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  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018, 1999 by David Thibodeau and The Estate of Leon Whiteson

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  Original hardcover edition published September 1999 by PublicAffairs as A Place Called Waco

  First Paperback Edition: January 2018

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  All photographs in the insert are courtesy of the author with the exception of the following: David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidian community: Copyright © Waco Tribune-Herald/SYGMA; David Koresh on a trip to Australia: Copyright © Elizabeth Baranyai/SYGMA; Marc Breault and Steve Schneider: Copyright © Elizabeth Baranyai/SYGMA; ATF agents attacking: Copyright © KWTX-TV/SYGMA; The ATF retrieves its wounded agents: Copyright © Rod Aydelotte/Waco Tribune Herald/SYGMA; Six hours after federal tanks: Copyright © CORBIS/Reuters.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBNs: 978-1-60286-573-0 (paperback), 978-1-60286-576-1 (e-book)

  E3-20171121-JV-NF

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue: This Could Be the Day That I Die

  BOOK I: A SENSE OF COMMUNITY

  1 A Galaxy Far Away

  2 The Man and the Music

  3 Coming to the Mountain

  4 Edging Toward Belief

  5 Slipping Through the Fence

  6 The Withering Experience

  7 Temptations

  8 On Rape, Abuse, and Guns

  BOOK II: PRELUDE TO A HOLOCAUST

  9 Visions and Omens

  10 Showtime

  11 Aftershock

  12 No Surrender, No Quarter

  13 Ranch Apocalypse

  BOOK III: LIFE AS A SURVIVOR

  14 “Are You Comin’ to Kill Me?”

  15 Half-Truths and Outright Lies

  16 Ignorant Questions

  17 Afterlife

  18 Climbing the Mountain

  19 Back to the Future

  20 The Double Helix

  Epilogue

  Photos

  Special Thanks and Acknowledgments

  Appendix: The Mount Carmel Community: The Living and the Dead

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  This Could Be the Day That I Die

  It is hell. Day and night booming speakers blast us with wild sounds—blaring sirens, shrieking seagulls, howling coyotes, wailing bagpipes, crying babies, the screams of strangled rabbits, crowing roosters, buzzing dental drills, off-the-hook telephone signals. The cacophony of speeding trains and hovering helicopters alternates with amplified recordings of Christmas carols, Islamic prayer calls, Buddhist chants, and repeated renderings of whiny Alice Cooper and Nancy Sinatra’s pounding, clunky lyric, “These Boots Were Made for Walking.” Through the night the glare of brilliant stadium lights turns our property into a giant fishbowl. The young children and babies in our care, most under eight years old, are terrified.

  The dismal racket and the blinding lights are tortures invented by the small army of law enforcement officers armed with tanks, armored vehicles, and automatic weapons who’ve surrounded the complex we call Mount Carmel for the past seven weeks. These torments are intended to sap our wills and compel us to surrender to an authority that refuses to accept that we are a valid religious community with deeply held beliefs. All our attempts to explain our commitment to what we believe have been dismissed as mere “Bible babble.”

  As the days drift by, we’ve begun to fear that, in their disregard for our faith and their frustration at our refusal to submit to naked force, the seven hundred or so agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), plus the officers of several state and local police forces besieging us, may be edging toward an action that will end up wiping our small community right off the map.

  In here, we’re all hungry and exhausted. For fifty days we’ve existed on two military Meals Ready-to-Eat (MREs) per day. The prepackaged rations of spaghetti and meatballs or tuna casserole taste like mud when eaten cold, slime when warmed over our lanterns. I’ve lost thirty pounds during the siege. We have no heat or electricity and little water. We use buckets for toilets, and we freeze in the chilly winter prairie wind that rattles our broken windows and whistles through the building’s thin sheetrock walls.

  Huddling in the cold inside Mount Carmel are sixty-two adults and twenty-one children. Originally, there were some 130 of us in here, but many left voluntarily during the long siege. Six of our people were shot to death when armed ATF agents stormed our property without warning on February 28. The agents had fired at us, and we fired back. Four of them died and sixteen were injured as we drove them off.

  The people who chose to leave Mount Carmel after the ATF attack, and the parents who stayed in Mount Carmel but sent out some or all of their children, made an agonizing decision to trust the solemn word of the FBI that all would be treated with respect. The feds guaranteed that the children would be allowed to remain with their parents or be reunited with relatives waiting in Waco. But the feds promptly betrayed their word. They separated children from their parents, some of whom were arrested, and placed the kids in public care; they shackled the adults, even some of the elderly women, and threatened to indict them all for attempted murder. These broken promises and hostile actions on the part of the federal government certainly don’t inspire the rest of us to leave the fragile security of our collective home.

  The ones who’ve stayed inside Mount Carmel are a core group of our leader David Koresh’s extended family, plus some others. My close friend, Julie Martinez, and her five children decided to remain after hearing how the FBI treated those who’d gone out. The rest of us who have elected to stick it out with David to the end are an international group of men and women of various ages and nationalities, including Americans, Mexicans, Australians, Canadians, British, and one Israeli.

  We have no formal name for our community. If anyone asks, we just say we’re students of the Bible. “Branch Davidians,” the name by which we’ve become known to an amazed world, really belongs to the splinter group of Seventh-day Adventists who lived in the Waco area for fifty years or so before David Koresh arrived on the scene and reorganized Mount Carmel. We are not, as the FBI and the fevered media claim, a crazy “sect” or “cult” led by a man they’ve dubbed the “sinful Messiah”; rather we are a continuity in more than half a century of serious religious faith. We’ve long lived in peace with our neighbors. Above all, we have never threatened anyone.

  It’s now 2:00 A.M. on a cold Monday morning, April 19, 1993. I stand guard at the window over the front door to our building. A blanket covers th
e window to keep out the scouring winds and the dazzle of the lights. Lifting a corner to peer out, I see the bulky silhouettes of a pair of M60 tanks. With their bulldozer scoops and thirty-foot-long booms, these “combat engineering vehicles,” as the feds call them, seem like prehistoric raptors in the dark, eager to chew our bones. Knowing that the function of their long snouts is to help the tanks snort tear gas into our home makes me shudder. My sense of dread is sharpened by glimpses of several Bradley Fighting Vehicles, small combat tanks, scurrying in the shadows beyond the glare.

  In the interval of silence between one hi-amp speaker-blast and another, an owl hoots. It’s the first natural sound I’ve heard in weeks. Then I realize that the night birds are human. The agents besieging us are exchanging birdcalls, signaling one another in the night.

  In these moments I’m all too aware of the vulnerability of the stark, spare structure we dub the “Anthill.”

  A rambling two- and three-story complex cobbled together out of salvaged lumber and cheap siding, Mount Carmel sits on a naked, flat plain ten miles southeast of Waco. With unpainted walls and rooms without doors, the raw structure shudders whenever icy gusts sweep through.

  The FBI knows how flammable our wood-framed building is. It knows we’ve stacked bales of hay against some of the outside walls to protect us against gunfire. It knows that we’ve used Coleman lanterns, kerosene, and propane for light and heat since they cut off our electricity. It is aware that we’re low on water, down to a couple of eight-ounce ladles per person per day. At one point an FBI negotiator asked us if we had fire extinguishers, adding jokingly, “Somebody ought to buy some fire insurance.”

  A child cries somewhere in the dark bowels of the building. It’s one of the loneliest sounds I’ve ever heard. I think of my little stepdaughter, Serenity, sleeping beside her mother, Michele, in the women’s quarters on the second floor. Serenity and I are good pals; we love spending time together, chattering about everything under the sun. We’re both Aquarians, and this past February we celebrated our birthdays—her fourth, my twenty-fourth.

  Alone at my post over the front door, I ask myself yet again: Can the authorities really intend to endanger the lives of so many women and children in a violent assault? Another signal from the hostile darkness seems to whisper back—Yes, we can.

  Steve Schneider, David Koresh’s deputy, comes to check on me. “How’s it goin’?” he asks.

  “Scary,” I reply in understatement.

  “I have a feeling the feds will jump us tomorrow,” Steve mutters. “They’re making those weird birdcalls. And all day long we’ve been hearing snatches of conversation on the FBI radio wave band we’re monitoring. It’s hairy, Thibodeau. Stay sharp.” He shivers and walks away, leaving me even more nervous than before. I huddle by the window, peeking out from behind the blanket, ears cocked for the ominous owl calls.

  This is a strange scene for me to be in. A rock drummer by trade, a kid from Bangor, Maine, from the same French-Canadian New England stock as Jack Kerouac, I’m no religious fanatic, just a dreamer looking for answers in a place called Waco. The two years I’ve been here have been tough, but they’ve tempered my body and my spirit. I’ve quietened my life, reduced my needs, made great leaps in my heart and mind. Being in Mount Carmel has given me a rare inner surety. Put simply, this hard place has made a man of me.

  Is that a reason to kill me?

  I ask this question of the air on this dark Monday morning, knowing it may be answered all too soon. A refrain from the old seventies Don McLean song, “American Pie,” repeats over and over in my head: This’ll be the day that I die.

  Still, I can’t quite believe that the responsible officials and politicians in Washington will allow this atrocity to happen. After all, this isn’t Iraq or Somalia, Bosnia or Tiananmen Square. It’s the goddamm middle of Texas!

  And a host of press photographers and TV cameras are watching us, even at a distance. Though the FBI has held the reporters a mile away from our place, and the agents have cut off our electricity, leaving us without TV, we know that the images of our long siege have been broadcast across the nation and around the world. True, the government spin doctors have put an evil slant on our character, casting us as child abusers, drug users, gun nuts, demonizing our community as a bunch of Bible-crazed loonies. They claim the women and children living here are hostages. This blatant deceit is a rotten strategy, and I have a stubbornly naive faith that the FBI will not be allowed to get away with it.

  The FBI tanks fly white pennants slashed with red diagonals, reversed Dixie colors. We interpret these aggressive standards as the promise of a bloody end to our confrontation, a determination not to allow us to surrender peacefully. At one point during the siege we hung out a bedsheet banner: “RODNEY KING WE UNDERSTAND.”

  A few nights back we gathered in the upstairs hallway where David Koresh lay on blankets, propped up against the wall. He wanted to talk to us about our situation, how it might come out. Once or twice I notice him wincing from the wound in his side, made by a bullet that struck him in the lower torso during the February onslaught. The shot passed right through him, but the lesion hasn’t healed, since he has never been allowed to get medical attention. The wound is still seeping, and he suffers spasms of intense pain and dizziness.

  David’s a skinny, casual kind of guy, not charismatic or physically compelling. He’s of medium height, dressing mainly in rumpled jeans and sweatshirt, sometimes a black leather biker jacket. His curly brown hair is untidy, and his pale, dimpled face is framed with a scraggly beard. He seems fragile yet radiates a quiet kind of sincerity and strength. If the spirit moves him, his brown eyes sparkle, and his usually low-key voice vibrates with power. When we play music—him on guitar, me on drums, someone on bass—he really gets into it, jiving with the best.

  “Any questions?” David asks us solemnly.

  “Have we brought this Armageddon upon ourselves, in a spiritual way?” someone says.

  David’s expression is hard to read. “If we die here it’s because our purpose in this life has been served,” he says quietly. “In that sense, the feds are instruments of fate.”

  “You mean, our attackers are also our deliverers?” I query, startled.

  “You could say that. But,” he adds with a wry grin, “that doesn’t mean we have to love ’em.”

  Now, keeping my lonely vigil at the window as the dawn sky begins to lighten, I tell myself that, if our end comes, I’ll be ready. But I can’t say I’m eager for it. My skin crawls, and that refrain keeps nagging at my mind: This could be the day that I die.

  Before six o’clock, just as dawn breaks, I’m awakened from a doze by the ringing of the one telephone the FBI has left us. It’s the line they’ve used in a series of surreal conversations, mainly with David and Steve Schneider, trying to coax us out. Now the sound is ghostly.

  “I want to speak to Steve,” a rough voice says as I put the receiver to my ear.

  “He’s asleep,” I reply curtly.

  “We have to speak to Steve right now,” the voice insists.

  Shivering, I stumble along the corridor to the room where Steve is sleeping. While I’m shaking him awake, my roommate, Jaime Castillo, appears. He looks alarmed. “Something’s going on,” he mumbles as we haul an irritable Steve to his feet. Looking out the window, we see a formation of the demolition tanks closing in on us in the cold, gray light. “Shit!” Steve exclaims.

  Just then, the amplified speakers, which have fallen momentarily silent, start up again. A metallic voice shouts at us: “The siege is over. We’re going to put tear gas into the building. David and Steven, lead your people out of there!”

  A pause. We stare at one another, stunned.

  “This is not an assault,” the loud voice continues. “The tear gas is harmless. But it will make your environment uninhabitable. Eventually, it will soak into your food and clothing.” The tone of fake concern switches to an abrupt: “You are under arrest. Come out with your hands up
!”

  “Get your gas masks,” Steve orders. “Now!”

  Gas masks had been issued to everyone at the start of the siege; they were part of a job lot we’d bought at a gun show when we were starting to buy and sell firearms to earn some income for the community. Until the siege began, we never imagined we’d end up needing them for our own protection.

  Racing through the long building, I wake people up, alerting them to the attack, urging them to put on the masks. Startled from sleep, people bump into one another, and the kids whimper anxiously. One young woman, Jennifer Andrade, can’t locate her mask, so I hurry to find her one. Meanwhile, the loudspeakers continue their hectoring. “The siege is over,” brassy voices shout. “We will be entering the building. Come out with your hands up. Carry nothing. There will be no shooting.” One phrase is repeated over and over. “This is not an assault, this is not an assault.”

  Not an assault? With helicopters buzzing our building like giant hornets sent to sting us to death? With tanks coming at us, their long trunks filled with tear gas, nosing the air?

  Suddenly, a sickening, crashing sound reverberates through the entire structure, as if the building has been struck by a giant metal fist. My dazed ears make out the rumble of heavy engines and raw squeals from the tank tracks biting dirt. This heart-stopping racket crescendos as the steel claws of two tanks bite chunks from the flanks of the long dormitory block. Another punches a hole through the middle of the block, ripping out a section of wall and roof, shaking the place stem to stern.

  In the shock and confusion I run up and down the second-floor corridor, checking to see if there are any women who haven’t yet taken shelter in the concrete walk-in cooler at the base of the residential tower. My heart’s pounding enough to jump right out my mouth. This can’t be happening! a voice shrieks in my head. But it is happening.

  All at once I see a powdery cloud billowing into the building, and I hear the sinister hiss of tear gas. Windows shatter as small canisters, like miniature rockets, shoot through the glass and explode, adding fumes to those spewing from the nozzles attached to the tank booms. A hail of broken shards flies toward me as I hurry to the ground-floor chapel at the east end of the building, my brain hammering with worry for the children. About three days before the assault I tried to fit Serenity with a mask, tightening it to see if it worked, but it only made her cry. Since the masks are too big for the kids’ small heads, the women have prepared buckets of water to soak rags and towels to cover the children’s faces. I hope some of the women and children have taken shelter in the old school bus we buried underground at the west end of the property months ago, before the siege began. It was meant as a refuge against tornadoes, but now it might protect the little ones.