Waco

by David Thibodeau

  Privately, though, I wondered what my role might be in the future. My talks in the South had given me some confidence in my ability to be an articulate witness, and I was ready to continue in that capacity, traveling the country, speaking to anyone who’d listen—left, right, or center. I had to keep my spirits up, somehow.

  There were encouraging signs that the government had begun to learn some of the lessons of the tragedy at Mount Carmel. The same day we met with Ramsey Clark, FBI Director Louis Freeh announced a new tactics and training program to cope with situations like Mount Carmel and, hopefully, avoid repeating the tragic errors the agency made during the siege. Freeh said the FBI was creating a new position—“special agent in charge of critical incident response” in fed jargon—to provide a more subtle and sophisticated method of dealing with “unusual” groups like ours. However, Freeh still clung to the official line that the whole tragedy was our fault.

  John Magaw, the new ATF director, faulted his agency for “intelligence gathering oversights,” such as lack of information about our comings and goings. In other words, ATF should have quietly arrested David when he was outside Mount Carmel. The raid was the largest law enforcement action in American history, Magaw said, noting that the ATF would consider changing its dynamic entry strategy. In October 1993 Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Ron Noble told the House Appropriations Committee, “Although we cannot prejudge all future situations, we must be open to the possibility that a dynamic entry, exposing agents, innocent persons and children to gunfire, may simply not be an acceptable policy.”

  But the frankest admission of fault came from Robert Sanders, former ATF deputy director for enforcement. In 1995 he testified, in the congressional committee hearings, that the agency, at the time of the raid, was “very troubled.” The agents in the field thought the assault was “something forced on them by headquarters,” Sanders said.

  The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had recently appealed to Attorney General Reno and President Clinton for a national commission to review the “policies and practices” of federal law enforcement agencies. The ACLU got no response, according to Gene Guerrero, field director of the ACLU’s Washington office: “That illustrates our concern that not only is the Justice Department doing nothing about Waco, it is not adequately addressing the concern for federal law enforcement abuses,” Guerrero declared. He went on to compare the official indifference to our fate with the meetings his organization had had with Justice Department officials concerning Rodney King’s beating by several Los Angeles policemen.

  Other groups planned “Waco Remembrance” demonstrations in Washington, D.C., including one outside the White House. “This has generated more interest than any other case I am aware of,” commented one of the attorneys involved in our wrongful-death lawsuits. “I think that is because it is so foreign to what we hold as sacred in this country to see government police surround a place where ninety people live and charge it with tanks.” The ACLU’s interest in us, though belated, was very welcome. It helped dilute the growing perception that only right-wing zealots sympathized with our pleas for justice.

  The patriot community and its more militant extremists had rapidly turned “Waco” into a war cry that was to have its own tragic result in Oklahoma City, which was bombed on the second anniversary of the Mount Carmel fire. Several patriot leaders stated that every federal official who had a part in the assault on our community should be tried, all the way up the chain of command, to Reno and Clinton.

  It turned out that Timothy McVeigh had made two visits to Waco, one of them during the siege. During early March 1993 he’d taken part in a libertarian protest meeting held at the Waco Convention Center and had appeared in a video made near Mount Carmel at the time. “A lot of people told me I should be afraid to come down here,” he told the camera defiantly. A month earlier, before the siege, McVeigh had visited Paul Fatta’s booth at a gun show at Tulsa, Oklahoma, and chatted to him about our community. “I’ve never seen him madder than when he talks about Waco,” a friend of McVeigh’s later confirmed.

  According to a FBI affidavit based on the interrogation of McVeigh after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 and injured some five hundred, McVeigh was “extremely agitated” about the government’s assault on Waco. After Oklahoma City, the affidavit stated, “McVeigh’s grievance concerning Waco became a matter of national concern.”

  Mount Carmel’s fate, sloganized to “Waco,” generated a host of books, pamphlets, and videos put out by radical rightists. In fact, “Waco” became the rallying point for a range of radicals who generally lacked an agreed agenda of reform, apart from being against the feds. “We see Waco as a centralization of power, the central government coming into all areas of our lives,” declared Norm Olson, commander of the North Michigan Regional Militia. “Waco was the second shot heard ’round the world.” Russel Smith, commander of the Texas Constitutional Militia, said that “Waco woke us up to a very corrupt beast.”

  When I gave talks after the Oklahoma City bombing, the press often tried to link me to McVeigh, despite my expressed dislike of the man and his actions. After a while I gave up disputing the connection and simply tried to tell what I knew and take whatever heat resulted. But it saddened me that Mount Carmel had become no more than a cork bouncing in the crosscurrents of alien agendas.

  The night after the meeting with the attorneys, I ventured alone to Mount Carmel. The area was still fenced off, keeping the curious out and the secrets in. Rows of white wooden crosses had been lined up against the chain-link fence in readiness for the next day’s memorial, a small army of ghosts in the moonlight.

  As the bullfrogs croaked in the background and as distant cattle moaned in their sleep, I pressed my cheek to the wire and stared at the piles of rubble beyond. All that was left of the bulldozed site was the excavations of the tornado shelter we had never had time to complete and the empty, concrete-lined swimming pool. A stubble of scrub had already reclaimed the site where our building had stood.

  The silhouettes of two burned-out buses shared the blighted landscape with twisted rebar, sticking out of lumps of concrete like devil’s horns. A dozen or so scorched bathtubs we’d never gotten around to installing were stacked up like giant soap dishes. Charred timbers were strewn among the bluebells, and not far from me I saw a crumpled kid’s bike with a busted red frame resting in the grass that had shot up after the spring rain.

  In that moment, David’s absence was a physical ache. His death had sucked the center from my life, leaving little but a black hole. And though his theology told me he’d fulfilled his purpose on earth, it was no compensation for being deprived of his vivid presence.

  Then the thought struck me: If Mount Carmel hadn’t been wiped out, would I have outgrown it? Would I have moved beyond David’s teachings yet carried them with me?

  I couldn’t imagine having to live in Mount Carmel for too many years. It had been too bleak, and even before we were attacked I was already beginning to feel restless. But the process had been abruptly aborted, leaving me betwixt and between, thrown back on my own resources, whatever they were.

  The next morning was a circus, with some three hundred people packing the site. The crowd milled around the grandstand and under the yellow- and white-striped refreshment tent. Rock music blared from loudspeakers while vendors hawked religious tracts, “David Koresh/God Rocks” T-shirts, tapes of David’s teachings and songs and the 911 emergency calls, caps with Branch Davidian logos, bookmarks, and balloons. Amateur photos of the fire were selling for $10 a print.

  Several media relay vans were in the background, keeping their distance, aware of the crowd’s distrust of their reportage. (At a previous meeting I’d addressed, the audience ejected the media from the auditorium, accusing the reporters of being liars.) Ron Engelman, our friend from KGBS Dallas, was there to “present information the lapdog media doesn’t have the courage to report.”

  There were gui
ded tours of the ruins, bulldozed as a health hazard by McLellan County authorities. The tours were led by a reverend from the God Said Ministry, who unctuously pointed out the sights. I felt slightly sick watching the minister and his eager flock of listeners, wondering at our all-too-human ability to turn tragedy into farce.

  There was also a strong “constitutionalist” flavor that I found distasteful. Patriot groups had helped organize the event, and their stamp was everywhere—in the books on sale, the ubiquitous Soldier of Fortune magazines, and the loud voices of their hucksters. It was they, I suspected, who’d made what should have been a solemn memorial into a carnival.

  In his speech, Clive Doyle tried to recapture the seriousness of the occasion. He surprised me, revealing that this was the first time he’d visited the site since escaping from the burning building. “I’m kind of numb,” he told the crowd, and people clapped cheerfully, as if he were paying them a compliment. I made a short speech, emphasizing Mount Carmel’s character as spiritual community. At the end of the ceremony we read out the names of the dead, tolling a bell for each one. Then we observed a minute of silence.

  After the speeches a group of us went to a restaurant for lunch. We all felt very emotional, but all the same we weren’t sure how to go forward as a community. Many members had gone away: Oliver Gyarfas to Australia, Rita Riddle to North Carolina to care for her badly injured daughter, Misty Ferguson. Ten of the surviving children were back with their parents, and eleven others were with relatives. No one felt able to actually live on the property, as we were legally entitled to do. We discussed the need for some kind of permanent memorial or Mount Carmel museum, but it didn’t get anywhere. (Subsequently, students at Baylor University put together a small exhibit, including a model of Mount Carmel, titled “The Facts About Mount Carmel,” in Waco’s Helen Taylor Marie Museum.)

  Clive was clearly the leading light in the small rump group that had remained in Waco. They were busy fighting a claim on the property made by Amo Bishop Roden Drake, crazy George Roden’s former common-law wife. For my part, I couldn’t handle living in Waco; just crossing the Texas border oppressed me. But Clive felt Waco was his home.

  The sheep were scattering; our cohesion seemed to be weakening. Most of us felt that David’s teachings couldn’t continue without him, and without David there was no strong, motivating force. He was the heart and soul of our community, and we were the truncated body, helpless to move on.

  19

  BACK TO THE FUTURE

  After the excitement of the past few months, my return to sleepy Bangor was a real downer. My family’s attitude toward my experience had hardened into a kind of rough indifference. My two grandmothers’ absolute silence about Mount Carmel was deafening, and the mere mention of the word “Bible” turned my dad’s mouth sour. My uncle by marriage, who was visiting Bangor, was the only one crude enough to actually put the general feeling into words: “So, did you guys start the fire?” he asked bluntly. Mim snapped at him to shut up, but I knew he’d expressed what they all thought.

  My mother was in Greece, but through her letters she told me she was proud that I’d become politically active, like herself. “You have to be willing to fight for your beliefs,” she wrote. “In America blind faith is expected as long as the game is maintained.”

  However, Balenda was still upset that I hadn’t been straight with her about my marriage to Michele. “Even if it was not real you both asked me and Gram to acknowledge and accept it in the letters and phone calls,” she wrote.

  After scolding me, she insisted in her maternal way that Michele, despite the contrivance of our relationship, had really loved me. For Balenda, the basic issue was clear: “Women do not like being treated as tribal entities for God or anyone,” she said in the same letter from Andros. “I hope that one day you will understand how un-human that is and that it’s not divine either.”

  As the weeks went by I began to dream about Los Angeles. My feet yearned for the hard pavement of Hollywood Boulevard, my fingers itched for the drumsticks I’d plied when music—and music alone—was the power in my life. Yet the thought of returning to that chaotic, energetic scene bothered me.

  Then two things happened, spurring me to take the plane to Los Angeles: I finally received my share of the out-of-court settlement with National Enquirer, and I got a call from Ryan, the singer-songwriter in the band I’d abandoned when I followed David to Mount Carmel.

  Ryan suggested we put the band together again and take another shot at trying to make it in show business. He didn’t ask me a single question about Mount Carmel—about my life there, my survival, what I’d been doing since—and that was a huge relief. I accepted the offer of a couch in his home in Sherman Oaks and said goodbye to my family.

  They weren’t too sad to see me go. Clearly, they didn’t quite know what to do with me, certainly not in my role as the survivor of an embarrassing event. My existence as a musician in Hollywood was something they could live with, even if it led nowhere.

  In Los Angeles, Ryan and I connected with Scott, our old lead guitarist, and a bass player, and we put together some demo tapes and got gigs in some of the Sunset Strip clubs like the Whisky and the Roxy. Drumming with the guys made me remember how much I’d missed performing. I rediscovered the sheer exhilaration of being in the music.

  In September 1994, I made a trip to Israel at the invitation of professor James Tabor. He met me at Ben Gurion Airport, and we drove straight across Israel to Masada, on the banks of the Dead Sea. In that desolate landscape, looking up at the ruined fortress where the Jews had died after defending their faith against a powerful Roman army, I remembered Mount Carmel and the Texas plains.

  Back in Jerusalem, I visited Mount Zion, where David had received his vision in 1985. The walled city was beside me, with the Wailing Wall and the golden dome of the mosque above it, symbolizing the overlay of faiths in this hard land. Maybe, in that context, David’s vision hadn’t appeared out of the air but rather rose out of a ground alive with inspiration. Anyone could have visions here, I thought—except me. I was eternally earthbound, a witness but no prophet.

  The months drifted by, and just like that it was spring 1995—the second anniversary of the fire.

  Nineteen ninety-five was meant to be a significant year. In his 1985 vision David had been set a timeline of ten years before the Apocalypse would occur. However, since he hadn’t prophesied his own premature death, no one among us really expected the world to end.

  The group that gathered in Waco that year for a rainy-day observance was far smaller than the previous year’s throng. The people who made the pilgrimage, huddling under umbrellas as the rain poured down, seemed more sullen, more serious. There were no T-shirt hawkers and balloon hucksters, just survivors and some sympathizers, like Ramsey Clark, attorney Jack Zimmerman, and San Antonio jury forewoman Sarah Bain. The chain-link fence enclosing the property was down, and we dedicated a grove of crepe myrtle trees to those who perished in the flames.

  The Northeast Texas Militia had erected a plaque inscribed with the names of the dead, but thankfully the patriot presence was far less forceful than it had been during the first anniversary. True, someone had white-washed a message on one of a cluster of shacks near the gate—“WELCOME HOME MILITIAS, WE KNOW WHO THE GOOD GUYS ARE.” I also heard that G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate defendant and talk-show host, had been invited to broadcast the memorial service from his Radio Free D.C. studio in the capital. Fortunately, he’d declined.

  In his speech, Jack Zimmerman said he felt the public’s interest in us was waning. “There seems to be a slackening off now,” the lawyer said. “But we’ve called for the congressional oversight committee to investigate the Justice Department. Until that happens, I don’t think we’ll be protected from a repeat.”

  I’d just finished ringing the replica Liberty Bell, a single chime for each time Clive read out the names of the dead, when the news crew filming us began to ask questions about Oklahoma City. At first
we had no idea what they were talking about—then they showed us footage on their monitors of the devastation of the federal building. The journalists told us that an explosion had ripped the building apart just after 9:00 A.M. that morning. A day-care center on the second floor had taken the full force of the blast; nineteen babies were killed.

  As we watched televised images of infants being pulled from that pit of devastation, the reporters standing by speculated on a possible link with Mount Carmel. During the first media frenzy the FBI was accusing Islamic terrorists, but some commentators were fingering Waco.

  My own reaction was absolute horror at the destruction in Oklahoma City mixed with fury that it should be connected with us. “We know what it’s like to lose children,” I told a pushy reporter. “Anytime kids die is a tragedy. We’re just here to honor our dead. We’ll say a prayer for those children, offer our sympathies for the parents who’re suffering as we suffered. But to make the assumption that we had anything to do with it is just plain crazy!” However, the insistent linkage between Oklahoma City and Mount Carmel made by the patriot movement has merely served to further pervert the memory of our tragedy.

  Back in Los Angeles, most of the people I knew didn’t seem to want to talk about any of this, and I was grateful. If people asked me direct questions, I’d answer; otherwise, I kept silent.

  However, I did continue giving talks to receptive audiences, at three-month intervals. Mainly I was invited to speak at the regional Preparedness Expos organized by survivalist groups. These weren’t my venues of choice, but in the hardened public perception of Mount Carmel, now linked with Oklahoma City, these were the only people who seemed willing to hear what I had to say. I wanted to break out of the closed circle of patriot sympathizers into a wider pool of listeners, but, apart from the ACLU, liberal groups and organizations shunned us like the plague, leaving us captive to the radical right. For a while I saw myself as an outcast from an America that had always been mine.