12
NO SURRENDER, NO QUARTER
If that Sunday was dramatic and terrifying, the day that followed was a roller coaster of confused events and emotions.
During the morning most of us in Mount Carmel wandered around in a daze, unsure about what to do next. The scenario in which we found ourselves had no script and no precedent.
What were a group of Americans to do that had been assaulted by its own government with such ferocity, not because we threatened anyone, but essentially because we were different?
We ate breakfast, in silence mostly, our heads dizzy with images we could hardly believe were true. Looking at the faces around me, I saw a kind of amazement, a can-this-really-have-happened stare. Even the kids were subdued, perhaps as much by the mood of the adults as by their own memories of the previous day.
Someone suggested tentatively that we’d just experienced one of the worst moments of religious persecution in U.S. history. “Not since the Mormons…,” he said, and trailed off.
To me, the words “religious persecution” sounded medieval. Wasn’t this the Land of the Free? The friggin’ twentieth century? I wanted to shout that this was nonsense, that we couldn’t possibly be persecuted for our scriptural beliefs. Not in America! But I kept coming around to an implacable question: Why else had we been attacked so fiercely? It just didn’t make sense.
Livingston was the only one among us who really struck me as serene. For him, the prophecy was working out as David had predicted. We were in the Fifth Seal, he said, souls to be slain “for the word of God.” After the “little season,” we, too, would die to this world. “Freedom begins at the level of the soul,” Livingston declared, and this ringing phrase lifted my spirits for a moment or two.
Outside Mount Carmel the circumstances were also very confusing. That morning, the ATF was muscled aside by its arch rival, the FBI. The ATF negotiator whom David and Steve had been talking to was bumped, much to David’s annoyance, then temporarily brought back. During the day, the FBI brought in its own team of negotiators, backed by psychologists from the Austin Police Department. At the same time, a fifty-man FBI Hostage Rescue Team took over Showtime, surrounding us with a fresh demonstration of force. At 1:30 P.M. the feds cut off all our outside telephone lines, leaving only those connected to their new command post at Texas State Technical College.
At the best of times our telephones were tricky. Even before the siege the lines often went dead when it rained. During the siege, since David couldn’t move about because of his wound, our sole connection to the outside world was through a hundred-foot spliced extension cord that our cats played games with and our one surviving puppy liked to chew on.
In Washington, President Bill Clinton, conferring with Acting Attorney General Stuart Gerson, stated that the FBI predicted the “standoff’ would last for no more than a week to ten days. In California, Robyn Bunds gave a press conference in which she described herself as having been “brainwashed” by David. Meanwhile, David’s mother, Bonnie Haldeman, and her husband, Roy, David’s stepfather, came to Waco. The feds brought Bonnie to the vicinity of Mount Carmel to “talk David out,” they said; but he refused to speak with her, suspicious that she was being manipulated.
“My mother… all my life she’s been telling me she doesn’t even know if I’m her kid or not,” he told the feds. David’s mother soon gave up on her attempts to get to see her son and went back home to Chandler, Texas. “It’s hard not knowing what’s going on,” Bonnie said. “How many dead. How many hurt.”
Meanwhile, David and Steve were discussing a possible surrender with the federal negotiators. The feds first suggested to Steve that, if we all came out, David might appear on ABC’s Nightline and explain his beliefs to Ted Koppel and a national TV audience. They obviously felt they were playing on David’s desire to get his word out.
Steve passed the phone to David, who told the negotiator that he wanted everyone in Mount Carmel to have a chance to make an individual decision.
This seemed to throw the feds for a moment, since it was their view that we were a bunch of mindless slaves of the Sinful Messiah. Between this call and the next, we heard sounds like people walking around on our roof, and David protested vigorously about this breach of our cease-fire agreement. The negotiators then offered a variant of the first proposal: that David would make a tape for a national radio network to broadcast.
After discussing this with Steve, Wayne, and several others, David agreed. Maybe he felt that the opportunity to speak his message to millions outweighed the heavy consequences—prison and public trials—that would surely follow from our surrender. Perhaps he hoped that, on national radio, the churches and their congregations would have a chance to hear his word and recognize his teachings. Maybe, like me, he still kept a basic belief in the essential fair-mindedness and decency of Americans, in their ability to hear a man’s true word through the noisy distortions of our institutions.
Most of us were relieved but wary. David had appeared to accept that the little season could be prolonged, that we didn’t have to live through the immediate culmination of the Fifth Seal—a reprieve from a fate we both desired and dreaded. Though by now I was honestly prepared to die for my beliefs, I couldn’t say I was eager. Surrender seemed a lot better than a shootout. However, none of us trusted the feds, having seen how they’d lied in their press conferences, denying that they’d fired first and that the helicopters had shot at us. In short, most of us feared the worst but hoped for the best.
As I wandered through Mount Carmel’s rooms, viewing the shattered windows and the bullet holes, I anticipated seeing Balenda. I knew she must be tearing her hair out with worry. One negotiator told Scott Sonobe that many relatives had called in to find out how we were, and I was sure Balenda was among them. For my part, I felt I hadn’t really done anything wrong, and I was prepared to defend myself in the criminal justice system, even go to jail, if that was how it worked out. Not that I was a martyr; I was just a guy who’d made his bed and was prepared to lie in it.
Despite the proposed surrender, we began to get ready for a long siege, just in case. Some of us went out to the well and filled up as many containers we could find with water. The feds had shot up our water tanks, and we feared that sheer thirst might eventually make us give up. From time to time I looked out the window, watching the FBI “secure the perimeter” with gun posts and patrolling Jeeps and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. For a while I even tinkered with the drums, knocking out a few licks, but I seemed to have lost confidence in my musical skills.
During the day we sent out more children, including Scott and Chrissie Mabb, two of Kathy Schroeder’s kids. David gave the children $1,000 to give to the feds, to pay for their upkeep and various other expenses. However, David’s suspicion of the FBI remained high all through the discussions about the surrender. “You are all going to kill us,” he told one negotiator during the morning. Another negotiator, trying to reassure him, said that the military vehicles circling our building were there “for tactical reasons only,” whatever that meant. “They took their guns off,” a guy named Jim argued over the phone. “It’s strictly a bullet-proof shield.” We were suspicious of this jargon—rightly so, as it turned out.
And we weren’t the only ones wary of the feds.
Noting the FBI’s mobilization of military equipment, former McLellan County District Attorney Vic Feazell lamented the FBI’s Storm Trooper tactics (his words) and the “vulgar display of power on the part of the feds.” Feazell told the Houston Chronicle on March 1: “The Feds are preparing to kill them. That way they can bury their mistakes and won’t have attorneys looking over what they did later.… I’d represent these boys for free if they’d surrender without bloodshed, but I’m afraid I’m going to wake up and see the headlines that say they all died.”
That Monday evening, David called us all together to see how we were doing and to tell us about the deal he and Steve were in the process of working out with the feds, a
n arrangement to leave Mount Carmel early the next day. He lay propped up against the wall in the hallway, lying on a blanket, his face pale. If the surrender went through, this might well be the last time we would see him.
“Well, Thibodeau, what’s cookin’?” he murmured, as I kneeled down beside him.
“We are,” I joked, hoping to bring a smile to his lips.
He grinned at me, and I moved away, watching the people pass by David’s impromptu couch. Some were weeping, especially the older women. Others voiced thoughts of suicide. “I don’t want to leave here,” one woman said. “Not alive. This is my home.” Through it all, David smiled and consoled his flock. To those, like Wayne, who said he felt we’d failed him, David replied, “No matter, not now,” with a certain edge of impatience. The period of the withering experience was over, and we were now into the End Time.
Afterward, in Perry Jones’s office, we recorded “final messages” on audiotape, describing how each one felt about the recent events. The general atmosphere was surprisingly triumphant, a feeling that, fortified by our faith, we’d fought off a vastly superior force. “God has brought us through this,” someone said. “The message is in full swing. The plan is working out.”
We all wondered what had happened to Paul Fatta. Shut out of our community, he seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. The police were looking for him, to charge him with conspiracy to manufacture and possess unregistered firearms; but after the Austin gun show, he and Kalani had vanished.
Later, we heard Paul’s story. Apparently, he’d learned about the raid on his car radio. Paul said he checked into a motel and phoned the authorities several times but was told he wasn’t wanted, so he decided to hide out in northern Idaho. Angered by the feds’ gross media spin, however, he contacted a reporter at the New York Times. “I think the talk of a fiery martyrdom is just something that’s being put out by the FBI,” he said. “They don’t want witnesses. If they find me, they’ll kill me.” On March 23, however, Paul turned himself in. He is currently serving a fifteen-year sentence for aiding and abetting our resistance to the ATF’s attack.
That same Monday evening, our pent-up feelings burst out in an orgy of eating and drinking. We expected to be leaving Mount Carmel the next morning, so we felt free to indulge our appetites one last time. Gathering in the cafeteria, we raided the refrigerator, opened a box of stale cakes Perry Jones had brought a few days earlier, and broke into our cache of hard liquor. For a few hours we threw restraint to the winds, drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes, shouting and singing, making one hell of a racket, everyone blissed out in reaction to the terrors we’d experienced. We were celebrants at the court of King Nebuchadnezzar denying the writing on the wall.
The more fervent people were singing psalms and praying at the tops of their voices, like a bunch of Pentecostals. We all joined in a circle and Neal Vaega led a prayer, “Father, come down now! We’re going into the arms of Babylon!” “Yeah! Yeah!” we all responded, swaying in unison, raising our arms to heaven. I knew this was crazy and I wanted to protest; but like everyone else, I got caught up in the collective high. Still, this wasn’t the way we prayed and I knew it.
David disliked such overblown outbursts, and I wondered what he must be thinking about our uproar on his bed of pain upstairs. The answer came when Steve appeared and told us to shut up. “David’s mad with you guys,” he said. “Why are you letting down the message?” Suddenly, everyone felt like hell, and we slunk away with our tails between our legs.
Anticipating our departure, the FBI eagerly lined up buses down the road as dawn broke on Tuesday. I threw my clothes into my duffel bag ready to go. Other people made themselves sandwiches to see them through the day under the feds’ care, but I felt too guilty about last night’s food fest to do the same.
David had prepared his audiotape, which the FBI had arranged to have broadcast by the Waco affiliate of CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network. He sent the tape out with Catherine Matteson and Margaret Lawson and two of Wayne’s children, Kimmie and Daniel. So far, it seemed, both sides were playing their parts.
However, as we later learned, the feds treated the older ladies who exited like felons. An ATF agent drew up an affidavit alleging that Catherine and Margaret “did knowingly and willfully use weapons, including machine guns, to commit violent crimes of murder and attempted murder of federal law enforcement officers.” This action enraged us when we heard about it, especially the thought of the elderly women being shackled at the wrist, waist, and ankles.
The U.S. Attorney’s office was also angry over this action. “Those bozos just rushed in without talking to anybody, slapped those poor old women in leg irons and handcuffs,” a federal prosecutor fumed. Catherine and Margaret were soon released, but they spunkily resisted attempts to get them to cooperate with the feds. Pressured to draw diagrams of Mount Carmel, they refused, fearing the government might use such information against us.
David’s tape was broadcast several times that afternoon, but the results were disappointing. After all, how could David explain his vision of the Scriptures in under an hour?
Meanwhile, David got ready to exit. Scott Sonobe manned the phone, limping along the corridor, shouting messages back and forth between David and the FBI. Several of the women were helping David change out of his bloody, sweaty clothes; others got a stretcher ready to carry him out.
Greg haggled with the feds over the burial of some dead pups, tying up the phone. The rest of us hung around, waiting for the word to go.
Having no reason to trust the authorities, we asked for an independent film crew—from CBS’s 60 Minutes, say—to come in and document the proceedings so the feds couldn’t screw us. But the FBI wouldn’t allow it, claiming that the volatile situation was too dangerous for journalists.
Everything seemed to be on track. But later that afternoon Steve came downstairs and made a stunning announcement: “We’re not going. The time’s not right. God has told David to wait.”
We stared at him in bewildered silence. There was some murmuring, but that last sentence killed all argument.
Generally the news was received without comment, and we began to shuffle away to rethink our personal and collective futures.
I must say, I was confused by David’s abrupt change of mind. Why had he agreed to leave Mount Carmel, then reversed himself? I was not alone. Many people on both sides of the standoff were thrown by David’s switch.
Some of us blamed the previous night’s binge, saying we’d sinned by getting drunk and acting wildly. Kathy Schroeder later claimed that Steve had told her that, in David’s view, our behavior had damned us. “Should we die then, we would not be saved,” she said. The implication was that we had to rededicate ourselves before we could risk annihilation.
FBI spokesman Bob Ricks had a cruder explanation. “David Koresh kissed the kids goodbye. He was going to go outside and commit suicide in front of the TV cameras, and at the last second, he chickened out.”
Knowing David, I was sure his explanation that God had told him to wait was absolutely sincere. David had always followed his vision, whatever the consequences, however the world viewed him. But I knew that David’s sudden change of mind would play badly beyond our building. Successfully spun by the feds’ media manipulations, the American public would likely swallow the official story that David’s reversal was proof that we were all his hypnotized, brainwashed hostages. In this context, we’d surely come across as a bunch of jerks, losing face with a lot of people.
But we still had little reason to trust the feds. When the surrender deal was canceled, Steve told a negotiator how we felt about the government’s willingness to treat us fairly. “Frankly, I’m glad we’re not coming out because, once you get into this building, you can mess with the evidence any way you want, make up any story about us. You’re expert at cover-ups.” Later, Steve added: “If this building stands… and the reporters and the press get to see the evidence, it’s going to be shown cle
arly what happened and what these men came to do.”
I had to agree with him. Yet if we had exited, independent investigators might have come in and verified that we were not guilty of all the charges the government had made against us. (As it turned out, when the place was burned to the ground, the feds were able to conceal all the evidence they chose.)
However, even if David himself didn’t agree to leave Mount Carmel, most of the rest of us were free to walk out at any time, and thirty-five people actually did leave during the siege. The only exception to this general freedom to exit was David’s extended family, which he and the other adults in the family felt had to stick together to share a common fate.
My prediction that David’s cancellation of the surrender agreement would play badly on the outside soon proved true.
It immediately sent the feds into conniptions. The next day, ATF Deputy Director Dan Hartnett and Jeffrey Jamar, the FBI’s head honcho at Mount Carmel, held a press conference damning David as a deceiver. One FBI spokesman sneered about David’s claim to talk to God, and a roomful of journalists sniggered.
Even so, the feds would not allow us to tell our side of the story to the media. After cutting our communication with the outside world and keeping reporters miles away from the scene, a negotiator told Sita Sonobe that they considered it to be in our “best interest and everybody’s best interest that a lot of information doesn’t get out.” Speaking to David, he let slip that the feds were shutting out the media “because we don’t want the press to know what we are or are not doing.” The Houston Post reported, “When enterprising reporters did seek to get closer than the three-mile limit [imposed by the FBI], they were treated harshly.… A number of photographers, tired of the ‘lens wars’ that had developed as media outlets sent stronger and stronger lenses to Mt. Carmel, violated distance limitations.… They were summarily arrested, thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and taken away to jail.”
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