The subsequent Treasury Department report revealed that there was in fact no contingency plan to postpone the raid and that agents had not been instructed what to do if they “were met with either an organized ambush or scattered pockets of resistance.” In the self-made disaster that was about to unfold, the ATF would bitterly regret its lack of any fall-back strategy when it came at us with guns blazing.
* ATF intelligence chief David Troy would trip over his own shoelaces at the congressional hearings. First he claimed that the agents would have arrested David outside in the weeks before the raid if they had seen him, but he forgot to mention that the warrant for David’s arrest was only issued three days before the attack. Then he said the trouble was that David never got personally involved in buying prohibited firearms, so there was no valid reason to charge or arrest him!
10
SHOWTIME
The Saturday, February 27, edition of the Waco Tribune-Herald was a lulu. An old photo of David, sporting long hair and a tie, accompanied a tabloid headline in bold type: “THE SINFUL MESSIAH: PART ONE.”
The text ran: “If you are a Branch Davidian, Christ lives on a threadbare piece of land 10 miles east of Waco called Mount Carmel.
“He has dimples, claims a ninth-grade education, married his legal wife when she was 14, enjoys a beer now and then, plays a mean guitar, reportedly packs a 9mm Glock and keeps an arsenal of military assault rifles, and willingly admits he is a sinner without equal.”
The sensational screed ran on to list all the charges against David included in the arrest warrant. In a front-page sidebar and inside editorial, the newspaper demanded to know why the authorities had allowed David to exist. “How long before they will act?” the editorial writer asked disingenuously, knowing full well that the ATF was about to launch its attack. Additional installments of a seven-part series were promised over the next week, covering such juicy topics as “Marc Breault, the faithful follower,” “The grim daily life of the Davidians,” and “Preying on the children.”
“Well,” David said, glancing up from the paper, “I guess this is it.” His voice was squeezed with emotion. I gazed around the room and saw a collective, dazed expression, the look people have in that last instant at the top of the roller coaster before the car starts its sickening dive. But my main feeling was one of relief. At last the waiting period was over, and we’d soon grapple with whatever providence had in store for us.
“What do you think?…” a woman asked, trailing off.
She, like the rest of us, didn’t want to articulate our worst fears, all the more scary because they were undefined.
That Saturday seemed to go on forever. The guys played some desultory games of football, and the women did their chores. I watched the rainy Texas sunset that evening and felt I was living in a highly symbolic moment—the end of our world, if not the end of the whole world. I was simultaneously exhilarated and terrified. I didn’t want to die, but I was now so identified with the community that the prospect of sharing its biblical destiny made my heart thump with excitement. It troubled me, though, that I might never see my family again, especially my mother, who, by the light of our faith, would be damned. I wished with all my heart that it might be otherwise, but I was powerless to change fate. At the same time I felt I was going through this experience partly on my family’s behalf, that my sacrifice might save them from the general damnation. I hoped they would understand this and be proud that I’d finally amounted to something.
That night, I was part of a small group that sat around discussing the firepower the feds could summon up against us. Clearly, it was awesome. We didn’t know for sure how many armed agents were assembled to attack us; based on rumors we’d heard, estimates ranged from fifty to a hundred. All of them would be heavily armed, backed up by helicopters and armored vehicles, perhaps even tanks. There was some wild talk about flamethrowers and napalm—the biblical “lake of fire”—but that was too fanciful for me. Compared to the feds’, our weaponry was puny. Even if we did possess some automatic weapons, our main defense comprised semiautomatic rifles and pistols. And only a fraction of our community could or would handle weapons.
Of the 130 or so people in our community, forty-three were children fifteen years of age and under, another forty-five were women. Of the men, a number were elderly; others, like me, detested guns. Though firearms had been distributed to most of the adults a few days earlier, I wasn’t given a 9mm automatic until the siege began. Even then, I preferred to keep the pistol under my bunk rather than in my pocket; that way, there was less chance I might accidentally shoot myself. Besides, the idea of actually aiming a weapon at another human being utterly repelled me.
So far as I knew, Paul Fatta and his son, Kalani, planned to take a batch of guns to a show in Austin the next day, and he had no intention of changing his plans. So if it came down to a firefight, our core group of useful defenders was barely a handful, and our gun “stockpile” was far from formidable. True, we felt we had right on our side—the right to defend our property and ourselves against “unreasonable search and seizure.” But that was merely a phrase; it wouldn’t deflect bullets.
We didn’t know exactly when the feds were coming, so they might surprise us any time, late at night or early morning. “You could wake up with a gun in your mouth,” Greg said grimly. This image chilled me to the marrow. But I still could not quite believe that the U.S. government would actually mount a military-style assault on a community with women and children. Everything American in me was stunned by the possibility that my own government might wipe us out. Where’s Paul Revere when we need him? I thought childishly. Where are the Minute Men who should stand by our side?
“Surely they won’t get away with it?” someone said, and I hoped he was right. Dammit, he had to be right! Otherwise, everything I’d ever felt about this great country was a crock of shit.
Steve came into the room, and we talked about keeping the kids and their mothers in the concrete vault off the cafeteria. But the consensus was that such a move would scare the children and should be delayed until absolutely necessary.
“We’re all in the same boat here,” Steve said. “Our fate belongs to all of us. Don’t be afraid. The prophecies are being fulfilled.”
Steve went on to repeat David’s notion of “translation”—being swept up into heaven without actually having to die, like the prophet Elijah, who was seized by a whirlwind and lifted into the blue, following God’s fiery chariot. As Steve spoke, his voice trembled with a kind of exhilaration that infected the rest of us.
But after he left there was a general letdown. For most of us in that room the concept of translation was rather too abstract to apply to our actual situation. I, for one, felt I lacked the spiritual power or simple worthiness to follow Elijah’s famous example.
That night, I sat for long hours staring out the window at the dark, flat, wet Texas plain, trying to imagine it as the landscape of Armageddon. Why was I here, in this miserable place? I wondered, not for the first time. Why had I bumped into David that day at Guitar Center? Just then, Sunset Boulevard seemed more distant than Jupiter, and I yearned for a rocket ship to carry me back there.
Why was I here?
I tried to answer the question as honestly as I could. The truth was mixed, an amalgam of the positive and negative aspects of my personality.
Positively, I’d had enough faith in my intuitions to trust David and follow him down the road of his teachings, even though it meant putting myself in harm’s way. As a result, I’d discovered a valuable part of me I hadn’t consciously known existed: a spiritual dimension that had expanded my soul. I’d found a structure I could accept despite its rigors and had achieved some control over my appetites. Negatively, I’d done all this in a kind of lazy dream, never really thinking anything all the way through.
So how real were the gains I’d made in the past two and a half years? Had I internalized this spiritual discipline sufficiently enough to continue it on my
own if Mount Carmel were destroyed and David were imprisoned or killed? Or did I still have to have him around to guide me?
And if, as David had implied, I survived Mount Carmel’s possible destruction, what then?
There were few answers to all these questions, and I ended up shivering with worry and self-doubt in the wet night.
At 8:00 A.M. the next day, Agent Robert came knocking at our door, brandishing Part Two of the Waco Tribune-Herald’s “Sinful Messiah” series. We gathered around in the foyer while David read parts of it aloud.
The second installment featured Marc Breault, the “faithful follower” turned relentless enemy. It told about Marc’s meeting with Perry Jones while he was attending Loma Linda University, a Seventh-day Adventist institution, in Southern California. He spoke about being impressed by David’s sincerity in admitting he had sex with young girls. “This guy was saying it straight out,” Marc told the reporter.
The article went on to give a cockeyed version of our daily routine, portraying the men in the community running obstacle courses at dawn while David slept on into the afternoon. Professor Gaffney’s comments on the stale nature of the information gleaned from Marc and included in the affidavit applied equally to the article: True or false, Marc’s “facts” were at least four years old.
David read aloud the conclusion of Part Two, which quoted another former member saying: “Generally in the quiet evenings, an introspective, self-absorbed malaise seemed to overshadow the place as individuals perhaps contemplated their grim future.” He looked at our intent faces. “What about that?” he demanded. “‘Grim future’ may be truly prophetic, huh?”
Robert shuffled uneasily, trying to gauge our reaction. The day was gloomy, the sun trying to break through the foggy morning sky after the night’s rain. The air was charged with tension, but David seemed amazingly cool.
Though we were unsure when the attack would come, David acted as if he knew it was imminent. “I heard that last night the ATF guys in Waco were boasting about coming out here and busting us up real good in the morning,” David said, watching Robert’s face. He went on to say he’d found out that the Waco hotels were filled with agents and that there was a rumor that local hospitals had been warned to prepare beds for casualties. “Probably ours,” David said dryly.
Robert cleared his throat as if to respond, but nothing came out.
“Well, Robert, they’re coming to get me,” David said.
Flustered by the calm certainty in David’s voice, the agent’s protestations were feeble. Robert was nervous as a cat, his eyes skittering this way and that, and I wondered why he was with us. If an attack were in the offing, surely he would fear being caught and held hostage? My conclusion was that Robert had come to do some last-minute spying, that maybe he hoped to escape before the shit hit the fan, but without warning us.
David started talking Scripture to him, choosing as a lesson the passage in Nahum, His fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by him. Robert was sweating, and I sensed that he wanted to get the hell out. I wondered why he didn’t just get up and leave, unless he was under orders to hang on until the last second. Or maybe he was simply transfixed by the tension of the moment. David had certainly gotten to Robert, and over the past few weeks he’d come to know us, so the thought of what was in store for our community must have chilled him.
In the next hour, as David talked to Robert, we were plagued by telephone calls from reporters at the Waco Tribune-Herald. Those eager beavers of disaster were keen to find out what we thought of their melodramatic trash. I think Steve fielded the calls, but I don’t know what he said to the journalists, or whether he just told them to get lost. Since they already knew the raid was about to go down, those ghouls were obviously after a scoop. Later, the ATF tried to blame the newspaper for warning us about the attack and eliminating the “element of surprise.”
Around 9:00 A.M., Perry’s son, David Jones, arrived. His expression was agitated, and he seemed to be bursting with bad news. Noticing Robert, he rushed by us toward the chapel, where his father was sitting in a pew, praying. David gestured to his dad to join him in the telephone room between the foyer and the chapel. A moment later Perry came out and pretended to David that he was wanted on the phone—long-distance from England. David vanished into the telephone room, and we all waited in silence. Robert kept looking at the door, fidgeting, obviously desperate to leave yet still in the grip of whatever held him captive.
Apparently, David Jones was driving toward Mount Carmel when he bumped into a TV cameraman who asked directions to “Rodenville,” a name that was once used by the locals for Mount Carmel. Because David Jones’s car had the U.S. Postal Service logo on its door (he was a mail carrier) the cameraman assumed he wasn’t a member of our community. But David Jones had grown up in Mount Carmel. He was David Koresh’s brother-in-law and Rachel Koresh’s brother.
Alerted by this encounter, David Jones sped toward Mount Carmel. On the way, he crossed a station wagon loaded with armed men in dark combat gear and riot helmets and glimpsed the yellow letters “ATF” blazoned on their backs. His ears were pricked by the sound of approaching helicopters as he hurtled along the dusty road toward our gate.
Listening at the door to the telephone room, I heard hurried whispers, David Jones’s slow, country drawl alternating with his father’s high-pitched rattle and David Koresh’s steady response. The phrase “It’s going down now” was repeated several times, and all of a sudden Koresh’s voice sounded shaky. That worried the hell out of me. We all looked to him to set the tone, and if he was that disturbed by what David Jones was telling him, we were all in deep trouble.
There was a sudden pause in the conversation in the telephone room. Then Koresh said, “I’ll talk to Robert. Maybe he can get them to delay it.”
When David came back into the foyer, his face was gray and his hands were trembling. “They’re coming,” he said, confirming our fears.
Robert stood up uncertainly, stumbling over his chair. For a moment it seemed he might deny David’s statement, but he said nothing, just edged a step or two closer to the front door.
“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, Robert,” David said, repeating one of Mount Carmel’s mantras.
The sentence was double-edged. What Robert had to do as an ATF agent was his dire duty; what he had to do as a man who’d seen the true nature of our community was to try and convince his superiors to resolve the coming confrontation peacefully.
David held out his hand to Robert. “Good luck,” he said as they shook. Robert turned and hurried out, and I sensed from the way he hunched his shoulders that he half-expected to be shot in the back.
A second later, we heard the alarm bleeping in Robert’s pickup. Perry Jones looked out the window and saw the truck roaring down the driveway, lights flashing, as if he were signaling his fellow agents in the farmhouse near our gate. As we later learned, a panicked Robert phoned the ATF raid commander, Special Agent Charles Sarabyn, from the house to warn him we knew the assault was coming. Then he sped toward the command center ten miles away, to talk to Sarabyn personally; when he arrived the place was almost empty.
“Everything was very quiet, very quiet,” Robert recalled. “I went outside and sat down, and I remember I started to cry.”
Meanwhile, the attack convoy was on its way from the assembly point at Fort Hood, fifty miles southwest of Waco. Trundling toward us were eighty vehicles, stretching out for a mile along the northbound lanes of I-35. Huddled in a couple of cattle trailers hauled by trucks in the middle of the convoy, and in the accompanying vehicles, were eighty or so ATF agents in full combat gear. To provide footage for the ATF’s record of the coming glorious victory, each agent was equipped with a camera along with his weapon, his nylon handcuffs, and some flashbang grenades.
Half a dozen snipers were already in position around Mount Carmel, and three National Guard helicopters—two Apaches and one Sikorsky Blackhawk—were bearing down. Comp
leting the scenario, a crowd of journalists and camera crews, like the lost cameraman David Jones had come across, were closing in on Mount Carmel.
After Robert left us, some of the women went upstairs, hustling the kids into their rooms. Other mothers gathered together in the base of the tower at the back of the second floor, reckoning it was probably the safest area, being farthest from the front door and protected above by two floors.
I went to fetch my pistol but thought better of it. Armed, I’d probably be more dangerous to myself than to any attacker; unarmed, I felt more innocent.
Concerned for Michele and the children, I went looking for them. Serenity regarded me with her big eyes. “Tib-o-doe,” she whispered, glad to see me. I tried to imagine what must be going through the mind of an imaginative four-year-old at that moment. I hugged her and the twins and asked Michele if she needed anything. Self-contained as ever, she simply shook her head.
To pass the time, I went to the cafeteria and made myself breakfast. The food was comforting, and I didn’t know when or if there’d be another meal. As I was eating my cereal, I heard the faint sound of chopper blades churning the air. Perry came into the cafeteria, stared at me in surprise for a moment, startled to see someone doing something as mundane as eating, and hurried out. That was the next-to-last time I saw him alive.
Though I was doing something normal, my mind was in a dreamy state. Time seemed warped, the minutes simultaneously flashing by and endlessly drawn out. I was in shock, and the world seemed extraordinarily serene.
Overhead, footsteps hurried and doors slammed. David appeared in the cafeteria, accompanied by four or five men armed with AR-15s. He seemed to have regained his cool, and that was reassuring, even as the drone of the choppers grew louder. “They’re coming,” David said levelly, “but I want to talk it out with these people, so don’t anybody do anything stupid. We want to talk to these people, we want to work it out.”
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