Waco

by David Thibodeau

  I was flooded with relief. It was clear that being mentally prepared to die was not quite the same as staring death in the face.

  At 9:45 A.M. a burst of gunfire came from the direction of the front door. There was a fusillade, and I heard Perry screaming. He was shot in the stomach, poor old guy, and his agony was audible above the rattle of the weapons.

  I ran into the foyer in time to see the right front door slam with the velocity of the bullets fired from the outside. The metal casing in the door had burst inward in an arc of small holes. David was staggering backward. I thought he was hit, but then I saw he was just retreating from the gunfire.

  “I tried—” he gasped, holding out his hands, miming the plea he’d made to the feds. He looked absolutely shocked.

  We quickly pieced together what had happened. As the agents attacked, David, unarmed, had opened the left side of the front door. “Police! Search warrant! Get down!” the agents shouted, aiming their weapons at him. (They later claimed that this outburst was all the notification required by their warrant.)

  Despite this aggressive approach, David did not lie down. He stared back at the agents and was surprised to see several reporters he recognized as employees of the Waco Tribune-Herald standing in the roadway behind the feds.

  “What’s going on?” David called out. “There are women and children in here!”

  But the agents kept coming, and David hastily retreated, slamming the door in their faces. That’s when the bullets crashed through the front door, striking Perry. “David, I’m hit! I’ve been shot!” the white-haired old man cried, holding his side. He started screaming and was hit again in the leg and thigh.

  When I got there, Clive Doyle was trying to help Perry, whom he’d found crawling away from the entry, still screaming in pain from his bleeding wounds. Clive carried him to a bedroom and laid him on a bunk. Perry groaned in agony for more than an hour before he died, disturbing everybody with his cries.

  “They came up in the truck and it had a gooseneck trailer behind it,” David told us, his voice tight. “They came all locked-and-cocked. I opened the front door as they were running up, in combat dress, guns aimed and everything, hollering. I didn’t know what they were saying, it was too noisy.”

  He paused, eyes dazed. “They just started firing. I fell back in the door and the bullets starting coming through. I yelled, ‘Go away, there’s women and children here, let’s talk.’” He backed away toward the stair and I watched him go with horror in my heart as the firing continued from the feds’ side and, in response, from ours.

  The ATF game plan, it turned out, had been to burst from the cattle trailers parked in front of the building. The agents then intended to batter down our front door with a ram and arrest David, firing if necessary. The idea was that fifty agents, including some female officers, would crash through the entry, guns blazing, to intimidate and disarm the men and take the women and children into custody. Despite being obliged by the nature of their warrant to knock first, they had practiced only the dynamic-entry approach. Clearly, that made a better movie.

  I don’t know for sure if David or Steve actually issued an order to return the feds’ fire, or if our people started shooting in a spontaneous response to the agents’ use of such deadly force. Speaking to CNN anchorman David French that evening, David said that when the bullets came through the front door “some of the young men… started firing on them.” The general feeling among other survivors I’ve talked to is that several people simply returned the ATF’s barrage of bullets in the shock of the moment, in a natural impulse of self-defense provoked by the unexpected brutality of the ATF’s assault.

  When we returned their fire, some of the agents ran for cover behind a white van while others squatted down behind our picket fence, screened by its cinder-block base. Yet others hid behind vehicles in the parking lot. The first burst of gunfire lasted fifteen minutes, followed by a twenty-minute lull. Then the shooting started up again, during which an agent was killed.

  The ATF apparently supposed that some of us would be working in the tornado shelter that morning, and a team of agents went around the back to cut us off and stop us from getting back into the building. However, these agents got tangled up in the ditches we’d dug there, tripped up by the stacks of cement and sand we’d left lying around. Our hired yellow bulldozer obstructed their view, and the mess of the hen house confused them in the muddy terrain between the pit and the water tower.

  The agents later claimed they were bushwhacked by “two white guys with pistols and a black male with an AR-15.” One of the agents, wounded near the concrete wall of the pit, crawled into a ditch and lay there until the cease-fire while his fellows cowered behind the ’dozer. To this day, no one knows who those “two white guys with pistols and a black male” were; it’s more than likely that the agents shot at one another in the confusion.

  Jaime Castillo and Brad Branch were standing at the front door when David had opened it to talk to the agents. In the chaos, they wrongly believed that David had been wounded. David, for his part, claimed for a while that a two-year-old girl, one of his kids, was killed at the door. However, a few days later, while talking to an FBI negotiator, David went back on this story and tried to deny it. I guess the dead-child story was David’s feeble attempt to counterspin the media against the flood of lies put out by the feds.

  Almost as soon as the action began, Wayne Martin had phoned 911. For two hours or so during attack, and for many hours afterward, Wayne talked to Deputy Lieutenant Larry Lynch, who’d just returned from the ATF’s command post.

  Wayne yelled hysterically into his speakerphone, telling the deputy that Mount Carmel was under attack. “Call it off!” Wayne shrieked. “There are women and children in here! We want a cease-fire!” He added: “If they don’t back off we’re going to fight to the last man.”

  “Oh, shit!” Deputy Lynch exclaimed, obviously distressed. He tried unsuccessfully to reach the ATF commanders; but for all his good intentions, Lynch was hamstrung by a momentous foul-up in his attempt to communicate with the ATF. None of the agents raiding Mount Carmel was equipped with a cellular phone or even knew Mount Carmel’s number. This was not only a gross lapse of standard procedure—it showed that the ATF had no intention of allowing us to surrender peacefully.

  Suddenly the shooting seemed to be happening everywhere. A host of agents were blazing away at the front, and others were climbing ladders around the east side of the chapel, trying to break into the empty gun room.

  A team of agents with automatic weapons scaled the chapel roof to get to the room where they assumed David would be hiding, probably from Robert’s reports. Climbing twenty-foot aluminum ladders, they smashed the windows in the gun room and tossed in their flash-bang grenades. These grenades explode with a blinding light and a terrific racket; they can mutilate an unprotected person. As the glass broke, however, someone in the room—I still don’t know who—started firing. Three agents were hit; two were killed and one fell off the roof into the courtyard. A second team that attacked the roof from the south were also met with gunfire.

  When the feds did get into the gun room, they found the racks were empty, since Paul Fatta and Kalani had taken our stock to the gun show. The agents spotted Scott Sonobe carrying an AK-47 in the dark hallway between the armory and the bedroom. Shots were exchanged, and both Scott and an agent were wounded. A bullet went through Scott’s left hand, between the thumb and the first index finger, smashed through his wrist and struck his right leg. Meanwhile, a second agent fell off the roof, breaking his hip.

  It was shockingly clear during the rooftop attack that the ATF had no intention of allowing the residents to come out quietly. “They want to kill us all, man,” Scott said. The two roof assault teams had no radio communications, and no one up there announced that they were law enforcement officials, as they were obliged to do.

  As the agents on the roof began to withdraw, another one on the ground was hit. We didn’t know it at the
time, but three agents were now dead. Meanwhile, another ATF team that had broken into the gym at the rear of the building waited to rendezvous with the rooftop raiders.

  All the while the helicopters were hovering, firing down into the residential tower and the room over the chapel, targeting David. Once again, it must have been Robert’s spying that made them assume he’d be in those areas.

  Apparently, the National Guard had agreed that its helicopters could be used as command platforms for supervising the raid. They were not supposed to be part of the actual attack, even though they carried armed ATF agents. The strategy, it seemed, was that the choppers would arrive at Mount Carmel just as the feds burst out of the cattle trailer rigs, then hover at around five hundred feet until the ATF had secured our property.

  As it turned out, the timing was off, the sequence was botched, and the helicopters ended up in the midst of the firefight. Two of them were struck by gunfire and had to land in a nearby field; the third chopper, though also hit, continued to circle overhead. Two neutral witnesses, local reporter John McLemore and cameraman Dan Muloney, took a videotape showing a chopper passing within inches of Mount Carmel’s north side, apparently strafing the building.

  At 10:34 A.M., forty-nine minutes into the attack, David himself called Deputy Lynch on a cellular phone. “There is a bunch of us dead, there’s a bunch of you guys dead,” he said. “Now, now, that’s your fault.” David then started talking theology to the law officer, who tried to deflect him. “All right, we can talk theology. But right now—” Lynch began.

  “No, this is life,” David retorted. “This is life and death! Theology is life and death.”

  Steve also talked to Lynch about a cease-fire, but there were arguments between Wayne and Steve over whether the agents could be armed while removing their casualties. By the time the cease-fire was seriously considered, the ATF had suffered heavy casualties: sixteen wounded and four dead officers. Having made no proper arrangements for casualties, they had to make do with makeshift ambulances to transport their wounded, some of whom were slung over truck hoods like roadkill.

  Later, the Treasury Department’s report made the amazing admission that the ATF had no plan to “extract any agents, including wounded agents, from their exposed positions.” For our part, Wayne refused medical help for our wounded. “We don’t want anything from your country!” he told the authorities. I understood his fury, but that seemed a foolish kind of pride.

  Having lived in a rough section of Hollywood for a few years, where the skies were crowded with police choppers and gunfire was one of the common street sounds, I reflexively hit the deck when I heard the ’copters coming.

  With my nose buried in the floorboards, I reflected that, in such situations, there are three kinds of people: those who stand in front of a tank and dare it to run over them, like the guy in Tiananmen Square; those who make brave speeches behind the barricades, like the students in Paris in 1968; and those, like me, who chew dirt.

  After a while I crawled toward the cafeteria, thinking I might hide out in the vault. The double doors at the rear of the cafeteria were open, and I could see the water tanks outside. At that moment the firing all around was so fierce I was sure we were all going to be wiped out.

  I saw an armed, black-suited figure coming toward me and thought, “This guy is going to come in here and kill me.” He vanished, and I burst out laughing, releasing a tension of terror and fury. “You have no honor!” I shouted at the invisible assailants. I felt very betrayed, very bitter, and my laughter was harsh and hysterical.

  On hands and knees, I crawled out of the cafeteria into the workout room next door, huddling among the weights and gym equipment, listening to the shooting, thinking I could die any minute. I saw Jimmy Riddle run by, carrying a gun, going toward the end room in the men’s quarters. In that area was the trapdoor in the floor that led to a ladder into a tunnel connected to the buried bus. Oliver Gyarfas followed Jimmy, and I ran after them.

  The three of us scurried down the ladder and along the short tunnel into the bus. Oliver handed me a flashlight, and we squatted in a circle, trying to figure out what was happening and what we should do. We heard explosions from the flashbang grenades and volley after volley of gunfire above and around us. After a while, we continued along the concrete tunnel leading to the unfinished tornado shelter. Above us, through the pit’s temporary plywood roof, we could hear agents shouting and shooting. The floor was muddy with the previous night’s rain, and Jimmy, who wore gumboots, waded toward the pit’s far exit. I stayed back, ready to yell if I saw a fed appear.

  The excavation was ten to twelve feet deep. In one of the bright puddles on the floor Jimmy saw the reflection of an agent up above. “Come on outta there, you motherfuckers!” a voice above shouted, raw with rage. Jimmy tried to get a shot at the agent but couldn’t find the right angle. The attacker’s shouts were so filled with hatred, we feared that if we did emerge we’d be killed on the spot. In that instant I couldn’t think of anything but that I was about to die.

  “Let’s get outta here,” Jimmy said, and we retreated back through the tunnels and the bus to the main building. Jimmy and Oliver ran off down the hallway, and I was impressed by their bravery. As for me, I was down on all fours again, keeping my head low.

  Suddenly, my hands and knees felt wet. Looking around, I saw water pouring through the room to my left. The room belonged to Winston Blake, a black man from Britain. Pushing aside the blanket over the doorway, my eyes were dazzled by the light coming in from the window.

  For an instant the scene was a whiteout; then I noticed that the window, which opened onto the cafeteria water tanks, was smashed. “How did the window get broken?” I asked out loud. “Why’s the water pouring in?” Abruptly, I realized that the water tanks outside were riddled with bullet holes and huge spurts were spraying the room.

  A dark lump lay on the floor. Focusing, I recognized a human form. I saw Winston’s light blue jacket. He lay in a pool of blood, and I knew he was dead. Hastily, I retreated, shutting the curtain, trying not to throw up. Winston was the first dead man I’d ever seen, and the sight of his lifeless body turned my stomach.

  Crawling up the corridor, I heard Brad Branch yelling, “Cease fire! Cease fire!”

  When the cease-fire took hold, I reached a room in front, beside the stairway. Greg was there, brandishing a rifle. He was yelling at an agent who lay facedown behind the cement block base of the front fence that formed a corral for the dogs. “Get outta there. Get the hell away from the fence,” Greg shouted. The dead dogs lay there. Greg had seen them shot by the ATF, and he was enraged, his face so charged with fury that it scared me.

  Wandering along the upstairs hallway, I came across David, propped against the wall. He told me he’d been shot just as the cease-fire was announced, by an agent who suddenly appeared while he was making his way along the overhead walkway above the chapel.

  “This fed jumped up out of the blue, firing from the hip,” he said. “A bullet spun me all the way around, like a 250-pound man kicking you in the side.” David pulled up his T-shirt and showed me his wounds, one in his right wrist, severing the nerve to his thumb, another low on the left side of his torso, slicing away a sliver of his hipbone.

  “I was getting numb, but I managed to crawl away,” he said.

  The most intense period of the firefight lasted around fifty minutes, followed by several lulls in the shooting as Wayne Martin and Deputy Lynch continued their telephone negotiations. The final cease-fire was agreed at around 11:30 A.M. During the last hour of talks, while the details were being hashed out, the ATF removed its wounded agents and retreated off our property while we took stock of our own casualties.

  Looking out the window, I watched the agents retreating. Two of them went by, supporting a third man drooping between them. All three had the gray, shell-shocked look I’d noticed on the faces of Vietnam grunts in documentaries I’d seen. Another agent, a black woman with dreadlocks, slouched pas
t with an expression of utter bewilderment. Our eyes locked for a moment, and she stared at me as if to say, “What the hell just happened here?”

  “You got your asses kicked, lady,” I answered silently, and she flinched, reading my response. Then she straightened her shoulders and tossed back her head, her confusion turning to arrogance. I felt sorry for her at that moment, yet I resented her haughty look after what she and her fellows had done to us.

  The area was peppered with agents in their blue-black gear, wearing their signature call letters across their backs, the bold-yellow ATF. There were scores of them, and for the first time I had a sense of how massive the attack had been.

  How had we managed to hold them off? I wondered, shivering in retrospect. Maybe if we’d known how much manpower and firepower the feds were going to throw at us, we might have been too intimidated to fight back. As it was, they were limping away, bearing their dead and their injured, sweat and anger in their eyes.

  Again I wondered what might have happened if the ATF had used a less provocative strategy to arrest David; if a mere handful of agents had come to the door, showed him the warrant, and asked him to surrender himself.

  Some of Mount Carmel’s survivors believed he would have gone along peaceably, trusting the criminal justice system to determine his punishment for crimes that may or may not have been proven. After all, they said, he’d done that back in 1988, over the George Roden affair, and the system had worked; he was released after a fair trial. If the ATF hadn’t been so hellbent on the dynamic-entry scenario, and if David had quietly given himself up, many lives would have been saved.

  Frankly, I’m not so sure David would have surrendered as easily. To start with, over the six years since 1987, his understanding of the radical nature of his mission had intensified; in other words, he’d recognized that the Fifth Seal’s text—I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God—was a prophecy he was convinced was about to be fulfilled—and soon. In his own mind, David was no longer simply an American citizen subject to the laws of man but an anointed one owing allegiance to a higher authority. The U.S. criminal justice system would not be the context for fulfilling his fated role on earth, so surrendering to its agents might have been seen as self-betrayal.