Andrew Exum writes: White supremacist groups and their sympathizers were especially present in the ranks of the U.S. Army’s combat arms units and the U.S. Marine Corps in the 1980s and 1990s.

In 1986, an exasperated Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, ordered the military to crack down on these groups, and another purge was ordered after U.S. Army veteran Timothy McVeigh planted a bomb that almost leveled the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people. 1995 was the same year a paratrooper from the Army’s 82d Airborne Division murdered a black couple outside Fort Bragg.

When I arrived in my first infantry unit in 2000, I remember encountering non-commissioned officers who were by then quite adept at interpreting the tattoos on the young white men arriving to the unit fresh from basic infantry training. By that point, though, recruiters were already weeding out most of the men who showed up with any sign of affiliations with white supremacist groups. [Continue reading…]

Military Times reports: A Marine veteran has been identified as the leader of a white supremacist group whose members marched at Saturday’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counter-protester was killed.

The news site Splinter first reported on Monday that former Marine recruiter Dillon Ulysses Hopper is the leader of white supremacist group Vanguard America.

Hopper served in the Marine Corps from July 2006 until Jan. 30, leaving the Corps as a staff sergeant, according to Manpower & Reserve Affairs. He deployed to Iraq from January 2008 to January 2009 and to Afghanistan from July 2010 to February 2011.

James Alex Fields Jr. was arrested Saturday after allegedly killing a woman by ramming a car into counter-protesters.

Fields, 20, was charged with second-degree murder and is being held without bail. At the rally he was photographed behind a shield bearing the emblem of Vanguard America, according to The Associated Press. The group has denied Fields was a member. [Continue reading…]