The deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol pitted military veterans against one another among both Metropolitan and Capitol police and rioters, The New York Times reported.
Officer Samuel Hahn of the Metropolitan Police Department, who served in the Marines before joining the department, noted that some of the rioters had shouted at him “you’re breaking your oath.”
“The oath that every member of the military takes is the same one as a police officer, which is to uphold the Constitution,” he later recalled, according to the Times. “There was this cognitive dissonance between what I was doing and what the people screaming at me were doing, which is the very thing that is antithetical to that oath.”
Meanwhile, Officer Eugene Goodman, the Capitol Police officer hailed as a hero for leading the crowd away from the Senate floor, served in the Army’s 101st Airborne alongside Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth, who expressed solidarity with the crowd hours before the riot. A spokesperson for Hegseth later told the Times he condemned the violence.
The riot occurred at a point at which both veterans are a major recruitment pool for both far-right militia movements and police departments.
Indeed, an early analysis of arrest data from the insurrection indicates about 13 to 20 percent of the arrestees had military backgrounds, roughly the same proportion of the militia movement in general that experts believe come from a military background. Militias also frequently invoke the U.S.’s military history, from references to the Civil War to the extremist “Three Percenters,” who derive their name from estimates that the American Revolution was won by a force equal to only 3 percent of the colonial population.
“Part of what was so horrifying about what happened that day is you saw training in action,” former Justice Department official Katrina Mulligan, now managing director of national security and international policy at the left-leaning think tank the Center for American Progress, told the Times.