More subtly, David failed to actively respond to the ominous signs that law enforcement officials were focusing attention on Mount Carmel for months before the February 28 attack. If he’d been more savvy, he might have hired an attorney to challenge the authorities on the issue of stockpiling illegal weapons, which they used as the prime wedge against us. The ATF would then have been forced to show its hand publicly, preempting the agency’s devious intentions. Wayne Martin once advised David to do just that, but he’d ignored this wise counsel.
Maybe David was half in love with Armageddon. Or perhaps he feared that this strategy would have brought everything out into the open, including his own criminal culpability in having sex with underage girls. This, indeed, was the worm in the apple of our collective innocence.
Yet the very fact that the hearings had been held showed that America couldn’t quite forget Mount Carmel. Its brutal fate truly was a rip in society’s fabric, and I had to believe that a slow mending would eventually work a change in the pattern of our culture. Such belief in the capacity of America to repair its errors, I realized, might be the truest kind of patriotism. It was certainly more profound than the paranoia of the patriot community and the militias’ penchant for violent action.
The tension between the strands of institutional inertia and natural justice was another kind of double helix. Like my own, its spirals were also rather frayed. But I had to believe that, in both cases, the threads would come together. I had to believe in America and in myself. Frankly, I had nowhere else to go. I’d crossed back through the fence far enough to know that I could not exist under the shadow of doom David had predicted. For him, his belief in Armageddon was an affirmation; for me, it was a crusher. Right now, all I could do was live for myself, play music, remember.
As I stared out the plane’s window, the world below seemed to drop away into a bottomless pit.
Failure met me early on my return to Los Angeles.
In the L.A. music scene you have to work twice as hard as anywhere else to make anything happen. You have to want it a hundred percent and more, because there are hordes of others pressing around you who do. The blunt fact was that our band wasn’t going anywhere, and eventually it just faded away. The band’s demise hit me hard, a personal as well as a professional failure. The songs were world class, but divided we fall, and not everyone in the band seemed willing to put in one hundred percent.
Then there was my ambiguous, post–Mount Carmel attitude toward sex. Surprisingly, given my long celibacy, I didn’t go crazy with women for a few years after I left Waco. I missed female company, but I was just too busy trying to rediscover who on earth I was. Also, I seemed to have lost my taste for casual sex. Women often came up to me after I gave a talk, seemingly turned on by my public soul-baring. We went out for dinner or a drink, but mostly I let the moment slide. I wasn’t yet ready for a serious relationship, either. Clearly, my erotic energies were dulled, and that worried me.
However, my dilemmas seemed petty when I’d receive one of Jaime’s letters from jail. Often they were written in faint pencil, as if each printed letter had been carefully considered:
Dear Dave,
I had intentions of calling you, but, do [sic] to an unavoidable fight, I now find myself in the hole. I’ve been in here 25 days with another 14 to go! I don’t know how Livingston can endure this kind of shit.…
Since I’ve been in segregation, I’ve just about spanned my whole life. I’ve thought about my childhood years, teenage days, high school and the beginning of my spiritual quest. And although the present is a bitter experience, I have no regrets that I am where I am.
Though we all as individuals still share the same experience of what we went through, that’s something we’ll all have to deal with on our own. All of us have the responsibility to remain faithful to what we perceived was the truth.
Keep rockin’ and HANG IN THERE! Oh ya, don’t go by your feelings! Just fucken with you!
Anyway bro, take care of yourself and keep the faith.
Love,
Your friend,
Jaime
Reading this, I was stricken with a strange envy. How simple it would have been if I’d been sent to jail, along with Jaime and the others. Prison routine would’ve neatly continued the discipline of Mount Carmel. Now, out here in the world, I was trying to structure my own days, but it wasn’t going well.
I attended the annual memorial events at the Mount Carmel site in 1996 and 1997. The gatherings, held on the windy plain, were muted and ritualized. We gave speeches, and Clive Doyle and I appeared on national television, mostly to field questions about the connection between Mount Carmel and Oklahoma City. “I am not a member of militias,” Clive emphatically told the media. “I don’t speak to militias.”
At the 1994 memorial I met Greta Stephens, a beautiful young woman with a chiseled face and startling blue eyes. I was drawn to her seriousness, her spiritual awareness. Greta joined me in Los Angeles in 1996. We hadn’t meant to have an affair, but she was too desirable to resist. Later, she got pregnant, and we decided to get married. Our daughter, Dylan, was born in December 1997.
Inside Mount Carmel I was close to the kids, but I didn’t know what it was like to have a child of my own. It changed everything, challenging my sense of myself. I’m crazy about that little girl, and I want to watch her grow up. There’s nothing as joyful as holding Dylan in my arms.
Sometimes I wonder what my life might have been like if I hadn’t met David that day on Sunset Boulevard back in 1990.
A friend once said to me, “What if, at the moment you met David, Mick Jagger had come up to you and offered you a spot with the Stones?” My answer was that I would surely have chosen the Stones. However, if the choice had occurred after I’d spent a few months inside Mount Carmel, I would’ve chosen David.
Though it was utterly different from anything I’d ever imagined, the time with David changed something crucial in me. His God wasn’t the God I’d ever thought I wanted. In fact, before I knew David, I hadn’t known I needed to experience a spiritual opening. My mother and family, and maybe many friends, feel that my meeting David knocked me off my perch, maybe permanently, leaving me confused and disoriented. Sometimes I even think that myself, but I know it’s not really so.
So, all I can say in the end is that everything that happened to me in Waco sprang from the fact that I became a believer, a man of religion, like millions of other Americans. (A recent Time poll reported that almost a quarter of the American population believes in the literal truth of the Bible, and an overwhelming majority follows some kind of faith.) Belief can’t really be explained to those who don’t have it, but that doesn’t make it invalid, and my religious commitment is essentially no different from that of the many people who attend regular churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. My teacher, David Koresh, had his own vision of biblical truth, but that was his God-given right and his privilege as a U.S. citizen—mine, too.
My interrupted time in Mount Carmel has made me more guarded, less spontaneous; more thoughtful, less impulsive; more cautious, less careless. The tension between my soul and my flesh is a hard struggle, but it is also very valid and worthwhile. I believe in Scripture, though I often don’t act as if I still do. In the words of an old hymn, I was blind and now I see—but seeing ain’t easy. I’m still making mistakes, but I’m not going to let those errors destroy my self-respect. While striving to knit up the loose strands of my nature, I go on drumming and witnessing, doing what I can to honor the hard truths David Koresh, my friend and teacher, and the community he created gave me as a gift.
AN EPILOGUE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
Even though nearly twenty-five years have passed since the horrific events at Waco, it still stands out as the seminal experience of my life. I try not to think of the siege too much because my life has moved on and when I dwell on what happened and why, I feel that familiar emotion of anger. One memory will never be erased, though, or even fade, and tha
t’s the memory of Serenity, the daughter of Michele, the woman I was most close to in Waco. I remember the sweet little pout on her face, her wide blue eyes, and the way she had of making you feel important and loved when she looked at you in her trusting way. I imagine her telling me all the good things that have happened to her in the intervening years. We even discuss today’s current events and the changes that have taken place in the world since that fateful day on the Texas plains, April 19, 1993.
Who would she be today? Where would she be today? Even at such a young age, Serenity was an inspiration to anyone who had the good fortune to have known her. She was a bright light walking around Mt. Carmel, and the thought of her going up in flames is unbearable.
I think of her particularly when I see my daughter, Nova, who is now nineteen years old. She’s a delightful woman, stubborn like her father, beautiful like her mother. But little Serenity never had the opportunity to grow up. She perished at the age of three in the conflagration of Mt. Carmel, along with her mother, two siblings, and twenty-one other children all under the age of fifteen. Like the others who burned or suffocated to death, she was completely innocent.
Looking back, I see those events as so needless, so unjustified, and so horrific. Seventy-six people perished on that day, a day that could have been avoided had the federal government acted with compassion and restraint. If only they would have allowed David Koresh to finish writing out the Seven Seals manuscript as had been negotiated. But the government, for many different reasons, chose to attack rather than let him complete his writing. Apart from not acting with compassion and restraint, the FBI—with the government’s collusion—acted out of ignorance and a lack of any sense of psychological insight. The situation could easily have been defused, but instead the FBI literally lit the fuse, hurled it into the building, and incinerated most of its inhabitants.
I now realize that David Koresh made huge mistakes. He was guilty of statutory rape and slept with a number of women, among them Michele, who was fourteen at the time. (Serenity was one of David’s children.) It should be noted that the age of consent in Texas at that time was fourteen (with parental permission) and although David’s actions might have been legal at the time, they were morally reprehensible, as well as bigamous. Also, he should have allowed the children to leave before the end result and for that he will have to answer to God.
David, along with other Davidians, went regularly to gun shows in Waco to buy and sell guns, which was perfectly legal. I’ll never be able to understand why the feds couldn’t have picked him up on one of those numerous trips when he left the compound. The fact is, there was only one man on that warrant and they could have picked him up at any time away from the group. That would have been such an easy, logical, and sensible thing to do. But the government was crazed with power and wanted to get a big bust at any cost. What if they had actually done their research and realized they were dealing with a man who really believed in the Bible? Even at this late date, it astonishes me to realize how many mistakes were made by the leaders of the ATF and by the commanders on the ground. They didn’t even listen to their own agent, whom they’d sent in that fateful morning to talk to David. Although the tragic and ignorant mistakes that were made have already been covered in this book, they are important to emphasize.
So many of the Davidians have been demonized by the media. As one of a handful of survivors, I felt it my duty to tell the true story of a group of people who were trying to live according to their religious beliefs and the teachings of a man they all considered divinely inspired. I don’t take the Bible literally but I do believe that David Koresh, despite his many failings, knew the Bible better than anyone I’ve ever met. Not that I’m a typical follower of Scripture. In fact, I was raised in a household of nonbelievers or, at the very least, agnostics. I watched cartoons as a kid, ate Cap’n Crunch cereal, laughed at Archie Bunker’s antics with my father, and obsessed about girls at school, hoping that someday I would be cool enough to talk to them. I also grew up loving music and wanting to be a drummer, and it was this ambition, more than any spiritual yearning, that first led me to Mt. Carmel.
Whatever my expectations when I arrived at Mt. Carmel, I ended up sharing an experience that made history, an experience that has been misrepresented at almost every turn. Both the ATF and the FBI were so good at lying about the government’s role that I decided the most effective balance to these webs of distortions and outright lies was to publish my own words as an eyewitness. I have never cared if they call me a liar or a cultist or otherwise try to discredit me.
After the traumatic events of Waco, I would have been happy just going back to my music. The tragedy seemed at the time—and still seems—unreal, as if this part of my life was a work of fiction written by some unseen hand. But so many overt lies and cover-ups have threatened to obscure the true story of Waco that even now, twenty-five years later, I feel a strong sense of responsibility to tell it as honestly as possible. In these pages I wanted to honor each and every one of the people who died, as well as those who survived, and this was a daunting task. Apart from all the complexities of the Davidians and their individual stories, no one can really understand Waco without having a knowledge of the Scripture that David taught, but I’m not a preacher. Interpreting Scripture is neither my calling nor my job, which is why I tried to keep my book as political as possible. Even writing my own story may have been beyond my capabilities, but it turns out that one thing I’m good at is finding the right team to help me make this book a reality. I was introduced to Leon Whiteson through my agent, Charlotte Gusay. In Leon, I found the perfect partner to bounce ideas off and be inspired by. He was a gifted writer, and I was deeply saddened that in 2013 at the age of eighty-two, he died of cancer.
Not until four years ago, when I was approached by filmmakers John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle about making a movie, did I feel a similar level of trust. I had been approached frequently by so many people but, to tell the truth, I never wanted a film to be made. Every other Waco film had been absolute crap, with the exception of the 1997 documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement (directed by William Gazecki, written by William Gazecki, Dan Gifford, and Mike McNulty). The Dowdle brothers had done so much research and had so much material they ended up deciding to make a six-part series with the Weinstein Company and Spike TV. I knew they could achieve so much more in that format than in a two-hour movie, so that came as a relief. John and Drew flew to my home in Bangor, Maine, and we hung out and talked for hours. I appreciated where they were coming from and started to see the vision they had. After so many previous disappointments, and because they wanted me to be on set as a story consultant, I began to hope that this version would get the facts straight and even help those in charge avoid repeating their fatal mistakes. Maybe it could even change the way people thought of those who died at Mt. Carmel, because no matter what you think of David Koresh, his followers died needlessly for their faith.
When I finally arrived in Santa Fe, I spent the first day on the set in stunned silence. I was shown into the office of Karyn Walker, who was responsible for all the costumes and clothing of the era. She had photos of everyone she could find up on the walls, and I stared in fascination at pictures of every individual I had known at Mt. Carmel. There was Julie Martinez and her two sons Joseph and Isaiah; Greg Summers, Jaime Castillo, Steve Schneider, and Wayne Martin; the Henrys; Perry and Mary Bell Jones; and of course, Michele and my little Serenity. That was a heavy day, but also a joyful one. Seeing those faces again was like going back in time, which was both unsettling and exciting. But nothing could compare to the day we drove a car out of town to the area where Mt. Carmel had been rebuilt. The location was amazing! They had managed to find a place that was flat for miles around just like Mt. Carmel. Across the street was an old building that looked similar to the ATF house where Robert Rodriguez had stayed with his fellow agents. There it was—a complete re-creation of the area.
The most intense experience, though, was seein
g the film’s full reproduction of Mt. Carmel. The set was perfect down to the tiniest detail. They even had a flagpole with a Star of David fluttering from the top and a re-created Seraph flag, which had been designed by David Koresh and Cliff Sellers, the group’s artist. Some details were changed—time sequences for example—but I was reassured by the fact that some of the people I knew and was close to were represented and honored appropriately. It was an even greater surprise when I walked into the set of the chapel area to see a double bass Pearl drum set just like the first drum set I had owned. I sat on the stage feeling completely at home. That’s when Taylor Kitsch, the actor playing David Koresh, walked in. “Man,” he said, “It’s so cool to see you sitting on that stage. I spend a lot of time in here alone trying to get into the head of my character.”
One of the great pleasures of being on the set was talking to the filmmakers themselves, from the actors to the writers and producers. Every single one of them told me that reading my book and the subsequent film script had been an eye-opener. Paul Sparks, the actor who plays Steve Schneider, said that when he first heard about the events at Waco, he fell right in line with the propaganda that portrayed Waco as being a really bad situation headed for a really bad end. Having worked on the film and read the book, he still felt Waco was a bad situation headed for a bad ending, but for vastly different reasons.
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