights back against City Hall" thread, and the eerie thought that something this evil and destructive could have been cooked up by one individual working secretly in his garage. The level of detail Heemeyer put into his machine is pretty amazing: investigators' accounts say the bulldozer's three video cameras were outfitted with individual air tanks and blowers to remove visibility-obstructing debris. But he didn't count on a cooling system failure.

In retrospect, the extreme mechanical stress of operating the dozer at "high speed" with possibly obstructed cooling pathways, plus an additional load of 10+ tons of steel-and-concrete armor proved too much for the Cat D9R, and Heemeyer's rampage ended roughly halfway through his "hit list," according to documents poliec found at his home. Rick Giombetti of Kangaroo Court has some interesting thoughts on the incident:

A story like the bulldozer rampage by a disgruntled Granby, Colorado muffler shop owner, Marvin Heemeyer, 52, and apparently motived by his desire to settle political scores he had with the town government, is one the mass media loves to entertain us with. Of course, the mental health movement and critics of psychiatric drugs will attempt to disown Heemeyer of his actions by claiming he was either suffering from "psychosis" at the time he committed his crimes, or that psychiatric drugs "caused" him to behave the way he did yesterday.

I would bet that Heemeyer has some military back ground given the way how he carried out his attack on the town using a bulldozer. To look at our imperialist military culture, and the way our federal government uses military violence to settle its political scores with the outside world, and suggest Heemeyer's actions are "surprising" is completely riduculous. If Heeymeyer was doing this in Iraq, and, yes, U.S. military forces are using bulldozers in their war against the Iraqi resistance to the U.S. led occupation of Iraq, most of us would hail him as a hero on his return. I see this an example of the war coming home.

Heemeyer's rampage isn't the first example of a Colorado resident who has resorted to this kind of violence to settle political scores. The AP article on the Heeymeyer story I've posted below (It's the last one at the bottom of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News articles) makes reference to a similar incident in 1998 in Alma: "The scene was reminiscent of a 1998 rampage in Alma, another town in the Colorado Rockies. Authorities said Tom Leask shot a man to death, then used a town-owned front-end loader to heavily damage the town's post office, fire department, water department and town hall."

Unanswered Questions

After a brief search, I discovered there is a large amount of material on the Web regarding military armored bulldozers [image-intensive, allow time for loading], especially those being used to tear down homes in the Middle East. Reports are now circulating that Heemeyer was indeed a veteran, who became estranged from family (including brothers Ken and Don) after joining the Air Force in 1969. While I don't think his military service was directly responsible for his actions this past weekend, his underlying psychological makeup combined with this combat and military expertise proved to be a very dangerous combination. And as one article pointed out, "Who knows how many other Marvin Heemeyers are out there right now?"

Extra: The Caterpillar D9R bulldozer (the one Heemeyer used to create the armored 'dozer) built with LEGO bricks. Perhaps the adventurous can reconstruct the model with an armored shell.

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