Box Office

Traditional fundamentalist theology speaks of a seven-year period of “tribulation,” after which time mankind will witness the Second Coming of Christ. It has been almost seven years since the Branch Davidian “compound” burned to the ground in central Texas on April 19, 1993, killing 74 people, including 21 children, and once again messianic violence is raising its ugly head.

Fearing “another Waco,” the Israelis deported a group of so-called Concerned Christians at the beginning of this year and only last month expelled “Brother David” and his followers, hinting darkly that some of them saw in their leader the resurrected spirit of his namesake David Koresh. “Brother” David William Garden had spent the last two decades on the Mount of Olives, ever since he made the pilgrimage from Syracuse, N.Y., waiting patiently for King Jesus to descend from heaven and enter the Holy City through the sealed Golden Gate across the valley from his apartment. The Israeli “Christian Terrorism” task force has Waco before its eyes, and it is taking no chances. The FBI had no such advantage in Texas and got fed up with cold pizza and warm beer in a siege that seemed stalled before the will of a man they perceived as a deranged rock musician and his groupies.

Search for “Waco” on the Internet and you will get a large number of links that have nothing to do with the conflagration at the ramshackle set of buildings that was the headquarters for Koresh. There are links to the Central National Bank of Waco, and the Waco Aircraft Co., for instance. But nothing will erase the word “Waco” from the public memory as shorthand for “religious commune led by a charismatic leader called David Koresh who died in flames with his followers after the FBI and ATF violently ended a long siege.”

Waco, or rather the religious community that lived at “Mount Carmel” nearby, is in the news once again, with the wrongful-death lawsuit filed by relatives, and the fresh Senate probes investigating the possibility of an official cover-up of what happened that day. Certainly there was a lot to be covered. The major question everyone is asking is, “Did federal officials kill people?” The answer is almost certainly, “Yes, indeed.”

The government begins its battle hopelessly mired in quicksand, with the revelation that the Justice Department had evidence no later than 1995 that incendiary tear gas rounds had been fired into the building with complete disregard for the men, women and children inside. The Justice Department at that time received a copy of a 49-page FBI labreport dated December 1993, including a list of evidence recovered from the site, on the last page of which was buried the notation of a “fired U.S. military 40-millimeter shell casing which originally contained a CS tear gas round.”

The House panel, which in 1995 investigated the events at Waco, was duly given a copy of this FBI report by the Justice Department--with the last page missing. “It was the last page of the report,” explained a source in the Justice Department recently, quoted in the Washington Post. “Sometimes the staple doesn’t go all the way through and a page gets lost. I’m sure that’s what happened here.” Maybe.

Forget the staple question. The fact that CS gas was used at Waco at all is a bombshell much bigger than the shell it came in. More than 130 countries, including the United States, signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (January 1993), prohibiting the deployment of CS gas in warfare, but it was a loophole in the agreement that no one had thought of banning its use against civilians, even children. Alan A. Stone, professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard, produced a report after Waco for the then-deputy attorney general delineating the effects of CS gas. “To use it with babies,” he concluded, “was like holding a gun to the parents’ heads.”

Unbelievably, this exactly was the FBI’s strategy, to force the mothers at Waco to grab their dying children and throw themselves on the mercies of nine Bradley fighting vehicles, five combat engineering vehicles, one tank retrieval vehicle, two Abrams tanks and a number of helicopters. No fire engines, however: They didn’t arrive on the scene until 41 minutes after the fire started, including the 10 minutes it took the FBI to call 911, and the 16 minutes the firemen had to cool their heels at an FBI roadblock. As one congressman put it at the hearings, “When you have 100 TV crews but not one firetruck, that’s not a well-thought-out plan, that’s box office.”

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David Thibodeau, 24-years-old in 1993, was one of the nine people who made it out alive, and “A Place Called Waco” is his story. Thibodeau describes himself as a fat boy from Maine who cared for nothing except the drums until he bumped into Koresh at the Guitar Center on Sunset Boulevard in the spring of 1990 while buying a pair of Promark drumsticks. Koresh and some of his followers had a Christian band in which he played the guitar and sang, and they needed another drummer. By September, Thibodeau was at Waco celebrating Yom Kippur with the Seventh-day Adventist Branch Davidians and quickly made the transition from musician to messianist.

One of the virtues of Thibodeau’s book is that he is not afraid to paint Koresh as a flawed messiah and himself as a less-than-perfect faithful follower. He writes of his struggle, not entirely successful, to adhere to the absolute celibate lifestyle of Koresh’s flock. Indeed, it was over sex, as well as guns, that Koresh finally came to grief. Having failed to make people believe that they were drug barons, the ATF and the FBI tried to justify their violent plans against Koresh’s group on the grounds that they were stockpiling guns and dealing in illegal weapons. But they knew that this was Texas, with a gun culture that’s part of the tradition, and that the Davidians helped support the community by buying, selling and repairing weapons. Certainly it is true that Koresh refused to accept a summons from the ATF, which led to a gun battle on Feb. 28, 1993, and the death of four government officers and six Branch Davidians. This was the justification for the 51-day siege that ended in the deaths of so many others, but it was an unnecessary confrontation.

The situation was rather different in regard to the charges of statutory rape, and Thibodeau makes no excuses for what went on in Waco. During a visit to Jerusalem in 1985, Koresh had a vision on Mount Zion which not only gave him a religious mission in life but also commanded him to have a child by his wife’s 11-year-old sister. Koresh already had a child, Cyrus, and would have two more with his wife, Rachel. But divine commands could not be ignored, so Koresh began having sexual relations with Michelle the following year, and a daughter, Serenity, was born when she was only 14, (Thibodeau would take Michelle at 16 as his sham wife in order to delude the authorities: Both Michelle and Serenity perished in the fire.) After little Michelle came others: 14-year-old Karen, 17-year-old Robyn and 13-year-old Aisha. Another young girl testified at the congressional hearings that Koresh had had sex with her in a motel in Texas when she was only 10 but, even without her testimony, it is clear that he was a serial child molester, and the fact that the girls and their parents were willing partners is no excuse.

The justified accusations of statutory rape were the weak link in Koresh’s defense and the reason that he was unable to throw himself on the mercy of the court. Janet Reno was known for her special interest in the protection of children and had just been sworn in as attorney general in March 1993, when plans for the initial swoop on Mount Carmel were almost unstoppable. The pressures for swift action were great: Remember that the attack on the World Trade Center had just taken place Feb. 26, and the ATF and the FBI were still smarting from deaths of the wife and teenage son of an Idaho survivalist named Randy Weaver, who were senselessly shot and killed in August 1992 in Ruby Ridge.

Beyond Koresh’s intimate circle, there is no evidence that other children were being abused at Mount Carmel; quite the contrary: The other children were found to be healthy and well-adjusted. But the stories of Koresh, his women and his natural children were ultimately too much to bear for the new Clinton administration, which was out not just to maintain the state, but also to make the world a better place, whether you liked it or not. Reno, the ATF and the FBI were party to a plan which took the risk of killing the children in order to save them.

The great mystery for Waco-watchers today is whether Koresh would ever have surrendered quietly to the authorities, or whether he was determined to bring the community to an apocalyptic end. Thibodeau gives his own assessment from within the compound, and his vantage point is one of the book’s strengths. He reminds us that Waco was not Jonestown: Apart from Koresh’s extended family, anyone could walk out if they wished at any time, and 35 people did during the siege. Most people simply felt they were safer inside Mount Carmel than relying on the compassion of the FBI agents seething outside with anger and revenge.

Thibodeau admits that some of the survivors claim that Koresh planned to turn himself over to the FBI as soon as he finished his commentary on the Book of Revelation, which he was furiously dictating to a follower while suffering from a gunshot wound he had received in the initial raid. Thibodeau doubts this and argues that Koresh already saw himself as a man with a higher and more deadly mission. Yet at the same time, he suggests, if Koresh had been approached by a local police officer known to him during one of his “troughs of self-doubt,” then he might have called it a day. Koresh was preparing to surrender at one point, after having a homemade video broadcast on a local Christian television station, but changed his mind at the last minute. In any case, Koresh had finished drafting only his commentary on the Second Seal when the FBI crashed through the building and put an end to the waiting.

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One revealing part of Thibodeau’s book is an almost naive description of the way in which the word “Waco” came to be a symbol for those against the government. He found his audience after the siege in “the patriot community, a broad, vague label that describes citizens who feel government is all too often guilty of gross abuses of power.” Timothy McVeigh made two visits to Waco, one during the siege, taking part in a protest meeting and appearing in a video made there at that time. He even visited the community’s booth at a gun show in Tulsa, Okla., and asked questions about the Davidians. Thibodeau regrets that men like McVeigh came to use “Waco” as an icon for their own brand of violent antisocial racism but expresses his own opposition very mildly as “dislike of the man and his actions.”

Thibodeau continued to speak to survivalist and right-wing groups even after the bombing in Oklahoma City, two years to the day after Waco, and excuses himself on the grounds that few other people would listen: “I saw myself as an outcast from an America that had always been mine.” Thibodeau comes across as a very gentle man in his moving and very vivid book, and it is deeply saddening that he should have found such an echo for his experience among these people. Thibodeau concludes by reaffirming that “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.” Like many militia men, the people at Waco combined opposition to the government with fanatical devotion to a vision of America and found themselves behind the barricades facing the armed forces of a country they loved dearly, if all too fanatically.