A Distant Thunder by Harold Covington

Shane Ryan is a wrong guy. Wrong race. Wrong gender. Wrong class. Wrong side of the tracks. Wrong attitude. America in the near future is a cold, cruel place, especially in the hardscrabble rural Pacific Northwest. There's war in the Middle East, a revived draft, mass unemployment, an economy permanently on the skids, greed and corruption, incompetence and stupidity at the top. Poor blue-collar kids from the trailer park are last in line for everything. America has screwed Shane Ryan, and he returns the favor. He joins the Northwest Volunteer Army, a terrorist organization dedicated to overthrowing the United States government and establishing an independent nation. America is about to learn the hard way that what goes around, comes around.

Review"

"...A Distant Thunder (364 pp.) is the second novel to be published. In terms of its internal chronology, the frame is set a little later than The Hill of the Ravens. An oral history of Shane Ryan, a very old veteran of the Northwest Volunteer Army, is being recorded for posterity. Shane’s recollections, however, focus on the period immediately before the war of Independence and the war itself. The setting is Western Washington State, south of Seattle. A Distant Thunder gets off to a rough start, because the literary conceit of an oral history allows Covington to indulge in stream-of-consciousness rambling, which quickly becomes tiresome. But if you stick it out through the first 50 or so pages, you will be glad, for once this book gets you hooked it is a magnificent read."

From http://www.toqonline.com/2009/09/the-birth-of-a-nation/

Occidental Review Quarterly.
Highly recommended.