He later testified before a Senate inquiry into the episode, and while he remained adamant that the government bore most of the blame, he also said he was not without guilt.
“If I had to do it again, knowing what I know now, I would have made different choices,” he told Congress in 1995. “I would have come down the mountain to stand trial.”
Randall Claude Weaver was born on January 3, 1948 in Viliska, Iowa, a small town in the southwestern part of the state. His parents, Clarence and Wilma (Troaks) Weaver, were farmers, and Randy and his three siblings grew up working in the fields with them.
After graduating from high school, he attended Iowa Central Community College for two years before leaving to join the military. He became a green beret and although he aspired to go to Vietnam, he remained in the state as an instructor, mostly in Fort Bragg, North Carolina
He was honorably dismissed in 1971, returned to Iowa, and married Victoria Jordison that same year. He briefly returned to college at the University of Northern Iowa, but decided to work with a newborn baby instead.
Over the next decade, he held a number of jobs in manufacturing and sales, including for Amway. At the same time, he and his wife, both of whom were raised in strictly religious households, adopted a millennial form of Christianity that saw the world around them as fundamentally corrupt and full of signs of the coming apocalypse.
They sold their home and most of their property and moved with their three children in 1983 to Naples, Idaho, about 50 miles south of the Canadian border. They bought a 20-acre pine forest on nearby Ruby Ridge, where they built a two-story plywood house and mill edges.
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