Waco

by David Thibodeau

  The fire burned for only twenty-five minutes, but it reached temperatures near 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit—“approaching cremation temperature,” according to a government medical report on the disaster. The same report noted that “most of the burned bodies were unrecognizable as humans.” The flames were so intense that the hotspots among the ruins took a full week to cool down.

  Marjorie Thomas, who suffered third-degree burns over half her body, recalled the terror of those last moments: “The whole entire building felt warm all at once, and then, after the warmth, then a thick, black smoke, and the place became dark. I could hear—I couldn’t see anything. I could hear people moving and screaming, and I still was sitting down while this was happening. Then the voices faded.”

  Marjorie continued: “I was making my way out of the building, because it began to get very hot, and my clothes were starting to melt on me.… I saw a little bit of light. I made my way towards the light, and on doing so, I could see where it—it was one of the bedrooms. I could—the window was missing. I looked out. I don’t like heights, but I thought… ‘I stay inside and—and die, or I jump out of the window,’ so I put my head—my hands over my head and leapt out of the window.” (Sheila Martin recalled that during the worst part of the fire Marjorie Thomas accidentally stepped on her daughter Sheila’s hand while coming down the stairs in the midst of all that flame and smoke. “‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, and young Sheila, who was close to suffocating, managed to say, ‘Oh, that’s all right.’ It’s amazing that, in all that horror, Sheila and Marjorie had enough sense of comfort and compassion for each other to say, ‘I’m sorry.’”)

  “I saw a huge fireball,” Clive Doyle remembered, “and I pretty well wrote everybody off at that point. I figured that no one was going to get out of there after that.” He added: “I personally did not see where or how the fires started.… We were sincerely expecting to come out. We had our bags packed.” ATF arson expert Paul Gray testified that Clive had “lighter fuel” on his jacket sleeves, as if that proved he was a pyromaniac. But kerosene spilled from one of our lanterns might well have been mistaken for lighter fuel.

  TV footage and the FBI’s own logs record that while the fire raged the tanks used bulldozer blades to push debris into the blaze.

  Even during the most intense period of the fire, the air in the underground bus was still cool and breathable. Many of the children might have found refuge there and survived the conflagration. However, at the San Antonio trial, FBI agents involved in the final assault on Mount Carmel revealed that they had been ordered to spray CS gas directly into the area where the trapdoor to the bus was located to prevent anyone from escaping or seeking refuge in the underground shelter. At the congressional hearings, FBI Assistant Director Larry Potts (previously censured for authorizing his agents to shoot to kill at Ruby Ridge) told Georgia congressman Bob Barr that the feds’ intention was “to move people toward the center of the compound,” where we could all be rounded up.

  Official lies survived the blaze intact. The day after Mount Carmel burned, FBI spokesman Bob Ricks stated that the agents in charge had not expected a fire. However, a nurse in the burn unit at Waco’s Parkland Memorial Hospital reported that an FBI agent contacted her at 5:00 A.M. on April 19, an hour or so before the feds sent in the tanks to inject Mount Carmel with tear gas. The agent, said the nurse, wanted to know how many casualties the unit could handle. Two other local hospitals were also approached by the FBI early that morning. (As it turned out, the feds refused to pay for the treatment of our people in the Parkland burn unit, and the hospital administrator had to file a lawsuit against the agency to get the government to pay up. The hospital’s claim was settled out of court.)

  Belying Ricks’s assertion that the feds hadn’t anticipated a conflagration is the fact that agents engaged in the operation had been equipped with fire-retardant Nomex suits, used by assault teams in situations where a high risk of fire is expected. And on April 15, the FBI requested the use of three U.S. Army CH-47 medical evacuation helicopters from Fort Hood to ferry possible casualties from Mount Carmel. More ominously, two weeks before April 19, the FBI asked morgues in the area to arrange for a special order of around eighty body bags, enough to deal with the corpses of every man, woman, and child remaining in Mount Carmel.

  Despite the obvious fire risk, intentional or accidental, no fire trucks were in place when the attack began. When smoke started to appear, the FBI waited ten minutes before calling 911. When the fire trucks did arrive, they were delayed another sixteen minutes at an FBI checkpoint. The FBI claimed that this last delay was due to a concern for the firefighters’ safety—a dubious excuse, given the number of children at extreme risk inside the building.

  A week or so before the attack, an agent asked Steve if we had any fire extinguishers inside. As I mentioned earlier, when he was told we had only one, the agent lightly suggested: “Somebody ought to buy some fire insurance.”

  As U.S. Representative Jim Traficant (R-Ohio) commented at the congressional hearings: “When you have one hundred TV crews but not one fire truck, that’s not a well-thought-out plan, that’s box office.”

  I can’t swear that there may not have been a few mad moments in the thickening fog of gas and dust, of choked throats and racing hearts, that thoughts of setting off a biblical apocalypse might have seized some minds. And for a while I almost wanted to believe that someone inside had started the fire; it was too shocking to think that the feds had deliberately incinerated us. But the FBI chose a dry, windy day to mount its assault, prime conditions for setting a building on fire. It was the feds, not us, who created the conditions for a conflagration. For that terrible consequence, the government is completely responsible.

  The government’s propaganda that we’d replay Jonestown—the mass suicide of James Jones’s followers in Guyana in 1978—was strongly refuted by people both inside and outside Mount Carmel.

  Jack Zimmerman, in his testimony to the 1995 congressional committee, stated: “They [the Departments of Treasury and Justice] said it was a planned mass suicide. They kept putting that word out; it was a planned mass suicide.… Dick [DeGuerin] and I had talked to those people about a planned mass suicide, and every time we talked to them, we were assured there wasn’t [any such plan].…

  “They [the feds] were putting out the word that the… Branch Davidians murdered people to prevent them from escaping. Of course, there’s no truth to that at all.”

  In a letter written to the congressional committee, Ruth Mosher, whose daughter, Sherri Jewell, lived and died in Mount Carmel, declared: “I repeatedly asked Sher if she would ever consider suicide as the Jonestown affair had, and her repeated answer was: ‘Heavens no, mom, it’s a sin to commit suicide.’”

  From his prison cell in Leavenworth, Livingston Fagan confirmed that “there was never any suicide pact or plan. There was, however, an expressed reaffirmation among certain individuals… of their willingness to die for what they believed, rather than surrender.” Livingston quoted Daniel 11:33, in which it’s written that in the final battle the remnant of God’s true people will die by sword and by flame, by captivity, and by spoil, many days. But the sword and flame would be the weapons of our attackers, not our own. And Sheila Martin said: “I never heard that David had such a plan, or approved of such a plan.”

  In fact, after April 19 even the FBI itself discounted the mass-suicide fabrication. An agency spokesperson stated: “We went throughout the world and interviewed former cult members, associates of cult members, the number that I last checked was 61 people. The vast bulk, the substantial majority of those believed that they would not commit suicide.”

  On the April 20, 1993, episode of MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Sessions himself stated that “every single analysis made of his [Koresh’s] writing, of what he said, of what he had said to his lawyers, of what the behavioral science people said, what the psychologists thought, what the psycholinguists thought, what the psychiatrists believed, was that th
is man was not suicidal, that he would not take his life.”

  Farris Rookstool, a member of the FBI’s evidence response team, said that in his opinion the claim that the Davidians committed mass suicide was “irresponsible.”

  Dr. Nizam Peerwani, a medical examiner for Tarrant County, where the autopsies on the bodies of those who died at Mount Carmel were completed, declared: “A lot of these deaths were not consistent with mass suicide.”

  This isn’t to say that there was no discussion of suicide during the siege. I, personally, never heard such talk inside Mount Carmel, but several of the survivors have stated that there was some discussion about mass suicide during those frantic last days, when the iron jaws of the federal forces began to really clamp down upon us. Kathy Schroeder, who turned government witness (at the 1994 San Antonio trial of eleven community members for attempted murder and other charges), wrote in her “confession” to the authorities that “Koresh believed… he was about to die… [his body] was to be carried from the building on a stretcher.… The members were to follow him and once outside they were to fire upon the FBI agents, drawing their fire, killing and being killed.” Others, she said, were given hand grenades to blow themselves up, and some women, who might lack the nerve, “were told to arrange to be shot by another member, if necessary.” She claimed that Neal Vaega, a sturdy Samoan from New Zealand, agreed to shoot her. Kathy did admit, though, that the idea of suicide was never formally discussed, “just spoken of… between people.”

  I liked Kathy, and I knew she was devastated by the death of her husband, Mike, in the shootout with the ATF on February 28. She and Mike had once been high-school sweethearts, and though she’d been through a bad time and a bad marriage before they finally got together, they were crazy about each other.

  But the ATF had tried (and failed) to stick Kathy with a record of arrest for possession of cocaine and marijuana, so I tend to think her dramatic account of our intended mass suicide may be a little suspect, a mixture of wild rumor and her natural desire to placate the lawmen who held her fate in their hands.

  But David often did say things that were contradictory, just to provoke us into a deeper understanding of some issue or another. Kathy’s lurid scenario of us coming out with guns blazing, bearing the body of our dead messiah, could well be her version of one of his more sardonic provocations. Not everyone understood when David was seriously kidding us for effect, but I certainly never heard him suggest suicide as a fitting conclusion to our ordeal.

  On the morning of the final assault, Reno went to the FBI’s Washington headquarters before dawn to watch the attack develop on a video feed from CNN. She also listened to audio from the FBI operations center in Waco, and probably heard Agent Byron Sage’s voice on the phone, saying to Steve, “This is not an assault”—despite the tanks crashing into our building. Maybe the hidden FBI bugs relayed to Reno the cacophony of tank engines, clanking tracks, splintering wood, crashing walls, and roaring gas trying to terrorize us into surrender. Perhaps she heard the frantic voices of men and women desperately praying, kids crying out in fright—“Mommy!” “Daddy!”

  FBI agents, breakfasting at a Waco diner before dawn that day, had drawn a detailed map of Mount Carmel on a paper napkin. The thumbnail sketch, deriving its up-to-the-minute information from the bugging devices inside our building, showed where each and every one of us was likely to be that day. A waitress in the diner found the napkin when the agents left to join the assault force. The sketch revealed that the feds chose to deliberately ram those sections of Mount Carmel where they knew people were clustered. In particular, they intended to immediately block the trapdoor leading to the buried bus to prevent any of the women and children from hiding out there to escape the tear gas.

  Whatever remained of the FBI’s Jericho Plan—the intention to slowly apply pressure to drive us out over a forty-eight-hour period—was abandoned within minutes of the dawn attack. Throwing aside all restraint, the tanks hacked away wildly at Mount Carmel, graphically expressing the built-up frustration of the feds. Seen on camera, the tanks looked like huge dung beetles trying to roll the flimsy building up into a ball.

  In a moment straight out of Through the Looking Glass, FBI spokesman Bob Ricks, in a 10:30 A.M. briefing in Waco on April 19, blithely declared: “Today’s action is not an indication that our patience has run out.”

  Reno, it appears, was unmoved when none of us came running out of the building into the feds’ arms. Apparently, it didn’t occur to her that the people inside Mount Carmel were either suffocating, trapped by falling debris, or terrified that the agents would mow them down if they emerged. I never saw anyone leave until the last moments, when the building caught fire. I know I hung on to the very last, when the brutal choice came down to being burned alive or shot.

  In fact, despite the obvious disaster developing in Waco, Reno, satisfied that the situation was under control, left FBI headquarters around eleven for a speaking engagement in Baltimore. However, at a hastily called Justice Department briefing at 5:00 P.M. that evening, she declared: “I think it’s an extraordinarily tragic and horrible situation.” At the time, Reno seemed shocked at the consequences of her decision to blast us with tear gas; but as Washington Times columnist Wesley Pruden dryly remarked the next day: “Any time you start the day by gassing women and children, you have to expect it to end badly.”

  16

  IGNORANT QUESTIONS

  The final moments at Mount Carmel were eerily biblical, as if the feds had perversely conspired not to convince us how wrong we were—but how right. The tanks moved in, the fires began. With the balls of flame, gas-poisoned air, screams of children as their bones were crushed, the cries of parents as flames incinerated their bodies, it was the end of the world as we knew it.

  I began this book with an account of those final moments—a nightmarish experience I can hardly bear to remember. “Nightmarish” truly is the right word, for when I emerged from the burning ruin of Mount Carmel part of me felt as if it must have been a horrible dream. In shock, I stumbled through the following hours like a sleepwalker, barely registering the sting of my own burned flesh or the stench of my scorched clothes.

  I vaguely remember the FBI agents piling us into a tank and taking us to a checkpoint, where, despite our protests, they turned us over to the ATF. There were fewer than ten of us, and the ATF agents threw us on the ground, searched us, put us in a van with a bunch of tense, armed men. Without saying a word, they drove us to a second checkpoint, shoved us into a tent, stripped us and videotaped us naked, put our clothes in bags, then made us don orange McLennan County Prison overalls and sandals. At yet another checkpoint, ATF agents ordered us to remove our clothes again, searched us a second time, took our fingerprints and palm prints, and shackled our wrists and ankles. Mostly, I recalled being surrounded by a mob of men with hard, hostile eyes.

  Amid all this, the ATF, to mark its terrible triumph, took time to remove the tatters of our flag and run up its own bureau’s banner, along with the Texas standard and the Stars and Stripes. It seemed that rubbing these flags in our faces was more important than searching for any other survivors. Our agony was the government’s triumph.

  Finally, we were handed over to the Texas Rangers for incarceration and interrogation. The attitude of the Rangers was markedly different from the feds. One of them told me, “David, we’re really upset about everything that’s happened. A terrible thing. We just want to get to the truth. Tell me your story.” Despite the Ranger’s sympathetic tone, I wisely refused to speak without an attorney present. When he again asked me to tell him what happened, I said: “Sir, I’ve just been through a traumatic experience and I prefer to keep silent right now.”

  Reporters crowded in on me as I shuffled in shackles up to the entrance to the sheriff’s station in Waco. “Did you kill the kids?” they shouted. “Did you burn the building?” “Those are ignorant questions,” I answered curtly. Later that day I heard one TV reporter comment thoughtfully on m
y retort: “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what Mr. Thibodeau means.”

  As I was led into the station one newsman shouted out, “Your mom’s here. Is there anything you want to say to her?” Seeing Balenda’s familiar figure in the crowd, I called out: “I love you, Mom!”

  In the jailhouse reception area I caught a glimpse of a small TV showing Mount Carmel, still burning. Reduced to that size, shut inside the glass tube, the whole scene seemed stagy, like a movie set, a fake Atlanta going up in flames, like in Gone With the Wind. I began to realize that what we had lived and died for was becoming a media show, an event distanced from reality.

  This painful thought obsessed me as the police nurse put salve on my burned face. She tried to give me a tetanus shot but I refused. “I don’t want anything put in my body,” I told her sharply, unfairly shifting my anger onto her.

  After I was processed, I used my one phone call to contact my dad. He’d been too distressed to actually come to Waco, but I knew that in his quiet, stiff way he was worried about me. “Jesus, I’m so fucking glad you’re okay,” he raged, his normally modulated voice cracked by shock and fury. Seldom had I heard him cuss and swear like that, and I had to take time to calm him down, a real role reversal. “I’m so sorry you had to go through this,” he lamented over and over.

  In the jail, I heard one last terrible story, the brutal coda to this workday of horrors. When the FBI mounted the final assault, just before the building burst into flames, one of the combat engineering vehicles broke into the cafeteria. Despite the fact that more than thirty women and children were crowded into the narrow concrete chamber at the base of the residential tower, the tank crashed into the ceiling, shoving chunks of broken concrete onto the people huddled below. Six women and kids were immediately crushed by falling blocks; the rest were suffocated by the dust and gas vapors as the tank injected massive doses of CS directly into their windowless, unventilated shelter. As far as I could tell, Michele, Serenity, and the twins had died in the storage room, suffocated by smoke, choked by gas, scorched by fire.