I stayed, but I couldn’t decide if that was an act of courage or cowardice.

Before the program started, several people made a point of introducing themselves to me. First names only for security purposes. Who knew if even those names were real? Among those people was a sparkling young woman with unusually round blue eyes that stood out boldly against her flowing jet-black hair. She looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place her. Her name tag identified her as Laura, so at least for that night she was Laura. She greeted Howie, who was still Howie, who introduced her to me. I remained Rollie; I was too well known in Washington to be anyone else. (Although I did flirt briefly with being Biff for the night; I’ve had an odd affection for that name since I played Biff Loman in a college production of Death of a Salesman.) My mind was much too caught up with Jenny to pay attention to Laura, but I advise you to remember her name. She’ll show up again.

This organization, I learned that night, had sprung up several months earlier. Similar local groups were spreading across the country. It had no name; the consensus being a lack of identity would make it difficult to identify: How could anyone be a member of a group that didn’t consider itself a group? There were no leaders, no central communications, and its financial resources seemed limited to a collection bowl sitting on the table. There wasn’t even a secret handshake. But everyone was asked never to talk about it and certainly never to write about it. It didn’t exist except when it did.

The local groups were linked together loosely by a chain of men and women called “two-staters.” These were people who carried information back and forth between their home state and one neighboring state. The whole operation was essentially a national game of telephone. It was arguably the least efficient means of communications short of smoke signals, but at this stage of development the organization without a name or leadership was still small and contained enough for it to be sufficient. And it provided extraordinary secrecy.

There was no formal program. No schedule of events. No one was urging anyone else to take specific actions. It became clear very quickly this was little more than a like-minded group of people getting together to air their grievances against the government. People stood up and told their stories. I’d attended several AA and NA meetings because I thought it was important to understand addiction, and in structure, this meeting was vaguely similar. An older potbellied man described the growing sense of mistrust in his once-harmonious insurance office as people became reluctant to talk about much other than TV programs, movies, and sports. A woman who described herself as a soccer mom complained that her child was required to recite the New American Pledge in his second-grade class every morning.

The two-stater from Virginia had some disquieting news. The movement was growing so rapidly that the government had become aware of its existence and was beginning to gather intelligence about it. A member of the group had been detained in Springfield, Illinois. Under the new regulations no charges had been filed against him, so it was unclear if his detention had anything to do with his participation in the meetings. War regs allowed law enforcement and, under certain conditions, militia groups, to hold people in custody for an extended period without officially filing charges. Supposedly this allowed the government sufficient time to question potential terrorists before his or her collaborators became aware of that arrest.