Waco

by David Thibodeau

  Around 1:30 P.M. a flock of choppers buzzed Mount Carmel, and we all took cover or rushed to defensive positions. Believing the helicopters were about to land on our roof, Wayne frantically phoned Lieutenant Lynch. However, the aircraft turned out to be TV choppers angling for a shot of Mount Carmel for their breaking stories. By mid-afternoon, more than sixty newspaper reporters, plus camera crews from at least seventeen TV stations and CNN, were held at a police barricade about a mile from the scene. That night the Federal Aviation Administration declared the ten-mile radius around Mount Carmel a “no-flight zone.”

  Later that afternoon, sometime after 4:00 P.M., I heard shots in the near distance, coming from the back, up toward the hay barn. We learned later that the gunfire was Mike Schroeder being killed as he tried to make his way back into Mount Carmel.

  That morning, Mike, my friend and fellow drummer, had been in the auto shop we rented and operated four miles down the road. The auto shop, which the feds erroneously dubbed the “Mag Bag,” was a couple of beige steel buildings, with partitions for an office, kitchen, and sleeping quarters. Mike lived and worked there, along with old Bob Kendrick and Norm Allison, a handsome, hip young black man from Manchester, England. They were working in the shop that morning when Bob noticed the choppers in the distance, in the direction of Mount Carmel. Mike phoned Mount Carmel and Steve told him we were under attack.

  The three of them grabbed their handguns and tried to drive to Mount Carmel, but the roads were blocked so they veered off to the mobile home where Perry Jones’s wife, Mary Belle, lived, two miles or so away from us. They walked down the road toward Mount Carmel, hoping to find a back way in, then turned off the road and crept through the brush to avoid detection.

  Of the trio, Mike was the most determined. Sixty-two-year-old Bob’s health was poor (he’d had several heart attacks), and he gradually fell behind Mike and Norm. After passing near the hay barn on our neighbor’s property, Bob just missed getting caught by agents, including a couple of snipers from the Texas Department of Public Safety who’d spotted his light-blue stocking cap and assumed he’d popped out of one of the mythical escape tunnels they imagined we’d dug out from our main building. When the officers went looking for Bob, they caught sight of Mike instead, who was wearing a navy ski cap.

  The agents, thirteen of them, later claimed that Mike had opened fire and that they fired back. But Bob, hugging the earth close by, heard the first shots—fired from a rifle, not a pistol like Mike’s—coming from the direction of the barn where the raiders were based. Despite being heavily outnumbered and badly hurt, Mike fought off his assailants for thirty minutes or so before he was finally cut down.

  The coroner’s report stated that Mike was hit four times in the body and left leg, which likely happened during the firefight. However, there were also three wounds in his skull, which must have been inflicted at close range, after Mike had collapsed and was bleeding to death from his internal injuries. The fact that no powder burns were found around these bullet holes was probably due to his woolen cap, which later conveniently vanished and has never been found, not even when the Texas Rangers searched for it during their later crime-scene investigation. (The Rangers’ investigations were hampered by the FBI, who blocked the officers from returning to the place where Mike was killed for ten days, giving them access only when the rain had washed away any incriminating footprints.) Mike’s body had been left hanging on a fence for four days, until the Rangers released his corpse. Coyotes had chewed off one of his legs, and I could only imagine the feast the fire ants and crows must have had during that time.

  Norm Allison gave himself up without firing a shot. In a later interview with Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Norm, a former cabbie, described his experience that day: “These big Texan sheriffs, all wearing the same tartan lumber shirts and neck chockers [sic], trying to make out that we had some mission to take over the world. A big conspiracy about how we’re part of David Koresh’s ‘mighty men.’ The people at Mount Carmel were good people with faith who were trying to defend themselves.”

  Norm was an odd type. His mother and older brother were Adventists, but Norm, an amateur rapper and self-proclaimed swinger, had disgraced the family by spending an eighteen-month spell in the slammer in Britain for rigging poker machines. He’d come to Mount Carmel around fall the year before, to join our band, he said. David turned him down as a musician, feeling he didn’t fit our style, so Norm went off to Hollywood to make his fame and fortune. But Hollywood didn’t fall at Norm’s feet, and the forlorn rapper returned to Waco in late January 1993, broke and broken. David didn’t really want him around, but Mike, a soft touch, let him help out in the auto shop and sleep on a beat-up bus seat in the garage.

  Norm told the agents who arrested him that Bob was wounded, but that wasn’t so. Assuming Bob was nearby, the officers called to him to surrender, but Bob was almost deaf and wasn’t wearing his hearing aid. He made his way slowly back to Mary Belle’s mobile home, where he was arrested nine days later. Rather foolishly, he showed the police the two pistols he’d carried on February 28, which led to the poor old guy being charged with “aiding and abetting” a conspiracy to commit murder—a charge he only narrowly escaped.

  With Mike’s murder, our death toll rose to six. Along with the law enforcement casualties, the day had cost ten lives and twenty people wounded. It was the worst moment in the ATF’s history up to that time—and in ours.

  But our blue-and-white flag was still flying, showing the Star of David and a flying serpent with fiery wings—a symbol both of deceit and salvation, derived from God’s instruction to Moses in Numbers 21:8: Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.

  As soon as the botched raid was over, ATF spokesmen scrambled to cover the agency’s ass. One ATF press officer said the agency was “outgunned”! In wild swings at shifting the blame for their tragically botched operation, the ATF also claimed it was “set up” by the media and local law enforcement. They even turned on their erstwhile coconspirator, reporter Mark England of the Waco Tribune-Herald, accusing him of phoning David to leak news of the raid, thereby eliminating the element of surprise. At one moment, while they were retrieving their wounded, enraged ATF agents slapped a TV cameraman to the dirt while he was filming them. They seemed to have forgotten that they’d invited the media along to record their glorious enterprise.

  The ATF’s head honchos also seemed to have forgotten that Robert Rodriguez had warned them their surprise was blown—and that they’d ignored him. The New York Times later reported that “several Federal agents involved in the violent raid… [compared it] to the Charge of the Light Brigade, laden with missteps, miscalculations and unheeded warnings that could have averted bloodshed.” The agents, the Times reported, “said that supervisors had realized even before they began their assault that they had lost any element of surprise but went ahead anyway.” To cut the babble, the ATF belatedly issued a gag order to its agents on March 15, but by that time the damage was done to the agency’s reputation.

  Some seventy or eighty heavily armed, supposedly professional agents, backed by a trio of helicopters, had failed to subdue a vulnerable, unfortified community of around 130 people, three-quarters of whom were unarmed women and children.

  The entire operation was graphically lambasted by no less an authority than Colonel Charlie Beckwith, founder of the U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force. Writing in Soldier of Fortune magazine a few months after the attack, Beckwith said succinctly: “Had a similar event taken place in the U.S. Army, the responsible party would now be serving time in the correctional facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.”

  Beckwith damned the ATF assault on several counts, including the decision to train at Fort Hood, “too close to the actual target site.” Sardonically, he added: “ATF might just as well have run a flag up telling everyone something was about to happen.” Beckwith criticized the agency
for its failure to consider the risk to human life on both sides; for the lack of a contingency fallback when the ATF discovered it had lost the element of surprise; for the time chosen for the attack—after 9:00 A.M., rather than at night or sunrise. “Every principle involved in mounting and conducting a successful raid/assault operation was violated,” he declared.

  The ATF initially responded by first suspending, then firing, Charles Sarabyn and Philip Chojnacki, two of the raid’s commanders. They were charged with a failure to abort the assault after they realized we knew they were coming. However, the agents challenged their dismissal and were reinstated in December 1994. It was rumored that they threatened to reveal details from certain still-unreleased cell-phone audiotapes in which they received orders from a superior, probably ATF director Stephen Higgins, or even someone higher up the command chain, to go ahead despite losing the advantage of surprise. Higgins was eventually forced to resign, and Deputy Director Daniel Hartnett and two other ranking ATF officials were temporarily suspended. However, one of them, ATF intelligence chief David Troy, was later promoted.

  Despite the dismissal of these ATF officials, the Treasury Department report, issued in September 1993, was essentially a cover-up. It concentrated on placing blame for going ahead with the assault after losing the element of surprise, but it did not bear down on the agency for attacking us in the first place on the basis of the trumped-up charges detailed in the original affidavit. Hartnett himself later told Congress that the Treasury report was deliberately distorted on the orders of Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Ron Noble.

  Perhaps the ATF was bamboozled by its own corrupt affidavit into believing that raiding us would be just like any other action taken against suspected criminals, usually dope dealers and gang members. Its technique, used effectively in most cases, was to show up with massive force and terrify victims into surrender. In something like six hundred raids executed in the three years prior to the attack on Mount Carmel, the ATF had only been fired upon twice. In turn, agents had killed three suspects.

  But we weren’t intimidated that easily. When the agents came at us on the ground and in the air with guns blazing, we fought back, as was our right when attacked with excessive force, even by law enforcement officers. In short, the ATF had no idea who they were really dealing with, even though Marc Breault, their main “expert” on Mount Carmel, had warned them we were a radical exception to their run-of-the-mill targets.

  Watching the sunset that Sunday, I could hardly believe that only twenty-four hours had passed since the last one. For those of us in Mount Carmel, the world had changed radically and forever.

  I tried to think my way through to a reckoning of these changes. On the ground, we were now no longer an obscure, unknown community in the middle of Texas but a national and international byword. “Branch Davidians,” the name we hardly ever used for ourselves, had become an easy tag for a host of talking heads and their audiences. We were physically surrounded, cut off from the outside world, thrown in upon ourselves even more than before.

  Spiritually, the changes were more subtle. As a group, we’d moved into the last phase of prophecy, shunted toward our own particular End Time by the action of the authorities who had, for their own murky reasons, focused upon us. Whatever our past tensions had been inside Mount Carmel, we were now bound tightly together in a common and relentless fate. We’d entered our true “soul time” and were supposedly living in a dimension that transcended whatever might happen to us in the flesh.

  People like Livingston and Wayne might say that our souls mattered more than our lives, but personally I felt all too human, all too mortal, all too vulnerable to my own doubts, fears, and the furies of the forces rallying against us. I cursed myself for this weakness, but it was too ingrained in my nature, so I just had to live with it.

  However, if I did survive the siege, I could be a witness, and I made up my mind to remember everything that happened.

  David, as usual, functioned on both levels, the worldly and the spiritual. In the first sense, he spent the evening trying to get the word out about our situation, giving phone interviews to the media, fielding calls from news agencies as far away as Australia and Norway who wanted to know who was killed and wounded and who on earth we were.

  At 7:30 P.M., David told CNN: “I had never planned to use these weapons. The problem is that people outside don’t understand what we believe.” Later that evening David talked for twenty minutes on Dallas radio station KRLD about his injuries. “I’ve been shot. I’m bleeding bad,” he said while a baby cried in the background. “I begged these men to go away.” Weak from his wounds, he started sobbing at one moment, telling the fake story about the child being killed. Maybe he believed the story at the time, or he was lightheaded, or he was trying to generate public compassion. However, he did offer to send out two kids each time KRLD played a short message he composed about the Seals. And when the station manager asked him if he had any sympathy for the casualties the ATF had suffered during the raid, he said vehemently: “My friend, it was unnecessary.”

  Some children did exit that evening, including six-year-old Angelica Sonobe and her little sister, Crystal, whom David requested be sent to their grandparents in Hawaii. Along with Scott and his wife, Sita, we all watched as the car sent by the feds took them away to safety. “Will I ever see my babies again?” Sita keened, and no one could answer her, not on the temporal level. Heaven, of course, was another matter.

  Late Sunday afternoon, soon after we heard the shooting that ended in Mike Schroeder’s death, KRLD repeatedly broadcast a message to us from the ATF. The gist of it was that the agency would not act aggressively if we were willing to give up. “Too little too late,” Steve said angrily. “Why didn’t they try that tack earlier?”

  The first ATF negotiators who got through to us on the telephone that day struck two sour notes that were to echo through the following weeks as the government’s noose tightened around our necks. One note was the tension between the negotiating-team members and their tactical commanders. The other was the feds’ total lack of sympathy for our religious beliefs.

  Almost immediately, the negotiators complained of pressure from their bosses. “I’ve got guys with scrambled eggs and gold leaves and badges like you wouldn’t believe,” one said, speaking on the phone from the house opposite our front gate that Robert and his colleagues had occupied. “I’ve got the governor, I’ve got the President, I’ve got everybody in the world—”

  “You’re going to smoke-bomb us or you’re going to burn our building down,” David countered.

  “No, I’m not going to let them do it,” the ATF negotiator insisted, knowing that his personal assurance carried little weight. (In fact, that Sunday evening the ATF requested the loan of ten Bradley Fighting Vehicles from the Texas National Guard.)

  Yet when David tried to explain the Seals and their importance to our understanding of how the confrontation with the feds might work out, a negotiator cut him off with a curt, “I’m not a theologian, I’m just a policeman.” David persisted, trying to explain the significance of the story of King Nebuchadnezzar and the three faithful men he’d tried to incinerate. “They threw those boys in the fire, didn’t they? But who protected them? God did! Now we’re in the fire.”

  During the fifty-one-day siege, 243 government tapes, some of them five hours long, were made of the negotiations we had with the authorities. We spoke with more than twenty different men and women, often around the clock, sometimes with long gaps in between. But all of these exchanges were tainted by the two factors mentioned above: the dissension between the official negotiators trying to find a common ground with us and their gung-ho, action-driven bosses; and the intractable lack of sympathy for our beliefs, dismissed as mere “Bible babble,” or any realization that we were prepared to die for them.

  Steve held out the hope that the federal agencies just couldn’t come in and wipe us out, not after Ruby Ridge and the bad PR they’d earned there, so
we did have some marginal bargaining power. But that didn’t reassure me much. My old faith in America had been badly cracked by the atrocious actions of some of its official agents, and I could not build any kind of hope on it now.

  Exhausted, I finally fell into bed and had an intense erotic dream. The shattering orgasm was a kind of release from the day’s terrors, a reaffirmation of life in the face of death. The dream startled me, though; I hadn’t had a lustful thought for quite some time and believed I’d finally mastered my sexual impulses. This sudden surge of desire shook me, but it also rescued me from my fright. “If we’re meant to be toast, so be it,” I thought as I lay in bed in the dark, listening to Jaime snoring. Those of us who’d been killed that day had moved on to a better place, and at that moment I had no doubt in eternity. Even as a child I’d felt there was an eternal judgment, that you just don’t get away with things. Now I was about to be judged.

  A childhood memory came to me, of the time I’d stolen a Matchbox toy car and Gloria had marched me right back to the store to return it. I remembered my public shame and the private little voice in me that told me I’d done wrong. Most of all, though, it bothered me that I’d hurt my granny, the woman who represented my best impulses.

  During this moment I envied my friends who’d been killed. They were now safe, whereas I was stuck here, with myself.

  * Graeme later incriminated himself by a naive confession to the Texas Rangers after April 19. He told them he’d learned everything he knew about firearms at Mount Carmel. Though that wasn’t much—Graeme had fired a weapon on only two brief occasions in an entire year—it was enough to get him indicted. In fact, David didn’t much favor giving guns to poor combat prospects like Graeme and me; neither of us was allowed to have any ammunition for our weapons, except during target practice and in the kind of emergency we’d just suffered. Jaime also gave himself away by talking to police after the April 19 fire. He unwisely told the Rangers that he’d had a gun at the front door that day but hadn’t fired it. At Jaime’s trial, the prosecution said that this proved his intent to use the weapon, and his own confession incriminated him. But the fact was that Jaime, like Graeme, was awkward with his rifle.