If you want to radicalize someone, send them off to an ill-defined, poorly managed war. Timothy McVeigh, one of Reitman’s subjects, is a case in point: “[T]he reality of combat…fucks with the head,” she writes of his time in Iraq, and so does homecoming in a time of recession and unemployment. Provoked by what he saw as an evil government and styling himself “the ideological descendant of Paul Revere,” he embarked on a brief career in terrorism that ended at Oklahoma City. An aimless California skateboarder named Nate Damigo is another case in point: He joined the Marines and, like McVeigh, was packed off to Iraq, “probably the worst place in the world.” In prison for crimes committed after returning home, he happened on Klan leader David Duke’s autobiography. Founding a white supremacist organization on his release, he mapped out the infamous Charlottesville tiki march—“You will not replace us” slogan, polo shirts, and all—“with a snarling aggression that was even more intimidating than overt violence.” On the other side of the ideological divide is Terry Albury, a brilliant young man who joined the FBI and served nearly a whole career as a Black officer in a nearly all-white and deeply racist organization. Albury himself went to prison on a four-year sentence after leaking information to the press about illegalities, such as hacking into journalists’ phone records. A crusading defense attorney working with unjustly charged Arab Americans, a neo-Nazi “murdered by a fellow neo-Nazi,” a young naval officer disaffected by military life, and a teenage girl arrested for trying to join ISIS round out Reitman’s cast of characters in this swift-moving, expertly told narrative, each grappling in their own way with “what created monsters, [and] all the whys.”
