The Los Angeles Times had a gritty story this weekend about a Minuteman who’s camped out near Campo, but whose faith in the mission is beginning to wane.

“I own the night, brother,” says Max Kennedy, a lanky, sunburned man with a scraggly goatee and a voice like a fistful of desert gravel. In his 53 years, he says, he has driven a cab in Miami and ferried fur coats in New York, peddled marijuana and jewelry, played bass in a punk bank and marched with 1960s radicals. He has been a Gingrich Republican and a pagan, a seeker of meaning in the Kaballah and the sayings of Chairman Mao.

In his latest incarnation, he’s a Minuteman staking out a small stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border in the beautiful, inhospitable mountains of southeast San Diego County. Untethered to job or family, he’s one of three or four hard-core members who camp out here full time, trying to catch illegal immigrants as they cross.

The story is worth checking out just for the photographs from Don Bartletti.

ROB DAVIS

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