Not long ago at Baylor University, I found it impossible to be in Waco, Texas and not to try to find the world of David Koresh that Attorney General Janet Reno had reduced to ashes. In another version of this history, it was Koresh himself who put his own parish to the torch. But the few people that I asked about the Branch Davidian house didn’t know exactly where it was located. It was only later that I met a professor of journalism, Sara Whelan, who was willing to track down its location. She had recently escaped from New Orleans to Waco, and thus she still had a newcomer’s curiosity. We stopped at an Interstate tourist office, and a few minutes later Professor Whelan proudly emerged from the building with pre-printed directions to “Mount Carmel,” the formal name of the building complex that, in April 1993, burned to the ground after officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco (ATF) moved in with tanks and nerve gas.
In trying to find the Double EE Rand Road on lonesome prairie, we made a few wrong turns and actually pulled into the driveway of the Double EE Ranch, which is as impressive as that of J.R. Ewing’s Southfork. A ranch hand corrected our mistake—we had turned left one road too early—and in a few moments we parked Whelan’s car on the edge of Mt. Carmel, in front of a makeshift museum that had a hand-painted sign offering tours of the grounds for $5. A few hundred yards into the property is a newly built white church. Between the road and its front door there are rows of freshly planted trees and small headstones, memorializing the names of the 81 Davidians who died in the1993 firefights. In effect, the Koresh church (although this is contested within the sect) still owns or controls the land, which is used partly for the congregation and partly as a parable on freedom of religion and government violence.
If, when I had stood in the drive of the Koresh estate, I had been asked to recount the events that had defined the first year of the Bill Clinton presidency, I would have said trigger-happy members of the FBI and ATF had attacked a rural commune—one that worshipped polygamy and guns as much as the second coming of Christ. I believed Attorney General Reno had used what is called “excessive force,” but I knew nothing about the cult’s leader, David Koresh, other than sensing that he and his followers had gotten their wish of having their judgment day coincide with a fiery conflagration. But mostly I would have been guessing, not having seen any of the siege on television, and never having read any histories of either Koresh or his followers. Nevertheless, standing in the Texas sunshine, I believed Mt. Carmel to be a variation on the themes of Jonestown, only this time the ATF had spiked the Kool Aid.
It was only several weeks later, after leaving Waco, that I managed to read several histories of the 1993 barn burning. In Waco itself, the local Barnes & Noble had no books on either Koresh or his demise. (The city would prefer more positive associations.) But from the Internet I purchased The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation by Dick J. Reavis, which from reading the promotional quotes I hoped might be free from the many conspiracy theories that this Armageddon has inspired. From Reavis, I was finally able to connect the grounds on which we parked Whelan’s car to the events of winter and spring, 1993. Alas, the museum promising $5 tours was closed, and the Mt. Carmel church doors were locked. Nor were any pilgrims on the road. Thus we had walked the grounds in eerie silence, as if on a movie set that had lost its audio feed or on a civil war battlefield where it was difficult to recall the exact circumstances in which Union soldiers had ambushed men, women and children it had deemed Rebels.
To give a bare minimum of the church’s background, it is necessary to start by saying that David Koresh was his adopted Biblical name, and that the leader of the Branch Davidians (not a name the group used to describe itself) was born Vernon Howell. He grew up in a broken Texan home, his mother having been 14 when he was born and his father absent from his life. Long before Howell drifted to Waco in 1980, the rural complex of wooden building had been associated with a schismatic group of Seventh-Day Adventists. Reavis calls them “perhaps renegade, but heirs nonetheless” of the “eight-million member Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church,” which, among others, can count among its early believers John Harvey Kellogg, the father of corn flakes. In 1942, a splinter group had renamed itself the “Davidian Seventh Day Adventist Association,” and it was from a lease in that name on Mt. Carmel lands that the press got the notion that Koresh’s followers should be known as “Branch Davidians.”
In fact, textual inspiration for the Koresh faithful came from the Seven Seals in the Book of Revelation, and those living at Mt. Carmel—a potluck of communal Europeans, Australians, and Americans—would have thought themselves nothing more exotic than students of the Bible, with emphasis on the Seven Seals. Although some of the men trained with firearms, it was not a gun cult, as you would find in rural Montana. Indeed, Reavis writes: “The people who had lived at Mt. Carmel were more akin to the Shakers and to the Onieda community—parts of today’s Americana—than to the members of the Charles Manson cult.” But if all they were doing out there on the Double EE Ranch Road was reading the Bible or baking communal bread, how did it come to pass that they found themselves under siege and then under attack from the combined arms of the FBI, the ATF, and the National Guard?
In reality, the G-men were attacking David Koresh more than they were laying waste to a rural congregation, near nothing and no one, 12 miles outside the city of Waco. Deserved or not, he had gained a reputation among local law-enforcement officials as a new-age preacher who was dredging up quotations from the New Testament to justify polygamy, dope dealing, and the stock-piling of assault rifles. In 1992 a UPS man had sounded the alarm after he spotted some hand grenades at the church.
Koresh had become a marked man. While thundering in his pulpit, he had found time to father 17 children, some with girls under the legal age of consent and others by women married to fellow Davidians. He had also amassed a formidable gun collection, notably from a co-religionist who made the rounds of the Texas gun shows. Although a man of the cloth—he told his flock that he was a third Christ, “a mortal embodying the spirit of God,”—Koresh enjoyed jamming with a communal rock band long into Texas summer nights. Had the Davidians not been armed, the encampment might well have seemed an out-take from Life of Brian. (Brian’s mother: “He’s not the Messiah. He’s a very naughty boy.”) In the makeshift cemetery in front of the rebuilt Mt. Carmel church is the wreckage of a Harley Davidson, a Koresh favorite when he wasn’t preaching about the “investigative Judgment of the dead.” One of his followers recalled: “David didn’t read anything but the Bible and Camaro magazines.”
In retrospect, had local police officials wanted either to question or arrest Koresh (although being a Messiah is not a crime in Texas or anywhere else), all they needed to do was pick him up on one of his frequent trips into Waco. The residents of Mt. Carmel may have had their own views on the Book of Revelation, not to mention their special take on marriage laws, but they did come and go from their compound. Instead the ATF cooked up one of those police raids that you see on television when it is airing “Real Tales from the Highway Patrol” or covering some narcotics bust.
At around 10 AM on February 28th, various law-enforcement officers, backed up by armed helicopters, tried to take Mt. Carmel by storm. Standing at the front door, Koresh was badly wounded in the initial assault. But in an amazing feat of arms (no matter which side of this story you believe), the Davidian militia fought off the ATF raiders, including the armed helicopters that had strafed the church buildings. 20 attackers were wounded, and four were killed. The Davidians suffered 6 killed. In a truce negotiated over the phone, the government withdrew from the property and laid down its siege lines, which isolated the compound for almost two months. Hence began the Texas standoff that attracted more than 1000 members of the world media, not to mention the FBI and U.S. army brass, including those in General Wesley Clark’s chain of command, who later would have supplied the assault armor.
On April 19th, under rules of engagement signed by Attorney General Reno, the government attacked again, this time using tanks to pierce the Mt. Carmel Center’s walls and to shoot canisters of CS nerve gas into the wooden compound. (As the tanks rolled forward, an FBI public address system blared: “This is not an assault. This is not an assault.”) Not reassured, the Davidians fought the mechanized agents, although this time the buildings caught fire and consumed all but nine of the 84 residents, including twenty-one children under age 16. From these ashes have come the conspiracy theories, many of which dwell on who started the fatal fire.
In the accounts of the US and state governments, Koresh devoured his own, as if fulfilling a prophesy in the Book of Revelation, rather than submit to the laws of civil society. Other histories, however, explain how CS nerve gas can become combustible, especially when shot by a tank into a wooden building. None of the nine Davidian survivors saw the fire start. But there is agreement that Koresh had the corridors at Mt. Carmel lined with hay, either as part of its primitive defense network or to feed the flames of judgment day. (During the standoff, Koresh told an FBI negotiator over the phone: "you're behind the Bradley [armored personnel carrier] we're here behind the walls of sheetrock.")
In weighing the evidence against Koresh, Reavis, who has been Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and who was an editor at Texas Monthly, disputes much official testimony. He quotes numerous witnesses to say that Koresh did not deal in drugs, and he cites the FBI, itself, to confirm that child abuse was not a variant at Mt. Carmel. Uncomfortably, he also reminds readers that “…there is no federal or Texas statute against stockpiling arms; anyone who can legally buy one weapon can legally buy a hundred, or even a thousand of them.” He describes Koresh the progenitor and Koresh the gunsmith as inhabiting legal worlds of his own construction, backed up by odd quotes from the Bible. (He once described Mt. Carmel’s extraterritorial status with a reference to Vatican City.) But the Waco story lays bare all sorts of troubling constitutional issues about freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, what constitutes a church, private property, and the uses of federal troops to enforce state laws. Is it Biblical or state law that should govern what goes on in the backseat of a Camaro?
As the church doors were locked and the museum was closed, there wasn’t much to see on the grounds of Mt. Carmel. Near the church are the burned remains of a bus and numerous headstones, as you would find on a battlefield. We lingered over the marker that reads: “In remembrance of all the men, women and children who were victimized and brutally slaughtered in the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building on April 19, 1995. We pray that they and their families find comfort and peace in Our Lord.”
Two years to the day after Mt. Carmel burned, Timothy McVeigh detonated his U-Haul explosives in anger over what he perceived as government-sponsored murder of the Davidians. During the initial siege at Waco, McVeigh had even tried to get close to Mt. Carmel and, while near the barricades, had passed out leaflets that read: “A Man With A Gun Is A Citizen, A Man Without A Gun Is A Subject.” But I still find it difficult to decode the symbolism of this monument, placed where it is. Is it just condemning all random violence or acts of terror? Does it imply indirect sympathy with McVeigh who believed that ATF officers were at work in the Alfred P. Murah Building in Oklahoma City? In a larger sense, all the monuments in front of the church, including those placed by the ATF, raise the difficult question about who are the victims at Waco: the dead government officers, the Davidian women and children, or the US Constitution?
Leaving Mt. Carmel, Professor Whelan and I stopped at the only other house on the road and chatted at length with a man who for years had been David Koresh’s next door neighbor. I never did learn his name, but during the siege the FBI had taken over his house—and only months later had paid him compensation. He now regretted that he had come to live across the street from a cult, and he told the story of how late one night, a family had escaped from Koresh’s heavy-handed control and asked the neighbor to drive them into town, which he did. The next morning, when an angry Koresh confronted him about hustling away these wayward sheep, the neighbor played it coolly dumb, saying: “But, David, I thought you had wanted me to take them into town.” His feeling was that Koresh, himself, had ignited the last fire, but he hardly believed the Davidians a threat to anyone but themselves. He and his wife had kept a polite distance from the commune, which often acted as though the Messiah had returned as Led Zeppelin. But the rock music annoyed the neighbors more than the guns or the Bible classes. (What house in Texas isn’t stockpiled with rifles and Bibles?) And the neighbor could well be the source of a quote in Reavis: “I’ll tell you what does bother me. This is a big fuss over nothing. These people have been here a long time and never bothered nobody.”
