Waco

by David Thibodeau

  Even so, I never abandoned hope that some act of grace would rescue us. Maybe old Jesse Amen was right: Perhaps an army of biblical prophets was waiting in the wings to come marching along, banners flying, and part the Red Sea of rage with which the feds had surrounded us. But the only banners we ever spotted were Old Glory—the stars and stripes now the standard not of liberty but of our persecution—and a white flag with red diagonals, a kind of reversed Dixie banner flown by some of the tank drivers.

  There were moments of humor, though. One time Sherri Jewell jokingly told an agent that the horns mentioned in Psalm 75 were symbolic penises. Lift not up your horn on high: speak not with a stiff neck… the horns of the wicked also will I cut off, she quoted, laughing as the negotiator’s soft “Ouch!” came over the line in response. But Sherri was not amused by her husband’s exploitation of twelve-year-old Kiri on Donahue. “I hate what my ex-husband has pumped into her mind,” she said angrily.

  There were, we heard, attempts to reach President Clinton to make him reconsider the government’s aggressive attitude toward us. On March 11, two prominent Baptists, James Dunn and Dean M. Kelley, wrote the president: “Please demilitarize the confrontation in Waco, Texas. It does not call for hundreds of heavily armed federal employees and Abrams tanks waiting for a showdown.… It is better to let [the Branch Davidian community] alone as much as possible until it either runs down or stabilizes as a more conventional religion. If there must be a ‘victory’ to save face for the government, can it not be brought about in a humane way?”

  That same day, Acting Attorney General Stuart Gerson left office. During his tenure, the only escalation he allowed the FBI in regard to Mount Carmel was to move more armored vehicles into the area. “I felt there was no need to force a change in the status quo. We were getting people out,” Gerson declared.

  However, as soon as Gerson left office, and while Janet Reno was still settling in, Agent Jamar told the FBI negotiators to treat David as if his scriptural messages were a delaying tactic. Glenn Hilburn, chairman of Baylor University’s Department of Religion, warned the FBI: “It was not wise at all to do that, especially in a situation that tense.”

  Again, that same day, there was a flurry over an astronomical event, a neutron star sighted in our galaxy. The gases in the tail of the fast-moving star gave it a peculiar shape, so the press named it the Guitar Nebulae. At first David, the guitarist, was skeptical, suspecting an FBI attempt to con him into surrender with a heavenly “sign.” For a moment, though, he got quite excited, quoting biblical prophecies about celestial chariots during a temporary delirium brought on by his wounds.

  At times, the government appeared to be genuinely trying to work things out with us. For example, on March 16, chief negotiator Byron Sage and Sheriff Harwell arranged to meet Wayne and Steve in front of Mount Carmel. For two nights previously, Harwell talked on the phone with Steve and David, saying, in his reasonable way, that it was time for common sense to prevail. The sheriff lied a little though, pretending that most people would be set free and their property returned. Maybe the good man actually believed this. He told David that he’d talked to many of our neighbors and that none of them had anything bad to say about us.

  (That, also, was a bit of a fib. Locals were surely distressed at the unpleasant reputation the “Waco wackos” were giving their town. To counter this bad rap, some of them had put “WACO PROUD” stickers on their bumpers.)

  “What does the sealed warrant say?” Steve asked the sheriff over the phone, referring to the original ATF affidavit and the search-and-arrest warrant it generated. “We still don’t know what David or any of us have been charged with!” The answer was vague, as the sheriff himself hadn’t seen the document that initially sparked the trouble.

  On March 16, while we crowded the windows to watch, Wayne, formal and nervous in his business suit, and a cool, casual Steve, snug in a windbreaker, waited in a temporary neutral zone in front of Mount Carmel for the G-man and the sheriff to arrive. Harwell and Sage, who were visibly on edge, drove up in a Bradley. For minutes that seemed like years, we watched the four of them huddle, trying to decipher their body language. The sheriff was laconic and Texan, his white hair and comfortable paunch sending a message of honest decency. Sage’s tall figure was stiff, as if he expected a bullet in the back at any moment—whether from his side or ours, I couldn’t tell.

  Our men, too, were a contrast in attitudes. Whereas Steve kept up a steady, eyeball-to-eyeball face-off with the officers, Wayne turned away from time to time, abruptly removing himself from the tight circle before plunging back in with vehement gestures.

  Wayne’s intense, dark face clearly showed uncertainty about what he was hearing, and we took that as a bad sign. However, when the meeting broke up and Sage and Harwell climbed back into the Bradley, Steve walked toward our front door with a confident step. “I believe Byron is sincere,” Steve announced to David. The rest of us, clustered around, nodded eagerly.

  But nothing came of this meeting. In reality, FBI commander Jamar and his masters back in Washington had already lost patience. A week earlier, Jamar had apparently told the press that the “ten-day roll” standard for an FBI hostage-rescue operation had expired, and it was time to tighten the noose. It was then that he permanently cut off our electricity. A week later, on March 22, the FBI began to prepare its final assault plans for presentation to the new attorney general, Janet Reno. The following day Sage himself signed off on the decision to use tear gas against us, signaling the final triumph of the tactical team over the negotiators.

  On March 25 Jamar upped the ante once more with a demand that between ten and twenty more people should leave Mount Carmel by 4:00 P.M. that day. If not, “certain actions will be taken,” the negotiator warned us. “This is not a threat, Steve, this is a promise.” Later the feds maliciously destroyed some of our remaining equipment, including Steve’s motorcycle.

  A bunch of us gathered around Steve as he talked to a negotiator about a group of us exiting, including Clive Doyle and the wounded Scott Sonobe. Judy Schneider, though in pain from her injury, refused to be separated from the daughter she’d had with David.

  One of the demands Steve made for our exiting was that the ATF agents who shot at us should also be charged with criminal offenses; unfortunately, the negotiator claimed that such things were out of his hands. Meanwhile, ATF spokesman David Troy repeated his old lies that we’d been running a drug lab and that we’d been the first to shoot on February 28, and the FBI’s tactical team began ripping down our fence to clear the way for the final assault.

  Next day, the loudspeaker noise changed from the crying baby and the honking seagulls to howling coyotes. During the evening a Bradley dropped off nineteen pints of milk, some packets of crackers, and a fresh battery for our video camera. This was the feds’ last humane gesture, for by then they had definitely decided to gas us into submission.

  “Yeah, my babies, my life is over,” David told an agent on the phone as we entered the last phase of the siege.

  BOOK THREE

  Life as a Survivor

  14

  “ARE YOU COMIN’ TO KILL ME?”

  Despite David’s gloomy prediction, we began Passover celebration on April 7 with a fresh wave of hope. Some things were happening that at last seemed to open a narrow door for us to leave Mount Carmel alive—not in abject surrender but with a sense that we’d honored our beliefs and stood up for them in the face of a hugely powerful opponent. Everything hinged on the willingness of federal agents and Justice Department officials to acknowledge that our spiritual faith was genuine, not the rantings of a bunch of wackos led by a religious huckster.

  For the first month of the siege FBI commanders had isolated us from all contact with the outside world in order to preserve the official view that we were dangerously weird. They’d even refused us our basic right to legal representation, preventing Dick DeGuerin and Jack Zimmerman, two highly reputable Houston criminal-defense attorneys who r
epresented David and Steve Schneider, from talking to their clients or entering Mount Carmel. Since the feds had cut our telephone lines, confidential discussions with the attorneys were impossible.

  On March 10, DeGuerin and David’s mother, Bonnie Haldeman, had driven to the FBI command post and tried to talk to Jeff Jamar, the FBI special agent in charge of the siege operation. DeGuerin even filed a petition in federal district court for a writ of habeas corpus, which was denied by Judge Walter Smith Jr., who later played a sinister role in the trial of eleven of our members in San Antonio. DeGuerin kept pressuring Jamar. Finally, in late March, Jamar relented, perhaps to demonstrate that he was willing to try every angle before he attacked us.

  Between March 29 and April 4 Dick came in five times; Jack came in twice. Their entry into our locked-down community was like a visit from an alien planet. Dick swaggered in wearing lizard cowboy boots, his tanned, boyish Texas face beaming with the kind of tough, easy confidence we’d long lost in our struggle just to survive.

  Jack was plainly shocked by what he saw, and the look of sympathetic horror on his rugged countenance gave us a reflection of how we might seem to people living an everyday existence. I got the impression that, to the two lawyers, Mount Carmel was something like a termite mound kicked open by one of Dick’s metal-toed boots, exposing a darkened world.

  The attorneys talked to many of us, took a good look at the bullet holes the ATF had made in the front door, in the tower, and elsewhere, and inspected the bloodstains where Peter Gent, Peter Hipsman, and Winston Blake had died during the original ATF assault. They examined the wounds of Scott Sonobe and Judy Schneider. They saw that David’s stomach wound was still giving out a pinkish ooze and that his wrist and thumb were numb; occasionally, David became unconscious while talking to the lawyers or was shaken by spasms and tremors. The attorneys told us to videotape all of this, especially the front door and the shattered ceiling in the tower. (We did, but the tape perished in the fire.)

  Jack Zimmerman, a former combat artillery officer in Vietnam and a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, later testified before Congress that the spray pattern of the bullet holes in the right front-door panel definitely indicated incoming rounds, not outgoing, as the ATF told the media, to back up its false claim that we had fired first on February 28. DeGuerin, an experienced hunter, told the Texas Rangers that in his opinion the rounds were “all punched in and they were various calibers.”

  After consulting Senior Texas Ranger Captain Maurice Cook, Dick worked out with David a possible way to end the standoff that was exhausting everyone. He said: “David, the world’s watching. Let’s have one Texas Ranger walk up to the front door and you and I will walk out and surrender to him. That’ll be sending a message to the people of the world that you don’t trust the ATF and the FBI, the feds that got you into this in the first place, but you trust your legal system and the Texas Rangers.”

  Later, in his testimony to Congress, Zimmerman explained that it was agreed that David would tell the attorneys when we’d be coming out and that they would inform the FBI. “Dick DeGuerin and David Koresh were going to exit first, to show everybody that they weren’t going to get executed the minute they stepped outside. And there would be a metal detector set up outside the front door in a bus.… When Mr. DeGuerin and Mr. Koresh went through that metal detector, Mr. Koresh would have plastic wrist restraints placed on him, be patted down by a male FBI or ATF agent.… I was supposed to stay in there and see that the other adults came out, keeping a distance so that law enforcement wouldn’t get nervous about people bunching up.… There would be a press representative there taping it [so] both sides would be protected.”

  After that, the FBI explosive experts would go into Mount Carmel to check for booby traps, Jack said, then hand over the site to the Texas Rangers. The wounded and others needing medical care would go to a hospital; the rest would be brought before a U.S. magistrate for arrest or release.

  Passover ended on April 14, and, as Jack explained, “We told them [the FBI commanders] it would take another ten, twelve days [from April 14]. We asked them, ‘Do you have that much time?’ They said, ‘We have all the time in the world to resolve this peacefully.’”

  Jack continued: “I was supposed to be the last guy out on the surrender plan. If there had been the slightest inkling in our minds that they were going to burn up the building or blow it up, I wouldn’t have agreed to be the last guy out.” Jack’s sharp final comment to the congressmen was this: “We wouldn’t be here today if the FBI and the Department of Justice had waited ten more days.”

  Though, as Dick DeGuerin testified, this plan “wasn’t greeted with a lot of enthusiasm” by law enforcement officials, we felt we’d at least shown that we were willing to work with the feds to find a way to end the standoff. “The holocaust is even more tragic because they were coming out peacefully,” Jack wrote later. “Steve Schneider told me at every contact we had that the entire group wanted to come out. They wanted the truth about February 28 to be told.”

  Jack added: “The demonization of the entire religious group by our government officials is tragic.… The Branch Davidians included decent, loving people who were committed to a religious faith that in this country they had every right to practice.”

  While the attorneys’ negotiations with the agents were going on, we received a communication from the outside world that really got our blood racing. On April 1 two respected theologians—James Tabor of the University of North Carolina–Charlotte, whom I quoted earlier, and Philip Arnold, director of the Reunion Institute in Houston—directed a broadcast to us on Ron Engelman’s show on the Dallas AM station KGBS. On the air, Arnold and Tabor seriously discussed our core beliefs and debated the ways in which David might interpret them to allow us to emerge from our isolation without betraying our purpose.

  Phil Arnold had come to Waco as early as March 7 to offer his services to the FBI. But his insistence that the feds should respect our beliefs annoyed the FBI, and he was barred from attending the briefing sessions. He returned to Houston, troubled and frustrated. “People’s lives are at stake here,” he said.

  Tabor had first heard about us when CNN anchorman David French interviewed David Koresh by phone on the evening of the ATF assault in February. “Over the next few days,” Tabor recalled, “it became clear to me that neither the officials in charge, nor the media who were sensationally reporting the sexual escapades of David Koresh, had a clue about the biblical world which this group inhabited.… I realized that in order to deal with David Koresh, and to have any chance for a peaceful resolution of the Waco situation, one would have to understand and make use of these biblical texts.” He understood that the people in Mount Carmel “were willing to die for what they believed, and they would not surrender under threat of force.”

  Tabor and Arnold put their heads together to formulate a resolution David could accept. They talked to Livingston Fagan, whom David had sent out on March 23 as a kind of theological emissary to the feds. The FBI had promptly jailed him and turned a deaf ear to his pleas.

  During several long visits, Livingston explained to Phil and Jim that, in David’s view, we in Mount Carmel were living in the Fifth Seal of the Book of Revelation, the one that asked, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth? In this passage, the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God… [were] told to wait a little season for the final confrontation between good and evil.

  Tabor and Arnold realized that this passage was crucial. They argued that because the duration of the little season was unspecified there was some leeway in its interpretation. It could be days, weeks, even years. The theologians formulated this “alternative scenario” during their April 1 radio broadcast and on a tape they sent in with Dick DeGuerin on April 4. They suggested to David that the little season could be stretched out, allowing us time to leave Mount Carmel and still be true to our beliefs.

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nbsp; In his account of his attempt to build a bridge between ourselves and the feds, Tabor offered his insights into something termed “biblical apocalypticism.” This tradition has three dimensions, he wrote. There’s the Scripture itself, the inspired teacher, and the particular time, place, and situation in which the teacher lives. The Scripture is unchangeable, but the way the teacher interprets it and the context in which he acts are flexible.

  However, these subtleties were beyond the comprehension of the FBI’s commanders on the ground, not to mention their masters in Washington. Impatient with our “Bible babble” and blinded by their prejudices and bureaucratic “rules of engagement,” they utterly failed to grasp the opportunity these strategies offered for a humane conclusion to our confrontation.

  Nancy T. Ammerman, the sociologist who served on a panel of experts that the Justice and Treasury Departments asked to evaluate the feds’ role at Mount Carmel, said: “Indeed the efforts by Arnold and James Tabor represented probably the best hope for a peaceful end to the siege.”

  David and the rest of us joyfully welcomed Tabor and Arnold’s intervention. At last someone was listening! And not just anyone, but a pair of reputable theologians who talked our talk, who understood that our message was not kooky weirdness but a valid part of a long tradition of apocalyptic belief. The smile on David’s face as he listened to the KGBS broadcast and replayed the tape was as wide as the Grand Canyon. The black cloud hanging over Mount Carmel seemed to lift a little, letting in a few shafts of light that dazzled our eyes and fired our hearts. Weakened by hunger as I was, I even did a little jig of joy.