Interview With a Bomber: Karleton Armstrong Reflects on Sterling Hall and the Vietnam War Era

A short, two-note fanfare cheerfully rang out through the cell phone speaker while 77-year-old former bomber and anti-war protester Karl Armstrong’s phone line connected with Media Milwaukee reporters Angelika Ytuarte and Thomas Mulkerrins.

Ytuarte and Mulkerrins called to interview Armstrong for their class project on the Aug. 24, 1970 bombing of Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin- Madison that killed physics post-doctoral researcher Robert Fassnacht, injured three others and caused millions of dollars of property damage. Armstrong, his brother Dwight, and David Sylvan Fine were convicted of blowing up the campus building, which housed the Army Mathematics Research Center, as a Vietnam War protest. The fourth bomber, Leo Burt, remains at large.

This little ditty was not the first thing they expected to hear during this interview with a man who perpetrated what was labeled the worst act of domestic terrorism until Oklahoma City.

“Harmonica,” Armstrong explained in one word followed by a low chuckle. He had gotten it as a Christmas present from his sister, Lorene’s, partner.

A lengthy interview resulted about topics ranging from his feelings of remorse (there are some), whether he would do it again (they would blow the van up in a field if they knew Fassnacht was inside), the Vietnam War, and even current politics (what he thinks of Donald Trump, Joe Biden.) His politics today are closer aligned to Bernie Sanders.

“I just wanted to reinforce the importance of a democracy… I was a Boy Scout,” said Armstrong in the wide-ranging conversation. “I believed in my Boy Scout oath, and I believe in our democracy. When I saw what was going on in Vietnam, I knew that our democracy was in peril.”

He insists the bombers wouldn’t have gone through with it if they knew a life would be lost.

“If we had known someone was in the building,” Armstrong said in the December 2023 interview with Media Milwaukee, “it would have been hard to do, but we would have taken the van and blown it up in the countryside.”

In the call with Media Milwaukee, Armstrong said that he has no idea how missing bomber Leo Burt would have evaded capture if he’s still alive in 2023.

“You know better than to ask that question,” Armstrong said with a laugh after Ytuarte had asked if he knows where Burt is. “I have no idea where he is, but… my standard answer: He doesn’t send me Christmas cards.”

After the few non-consecutive missed calls and one successful one, the two reporters finally reached out and talked to Armstrong about his current beliefs and reflections on politics and the bombings he executed. The lighthearted harmonica greeting was an appreciated icebreaker after a stressful couple of months of coordinating how and when to reach him.

In an instance leading up to this call, their small crew of three students- including Media Milwaukee reporter Dominic Rodriguez– who had attended the first, mid-October outing to Madison, stepped onto the front stoop outside of Armstrong’s home on the city’s south side. The pleasant smell of cleaning supplies and alerting barks from a dog drifted through the screens of the open windows on this unseasonably warm October night.

A woman’s voice called through to the front stoop, “Coming!” She, whom they later knew as Chris, emerged at the window facing the front door and took them off guard, as she was clearly not Karl. She had light gray, shoulder length hair, thin wire-rimmed glasses, and she wore a green American Girl Doll branded t-shirt and blue jeans.

The students introduced themselves as a student journalist crew from Media Milwaukee interested in writing a story about the era around the Sterling Hall bombing and the Vietnam War.

“We were hoping to talk to Karl Armstrong. Is he here right now?” Ytuarte asked.

“He’s actually at the VA hospital visiting an old friend with dementia right now, but he would be a great interview for this. He remembers that era,” said Chris. “I’ll call him and see if he can talk tonight.”

Chris disappeared once again into the trailer home, and we could vaguely hear her speaking on the phone while walking around the house. After about four minutes, she reappeared at the side window.

“He said, ‘Not tonight,” she reported back. “He said he’s tired now, but maybe sometime later.”

With that, Mulkerrins gave Chris his contact information for her or Armstrong to call in the future, and the student journalists left satisfied with their interaction.

However, two days later Chris called Thomas with a voicemail that left him and the rest of the class somewhat puzzled.

“I knew he wasn’t going to be available, so I kind of gave you a bunch of bullshit,” she said. “It’s bullshit.”

She said that she thought Armstrong visiting a friend with memory problems from the Vietnam era would make for a good story.

“Don’t think that,” said Chris. “He’s not available, so I made up an excuse to protect him.”

She ended the call by apologizing and reminding them that they knew her phone number.

Wisconsin Historical Society’s former curator of social history, Leslie A. Ballais, said that Armstrong stopped talking to the press around 2000.

“I’m pretty sure he did interviews for the 2000 anniversary [of the bombing],” said Ballais. “But, after that he kind of shut down and didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”

The three other conspirators in the bombing were unreachable to the student reporters. David Fine, 71, lives in Portland, Oregon and had not answered any calls made by Media Milwaukee reporters or the letter Ytuarte mailed to him. Dwight Armstrong, Karl’s younger brother, died at 58-years-old in 2010 after a battle with lung cancer. Leo Burt, who would be 75 years old if he is alive, has never been found since he slipped out of the back window of a Peterborough, ON boarding house in Canada six days after the bombing of Sterling Hall.

As far as the Media Milwaukee reporters were concerned, this late December call with Karl was a stroke of luck.

After Armstrong was captured in Toronto and extradited back to the U.S., he served 10 years in prison out of his 23-year sentence on his second-degree murder charge.

After he was paroled, he returned to Madison from the Waupun Correctional Institution in 1980 and opened a juice cart called Loose Juice, not far from the UW-Madison campus.

According to Armstrong, he ran the cart for 25 years. Around Loose Juice’s 20-year anniversary, he and his brother and bombing co-conspirator, Dwight Armstrong, opened a sandwich shop called Radical Rye. The shop eventually closed down, and the space was repurposed into the Overture Center for the Arts.

“People loved the food,” said Karl Armstrong. “We just carried on the tradition a bit more efficient, as far as how to do the business.”

In 2012, Armstrong was arrested in Chicago after authorities found $800,000 cash in a duffel bag during a search of the trailer he was driving. Under the suspicion of marijuana trafficking, his home in Madison was searched. However, there was no marijuana found in either the trailer home or the vehicle he had been driving, according to multiple reports of the incident from local news outlets.

Despite this, Wisconsin Historical Society curator of economic history Dave Driscoll said that Armstrong is a “classic case of serving his debt to society, coming back and reintegrating.”

“Unfortunately, someone was killed,” said Driscoll. “But, compared to the unnecessary and unjustified deaths in the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, it was considered less severe.”

In the 1979 documentary The War at Home, Armstrong was quoted saying, “I have already expressed, and shall continue to experience for the rest of my life, the anguish I feel because of Robert Fassnacht’s death. But I feel that the public empathizes with the motives for my actions.”

When asked if he still feels frustrated with himself or have come to accept his past actions, Karl told Media Milwaukee reporters that one doesn’t “really get over it.”

Although he’s still never changed his mind about the bombing being a righteous action, Armstrong said that had the four conspirators been completely certain that someone was in the building they would have backed up the van carrying the ammonium nitrate bomb and blown it up in the countryside.

Armstrong said that the means and the ends are inextricably related when Ytuarte asked him if he considers a “by any means necessary” approach to current affairs valid. He said he’s never thought that it was a valid approach to conflict and that the biggest impact intended in the bombing of Sterling Hall’s Army Math Research Center was property damage.

“Now I know that we had just completely blown it…” said Armstrong. “Robert Fassnacht was killed, and people were injured.”

From an ethical standpoint, Armstrong’s statements draw points from both Kantian and utilitarian principles. He believes that the bombing was the right thing to do, but he regrets part of the outcome being the death of the young researcher, Rober Fassnacht, and injuries several others suffered. He said anyone considering using destructive means should think it over “many, many, many times.”

“[The] Army Math bombing… I guess the best way to describe it is it kind of being… a true tragedy,” said Armstrong.

Armstrong said that his current personal political preferences are progressive. He listed Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as a couple of politicians who share some opinions that are similar to his own.

“I even liked Biden,” said Armstrong, “But I disagree with him probably on a third of the stuff he does.”

Armstrong said that he has friends who are Qanon advocates and some who are Trump supporters, and he can see the factors that lead them to their political beliefs. Armstrong said that although he keeps “MAGA” Republicans as friends, he sees Trump-backing politicians as being a “criminal class of people.”

He said that he sees the assassination of President Kennedy as being a coup that produced the current state of politics and continues to produce repercussions. He referenced the Vietnam War along with other wars the U.S. was involved with as being part of those repercussions.

On the current, prominent war going on in Israel and Palestine, Armstrong said, “It was obvious that Hamas was basically trying to provoke Israel into an over-the-top reaction… Israel, in a way, is just playing into their hands. They’re not gonna eliminate Hamas, because they can always escape to Egypt if they had to.”

Armstrong said that the “present government is racist” and that they seem to be practicing a form of genocide against the Palestinians. He also said that democracy has always been in a very fragile, perilous position; That bombings as a means to achieve any ends are not to be taken lightly.

Karl doesn’t go on Facebook or other social media because “it’s just another way for the government to keep track of you,” and he doesn’t really have a lot to say.

David Fine, another co-conspirator in the bombing of Sterling Hall, now lives in Oregon. He served three years in prison, but opted to study law at the University of Oregon once he was released and paroled. He passed the Oregon bar exam but was denied admission on the grounds that he was a convicted felon.

During his court proceedings, Fine was quoted as saying, “I would just like to say that all those who join me in mourning the death of Robert Fassnacht in the bombing of Army Math would also on this day, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, join with me in the mourning of the deaths of 75,000 Japanese people and allied prisoners of war.”

Fine became a legal clerk, but Media Milwaukee confirmed through phone correspondence that he has since left the last firm he listed working at on his LinkedIn page.

He had been very active on Facebook talking about campaigning with the Obama administration, the 2016 presidential election and its subsequent events, live music performances he attended and his beloved cats. However, aside from a handful of fundraiser pages he’s shared, recently he hasn’t been particularly active on the parts of his page that are visible to the public.

Lester Pines, who Fine’s family hired to represent him in the first part of the federal criminal process, said that he visited Fine a couple of times while he served his prison sentence. He also said that he recently got back into contact with him over Facebook after years of having no contact with him.

Since his quiet escape from the Canadian boarding house, Leo Burt has never been found. There have been many tips and alleged sighting of him, though.

Armstrong also said that if Burt is alive, he doesn’t want to know.

Much like his co-conspirator David Fine, Karl Armstrong lives a simple life as a retiree with his two mischievous cats, now. He even keeps his Christmas presents simple and useful. He told the Media Milwaukee reporters that he gets people great wool socks.

“If you want to stuff a stocking, a sock inside a stocking fits very well.”