“You’re concerned about your children, as all good mothers are,” an agent told Julie. “David has repeated that you’re all free to go, and that if you stay it’s your choice.”
Julie wavered, torn between the safety of her family and her fears that the feds would permanently separate her from her children, accusing her of being an “unfit mother,” as they had accused some of the other women who’d exited with their children. If she went out with them, as the agents suggested, she feared she’d be imprisoned and her children would be taken into care.
“That should not be a concern because it’s not true,” the feds lied. “They always want to keep the parents with their children.” Julie retorted that she knew that many of the children who’d come out were in foster homes, but the agents tried to befuddle her with veiled threats that “it’s not going to get better.”
Really torn up by having to make this difficult decision, Julie asked to talk to her elder brother in Arizona to see if he would take charge of her children. The feds refused; but they did get her brother to send Julie a message urging her to send her children out.
“What’s best for my family?” she agonized. “To keep it together, come what may, or hand my kids over to the tender mercies of officials I really distrust?”
The night that Julie decided to keep her children with her, she was in tears. “I’m not sending my kids out there, I’m not going out,” she told me. “Those feds I was talking to made me feel real cheap, saying stuff like, ‘How can you be involved in this group?’ Oh no, they’re not taking my kids away from me. I love them. Hell, I got off drugs for them!”
Julie’s fears that she’d lose her kids if they left Mount Carmel and that she would go to prison were confirmed when her mother, Ofelia, left the community and was promptly jailed for several months.
On a practical level, we had plenty of food to carry us through a long siege, mainly a store of MREs—our true “stockpile”—and twenty-five chickens penned up out back.
Water was scarce. Though riddled with bullets, our storage tanks could still hold a couple of hundred gallons, but that wouldn’t last eighty or so people very long. Greg Summers melted down some toy solders from kids’ toys and plugged some of the holes, but that makeshift repair didn’t hold. To supplement our supply we went outside when it rained and collected water in buckets, even though the FBI threatened to shoot us.
After the feds first interrupted then finally disconnected our electricity supply (on March 12, the coldest night of the siege, the low dipping into the twenties), we had to rely for light and warmth on a couple of dozen Coleman and kerosene lanterns, some propane heaters, and two generators running on gasoline. We owned no personal appliances, so our power use was low anyway; but the lack of electricity immobilized the pump that drew water from the artesian well to the tanks beside the cafeteria.
Fortunately, our propane tanks were topped off. Four days or so before the ATF raid, Perry Jones had visited Star-Tex gas to fill two five-gallon tanks; in addition, we had four other tanks, three holding twenty-five gallons and one fifteen gallons. However, a thousand-gallon tank we’d installed the previous June was empty, since we’d never needed it—till now.
Milk for the children was a real predicament, and that led to our first direct challenge to the feds’ humanity.
Milk was a problem for us in more ways than one. It was an Adventist tradition, dating back to the church’s founder, Ellen G. White, that cow’s milk was far less healthy than goat’s milk and, of course, mother’s milk. Now we were cut off from the supply of goat’s milk we’d been buying in Waco; even worse, the mothers who were nursing babies stopped lactating because of the stress and tension caused by the raid and the continuing presence of our enemies.
David told the feds about this, and they immediately started haggling, trying to compel us to exchange kids for milk. David sent out one of David Jones’s children, but the FBI reneged on its deal, perhaps to spite our canceled surrender. David, Steve, and some of the moms begged the negotiators to honor their promise, but they didn’t. Instead, an FBI spokesmen told the press we’d rejected their offer.
This attitude persisted until David got to speak to Sheriff Harwell. He immediately promised to see what he could do to get us the milk. “I want those babies taken care of,” the good man declared, and six gallons of milk were sent in. Cow’s milk, to be sure, but we had no choice.
“We just could not understand why you all were, you know, punching at the kids,” David complained to a negotiator when we finally got the milk. In his response, the agent on the line revealed again the dissension between the negotiators and the tacticians. “You know and I know who it is, and it’s not us,” he said.
However, the FBI once again twisted the truth, claiming to the press that Sheriff Harwell had had to beg us to accept the milk. To cap it all, the feds hid secret bugging devices in the plastic milk bottles. These bugs were the first of many the FBI managed to sneak into our building during the siege.
As a matter of hygiene, we buried Perry Jones beneath the dirt floor of the tornado shelter, along with Jaydean Wendell, Winston Blake, and Peter Hipsman. One morning, Mark Wendell, Jimmy Riddle, and Clive Doyle sneaked out to retrieve Peter Gent’s body in the water tower. Peter lay where he’d been killed, on a ladder at the top of the tower. They lowered him down with a rope and zipped his body into a sleeping bag.
Peter’s parents had come from Australia and wanted to get possession of his body to bury him. Steve asked the FBI to take the body to Waco for burial. Unbelievably, the feds started dickering, insisting that one of us remain with the body. We refused, knowing that Peter’s escort would likely end up in jail. Nicole complained to a negotiator that her brother’s corpse remained unburied, and we were finally allowed to inter him in a grave under a tree on the front lawn.
The FBI refused to give us permission to bury the dogs killed in the raid. Greg had to lay them out in a row to show the world what the ATF had done to his animals. As the days wore on the corpses had decayed, and the stench of their rotting bodies was making us sick. One afternoon three guys with shovels went outside to dig a shallow grave for Peter Gent.
Meanwhile, we settled in for the long haul. After a breakfast of nuts, applesauce, and raisin rolls, study sessions occupied us till lunch. We had a packaged MRE for lunch and another for early supper, then more study till nightfall, when most of us were too exhausted by tension and increasing hunger to do anything but fall into bed.
The FBI and, later, Janet Reno made much of the idea that we and the children were suffering from “deteriorating sanitary conditions,” but things weren’t nearly as bad as they made out. Everyone kept clean. Before water became scarce we took sponge baths in rainwater. I let my hair grow longer, but I shaved my face.
We soon ran out of natural food and had to fall back on cans. Assessing our grocery stores, which consisted mostly of piles of those unappetizing MREs, we reckoned we’d have to ration ourselves to two cans per day. The water ration was gradually reduced until, by early April, we were down to two eight-ounce ladles per person per day. The worst thing was the cold, especially for the kids, who shivered through some freezing nights. I battled the cold by wearing layers of sweaters, but the icy Texas winds cut me to the bone.
The gym was the most exposed area of the building, difficult to guard, and so we blocked it off, fearing that agents could penetrate it any time they liked. However, since we no longer had access to our outside toilets, we were forced to use the gym as a place to dump the waste buckets, emptying them down a plank through a hole in the back wall. We also carried the buckets through the tunnels and the underground bus into the tornado shelter, but that was more risky, since the feds could enter it easily. All that was pretty disgusting, but it was necessary to keep our living space clean.
Steve organized a roster of men to keep watch in shifts, day and night, led by guys like Neal Vaega and Brad Branch, who were most easy with guns. I was given a pistol and a ri
fle; I slept with them beside me as a kind of symbolic security blanket. I carried the pistol with me when I had to go into the gym at the rear of the building to collect some extra blankets. The Glock felt cool in my hand, in both senses of the word: cool to the touch and cool to be armed, like a movie hero. However, if I’d actually come across an agent back there my hands would most likely have automatically lifted in surrender. I just couldn’t see myself killing anyone.
One time, though, I did want to use my gun—to shoot those damned speakers out. The noise of sirens, seagulls, bagpipes, crying babies, strangled rabbits, and crowing roosters was driving me nuts, yet I resisted the temptation. Instead, we began a kind of duel of the amps, blasting recordings of our music through our own loudspeakers, which drew a protest from the feds. Some cheek! A neighboring farmer complained that the racket of the speakers and the choppers stampeded his Brahmins, causing them to lose weight and market value. So much for the FBI’s vaunted psychological operations, or “psywar.”
Even though our resources were low, our spirits were high. The isolation gave me time to play cards with the children, especially Julie’s sons, Joe and Isaiah. Between games we watched the tanks and Bradleys moving around Mount Carmel. “Kinda scary but kinda neat,” Joe said. For many of the kids, the siege was an adventure, a real-life movie. In truth, even after the first firefight, the young boys and girls didn’t appear to be shattered. They certainly weren’t nearly as nervous as I was. They just went on being kids, and so hanging around with them lifted my spirits.
There were sad moments, though. A week or two into the siege we began fitting the gas masks, and I helped Serenity with hers. We had to struggle to adjust the leather mask to fit her small face; it was awkward and hurtful. After a few moments a tear escaped the mask and ran down her chin. My heart wrenched as I watched the tiny drop fall onto her dress.
All in all, though, we accepted the hard time as a test of our faith and an enhanced “withering experience,” a kind of purification under duress. I didn’t really miss the goodies that used to obsess me, didn’t mind going without pizza and beer. On the contrary, as I felt the fat slipping from my bones, hunger became a kind of exaltation.
My body slimmed to some 150 pounds, my trimmest weight since fifth or sixth grade. Maybe it was starvation, yet I felt lighter on my feet and purer in heart than I’d been in my entire life. Even toward the end of the siege, when I got so weak I could barely walk, I was buoyed by sheer pride. As my flab dissolved, my willpower firmed up. Inside, I felt good, essentially invulnerable. For a while I was the person I’d always wanted to be.
In the seven weeks during which we were forcibly holed up, I was given a powerful taste of transcendence that will always flavor my life—a sense of going beyond the boundaries of everyday existence and my own limitations into another, more exalted realm. But a taste was all it was. During those long nights and slow days I came to realize that a glimpse of such profundities was probably all I’d ever have, all my earthbound nature would ever allow me to achieve.
“You know, Thibodeau, I just wish I had three more years with you,” David told me. But fate denied me that time. Probably it would not have changed much even if I’d had the additional years of study. Day by day it became ever clearer that my destiny and David’s destiny were quite different. His visionary gifts came out of who he was, his particular character. Since my personality was unlike his, I knew I’d have to find my own way forward, struggling to find how to be transcendent and earthbound together. As Steve liked to remind me, I wasn’t “theologically seasoned,” that is, I wasn’t grounded in Adventism or any other Christian faith. But during my best moments I hoped that lack of seasoning left me open to reaching something more personal, something more purely me: a true witness rather than a total worshipper.
Though the feds tried to sever all our links with the rest of humanity, they didn’t quite succeed.
In an early breakthrough, a communications technician told Dallas AM station KGBS that our satellite dish could be repositioned to pick up radio transmissions, and KGBS announcer Ron Engelman sent us a message to move the dish to show we could receive his signal. For the duration of the siege, Engelman kept contact with us, speaking out on our behalf when most of the media were swallowing the official version of events or pursuing their own warped agendas.
Engelman had his own agenda, of course. He was a constitutionalist—a believer in a radical interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as a bulwark against government abuse. His sympathy for us wasn’t religious but political, but at the time he seemed to be the only voice out there speaking up for our rights. However, his voice was the first indication that the events at Mount Carmel, against our will or intention, would spawn a politically charged controversy.
A totally religious community, we never had a direct interest in politics in any conventional sense. For us, the destiny of the human race would be played out on a spiritual plane, and the conflicts of the mundane arena were essentially irrelevant, except as examples of a massive Babylonian futility. But the Mount Carmel story quickly became political, much to our eventual disadvantage.
Engelman’s take on our predicament attracted libertarian weirdos like Gary Hunt, publisher of a way-out tabloid, Outpost of Freedom. Hunt contacted Engelman, and the announcer urged us to break through the feds’ communications blackout by hanging out bedsheet banners.
One day Engelman and some like-minded associates came to Waco to try to bring us a couple of “medical men”—who turned out to be podiatrists!
The FBI refused the foot men entry, but their visit did spur the feds into again offering us medical attention for the people suffering from wounds. David Jones, shot in the tailbone, was embarrassed but okay. Scott Sonobe’s injuries, however, were painful. He’d treated his swollen hand, which a bullet had pierced, with a solution of Epsom salts and some of our few remaining oral antibiotics. A doctor summoned to the phone by the FBI told him his hand bones had likely been smashed and that his wound should be X-rayed and surgically cleaned. He was also limping from the bullet in his thigh. Judy Schneider’s shattered right index finger was swollen and discolored, and she had resorted to rubbing it with garlic, a favorite Mount Carmel remedy that David also used on his wounds. When Judy’s finger failed to heal, she suggested to Steve that he cut it off, but he rightly refused.
David was suffering the most from his injuries. He pissed blood, his stomach wound kept seeping, and it was painful for him to shit, cough, or laugh; he had spasms, tremors, and splitting headaches; his thumb was numb and his pierced wrist wasn’t healing. Before she left, Annetta Richards, the Jamaican nurse, cleaned his wounds. Later, the feds sent in a suture kit, also bugged with a listening device. At times, David would fall unconscious in the middle of a sentence and awake with a startled look in his eyes, as if he’d been forced to come back to earth from a temporary heavenly translation and regretted his return.
The feds used the promise of medical attention to lure us into sending out more people, even after all those who wanted to leave Mount Carmel had departed. “Show us these signs of goodwill,” a negotiator told Steve, “and we will allow those who need medical treatment to return back inside the compound if they so wish.”
“A likely story,” was Steve’s sardonic comment.
Despite the FBI’s desire to cut us off from the world, two odd guys managed to slip through the official cordon a few days after the attack.
Our first visitor was a twenty-five-year-old Pentecostal telephone operator from Houston named Louis Alaniz.
Upset by the universally bad press we were getting, Louis came to Waco to find out if we were as devilish as we were made out to be. He dodged the roadblocks and made his way through the woods to the edge of our property. Sliding around an FBI tank, he came running up to our front door and banged on the bullet-riddled metal, howling to be let in as the feds’ loudspeakers screamed out dire warnings. We opened the door a crack and he slipped inside, dirty and hungry, scratched
by thorns and bitten by ants. Louis stayed until April 17, studying Scripture with David, sharing our privations. When he left he was jailed by the feds.
Two days later a middle-aged hippie with a beard down to his navel appeared at our door. Jesse Amen was, he said, “a witness from God,” a pilgrim bicycling across the United States on a sacred journey. He spoke fervently of “Lord Lightning Amen” and his lady “Cherry Lightning Amen” and told us a biblical army was massing on the Colorado River to rescue us from the feds. When he came in, David astonished Jesse by washing his muddy feet. This Christlike gesture blew the man’s mind, and he hung around until April 4 before giving himself up. “You get to where you just can’t take no more,” Jesse said. For Jesse, Mount Carmel was a spiritual feast as well as a physical famine, and that held true for the rest of us.
Jesse, the feds announced, escaped our “compound,” and the constant use of that word by the feds and the press to describe Mount Carmel really annoyed us. It made us seem as if we were living in a prison camp, locked like convicts in a circle of barbed wire. “Would they refer to the Capitol in Washington as a ‘compound’?” Wayne protested. “Is the Playboy Mansion in L.A. a compound?” I chimed in. The word was a clear putdown, meant to reduce our status as free men and women.
The omnipresence of the feds created an unrelenting pressure, like hands squeezing my skull. It wasn’t only the loudspeakers blaring that earsplitting trash at us, or the stadium lights glaring at us all night, or even the rude shouts of the circling feds—“Get the hell outta here!” “Why don’t we just kill ’em all!”—but also the frequent buzzing of the choppers swooping over our roof, prompting me to hit the floor with every pass. This protective reflex became so automatic that for months after the siege I’d hit the deck anytime I heard a helicopter—even in peaceful Bangor.
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