Koresh, page 38
McGee had been a wildland firefighter for six years. He knew the compound was built of CDX plywood and two-by-four framing. With twenty-mile-an-hour winds, that was bad news. “Man, that’s unbelievable,” he told the guys in the Brad. “It’s going to go up like kindling.” He gave it twenty minutes before the whole thing was in flames.
A local man, J. J. Robertson, who’d been working at the Salvation Army truck parked outside the perimeter, was curious about what was happening. He walked through the woods toward the compound. As he got closer, smoke began seeping among the briar and scrub brush, a billowing, acrid fog. He could hear helicopters above him. It sounded like they were moving fast.
When he looked down at his feet, it seemed as if the ground cover was moving. It was rabbits and foxes and other small animals, running away from the fire.
Inside the compound, Ruth Riddle was on the second floor near a hole that had been punched in the exterior wall. She felt the air growing hotter. The floor beneath her feet was warming up. She could hear a rushing, crackling noise, as if the prairie winds had invaded the building.
Flashes of fire shot down the hallways. They got closer and closer, pushing a wall of heat in front of them. Riddle jumped through the hole.
Agent McGee saw the woman leap. She landed awkwardly in the debris in front of the building. It looked like she might have twisted her ankle.
Then the woman did the damndest thing. She turned and walked back into the first floor of the compound, close to the flames.
McGee called for the driver to get closer. When the Brad had maneuvered next to the building, he dropped the hatch. “Are you crazy?” one of the guys called after him. There were possible shooters in there. The woman herself might be a shooter. But McGee jumped out, leaned his rifle against the side of the Brad, and ran for the building.
Riddle was lying facedown on the ground, like she’d dropped there from the roof and died. Just the weirdest thing. McGee nudged her. She turned and looked at him.
“Who are you?” she said.
He shouted that he was with the FBI and they needed to get out of there. The fire was roaring behind him. He was worried less about it than the superheated air that would flow from it, crisping his lungs and drowning him in his own fluids. He’d seen it before.
“Where are the children?” he yelled.
She turned her face away from him, said nothing.
“Where are the kids? Tell me where the children are.”
Nothing.
“Look, the ceiling is going to collapse on us. We’ve got to get out of here.”
He grabbed her. She was deadweight, giving him no help. He dragged her out through the hole in the wall and got her to the Brad. She never said a word.
The snipers and observers near the compound began to hear gunshots. Some were random and sporadic, and the FBI agents assumed they were rounds cooking off in the fire. But there was a second sequence that sounded rhythmic. They believed that Davidians were being shot inside Mount Carmel.
Byron continued to talk on the loudspeaker. “Steve, David, we’re attempting to contact you via the telephone . . . If you cannot do that, if the lines have been cut, indicate with a flag out the front door.” Moments later, a flag appeared. But no one picked up the phone.
Byron saw the first whiffs of smoke soon after the others spotted them. He wasn’t surprised; he thought the Davidians were burning evidence and destroying the crime scene in order to avoid prosecution later. Without any physical evidence, it would be the ATF’s testimony against the Davidians’ testimony, and it might go the Davidians’ way, you never knew. But seconds ticked by, then minutes, and still nobody came out.
Janet Reno had finished her speech in Baltimore. She was at a local hotel having lunch when an FBI agent informed her about the fire. She got into the dark blue Lincoln and headed back toward Washington. She told the agent driving the car to hurry.
From the back of the car, Reno called FBI headquarters. She asked several times about the children. Had any been spotted? Had any children gotten out?
Byron turned his back to the monitor. He had to keep speaking, but the sight of the burning compound was disturbing to him.
“Bring your children and leave the building,” he said. “Fire is plainly visible. We observed people lighting the fire. Leave the building. Leave your weapons behind and locked in the building.” Silence.
“You will not be harmed. You will not be fired on. Put your weapons down and leave the building. Shit.”
In Washington, FBI and Justice officials were watching on TV. “Oh, my God, they’re committing suicide,” somebody said. Another official replied, “That’s not suicide, that’s homicide.”
President Clinton watched the CNN live feed. He felt sick.
He wanted to speak to the press and take responsibility for the operation. Two of his close advisers, Dee Myers and Bruce Lindsey, agreed. But the White House communications director, George Stephanopoulos, told him it was too early. Not all the Davidians were confirmed dead; Koresh might hear the president’s words and kill his remaining followers. Clinton agreed to wait.
At 11:40 a.m., unidentified voices were heard on the bug tapes. “I want a fire around the back,” said one. Then, “let’s keep that fire going.”
Clive Doyle was on the stage in the chapel, behind a wooden partition. About ten others had retreated there as the day progressed and the tanks inserted more and more gas into the building. Doyle had planned to die and be translated into the new life. His daughter Shari was deeper inside the building.
Wayne Martin, the lawyer, walked in, wearing a gas mask. He went over to the wall, turned, and leaned his back against it. He slid down until he was sitting on the floor.
Everyone was watching Martin, wondering if there were further instructions on what to do. Had David said anything? What was happening?
Martin pulled the gas mask off. “You’d better just pray,” he said.
There were no gas masks for the kids—they didn’t exist, one couldn’t buy such a thing—so Davidian mothers and fathers in the concrete bunker grabbed towels and stuck them in buckets of water. Then they held the drenched cloths to their children’s faces.
Heat began pressing into the small area on the stage where Doyle and the others were. It was above their heads and then all around their bodies. People began screaming. They dropped to the floor and rolled along it. Perhaps some of them had caught fire, Doyle couldn’t see, but certainly the heat was rushing in waves. It was pitch black inside the narrow space, and claustrophobic.
David Thibodeau, the rock drummer, heard someone shouting about fire on the second floor. He ran upstairs, toward the chapel attic, to see what was happening. He had to step across some flooring laid across the rafters to get there.
When Thibodeau got close to the attic, he saw a wall of fire roaring down the hallway. The sound was louder than anything he’d heard in his life. He felt he was choking.
He turned around and ran back downstairs.
Doyle kept waiting for the change to happen, for his body to begin the translation. The heat was almost unbearable, and still nothing happened except the terrible pain he felt. He was confused. He was afraid, too, that if he went outside, the FBI would shoot him.
The fire seemed to fly through the air. The wall that Thibodeau was standing next to ignited. As he became aware of the flames, they were already leaping upward. He heard the hair on his head beginning to sizzle. He knew if he stayed there, he would burn to death. A hole had opened up in the wall in front of him and he stumbled through it.
He thought he would be the last to make it out, but he turned to glance at the building and saw Doyle coming out after him, his arms covered in flames. Doyle was patting his sleeves with his bare hands, trying to put out the fire.
“Hold your hands up,” someone barked. Thibodeau did as he was told and staggered forward, stiff-legged. Something exploded behind him. An enormous wave of heat pressed against his back for a second, then swept past him.
When he looked back, the building’s roof and upper floors were being consumed by roiling balls of fire eating their way upward into the sky. He thought, no one will survive that.
Doyle staggered forward. He rubbed his arms and watched the skin roll up in his hands. The jacket he was wearing was melting from the heat onto his skin. His arms smoked.
The loudspeakers were blaring, echoing. “David, don’t do this to your people. David, don’t do this to your people . . . Be a messiah, not a destroyer . . . Don’t lead them to destruction. Bring them out.”
Amid the roar of flames, Steve Schneider could be heard talking to himself. “What’s taking them so long?” he said. Steve was waiting on the angels.
Ten minutes after the first puff of smoke from the compound, just after 12:30 p.m., the main tower collapsed in a plume of smoke and fire. Underneath it was the bunker where the Davidians’ bus was buried. Byron stopped talking on the loudspeaker and turned to look at the compound. He reached down with his right hand and clicked the power switch on the PA system off.
A T-intersection about a mile from the compound had been designated a medical triage site. A Brad appeared on Double EE Ranch Road, moving fast. It reached the T and it hit the brakes and spun around. As it shook to a stop, the back gate started to lower.
You could see little wisps of smoke wafting out of the interior. When the door was fully lowered, it became clear there was someone in the back. It was Marjorie Thomas, one of the Davidians. Her flesh had been so terribly burned that she was cooking alive.
They put her on a chopper and flew her to a burn center at a nearby hospital.
Live shots of the compound going up in flames went around the world. Bonnie Haldeman was working an overnight shift as a nurse. She was in one of the patient rooms giving a woman her meds. The TV was on in the room, the volume low. She glanced at the screen and saw the tanks punching holes in the compound walls.
“Oh my God, what’s going on?” she thought to herself.
She kept her eye on the facility’s TVs as the morning passed. She saw the first puffs of smoke. “People are going to start coming out,” she thought. When they didn’t, she imagined they were down in the bunker and it was taking them a while to get out. One reason for the delay and then another flitted through her mind.
At one point, she was called to the phone. It was Connie Chung, one of the hosts of the TV show A Current Affair. “What are you feeling right now, Bonnie?” Chung said. Bonnie didn’t know how to describe what she was feeling.
Maybe Vernon got out, she kept thinking. The cameras were far away, you couldn’t pick up much detail. Maybe they weren’t capable of catching the little figures of people escaping. The kids must have gotten out. Even as the building began to collapse, she kept that last thought in her mind.
Debbie Bunds was watching. She felt that people were dying right on television. People she’d known, people she’d seen born, grown up with. David was killing them. He was too much of a coward to come out and face the music.
She felt sick. But as she watched, she pleaded in her mind: “Please, let David be gone.”
Kat Schroeder, watching at McLennan County Jail, felt the opposite. Dying was the right thing to do. She felt that her friends were being translated before her eyes. “I should have died, too,” she thought.
In the same jail, Livingstone Fagan didn’t think anything had been lost. His wife and mother weren’t gone forever. He expected to see them again soon. He decided to delay telling his children that their mother was dead. Or was she?
Eddie Goins, one of David’s rocker friends from Waco, had been waiting for the Davidians to come out. He wanted to testify on their behalf in court. When he realized David was dead, Goins got angry. “He’s been done shitty,” he told people. “This is supposed to be America.”
In England, Sam Henry was leaving a job. It was teatime. He was headed home to pick up some tools. Then he would head to another thing he’d taken on.
When he pulled into his street, he saw TV crews gathered around his gate. He approached them and asked what was going on. “Let’s go to the studio,” said one of the reporters, “and you can see what’s going on.”
Gail Monbelly, whose sister Bernadette was inside the compound, walked into her house. The phone rang. Her mother, asking if she’d seen the news.
“No, Mum, I’ve just got home from work, what’s wrong?”
“There’s been a fire.”
“A fire where?”
“At Waco . . . Just put the TV on. I can’t speak.” She put the phone down.
Gail switched on the TV. She collapsed to the floor.
“I’ll never laugh and joke with her again,” Gail thought. “The person closest to me in all my life. My secrets have died with her.” When something big happened in her life, the first thing she would think was “I have to tell Bernadette.” That was over.
Sandy was still hiding from the press. Her lawyer didn’t want her to go anywhere. But that day she snuck out and went to a grocery store. While she was doing a little shopping, she looked up and saw a TV tuned to CNN.
She found a telephone booth and called Bonnie’s house. Bonnie had people screening her calls. Sandy told the person who answered that she was David’s ex-girlfriend.
Bonnie came to the phone. She said, “Sandy, I think Vernon is dead.”
“Yes, I think so, too,” Sandy said. They both began to cry.
Bernard Nussbaum, the White House chief counsel, was in Poland on a trip with the vice president to commemorate the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. He walked into his hotel and saw Mount Carmel burning on the TV set.
He called the White House. “What’s going on?” he asked one of the president’s aides.
“What’s going on is what you see on TV. What’s going on is they broke in and fire started and a lot of people are dead. But we’re handling it. We and George Stephanopoulos.”
Nussbaum began to regret telling Reno to trust the FBI. His opinion of the bureau had been too high. Later, the FBI’s role in Waco came to remind him of the CIA’s advice on the Bay of Pigs.
As for Marc Breault, he was at home in Melbourne when the phone rang near midnight, Australian time. When he picked up the phone, a woman identified herself as a reporter for the Times in London. She asked for his reaction.
“My reaction to what?” he said.
She told him about the fire. He turned on the TV and watched. The reporter was waiting for a comment.
Strangely, he found it hard to feel anything at all. He thought of the children. But as for the others, Marc felt he’d lost them long ago.
That morning, Timothy McVeigh was at a friend’s house in Michigan. He was planning on heading to Waco the following day, to bear witness and perhaps do something—to take some undefined action that would help free the Davidians, though McVeigh couldn’t think of what that might be. He was splayed out underneath his Chevy Geo Spectrum changing the oil when someone shouted at him to come watch the TV.
McVeigh and his friends watched in silence as the tanks inserted the CS gas into the building. McVeigh had been soaked in the stuff during Army training at Fort Benning, and had watched his buddies vomit, their skin scorched by the gas. Watching, he was horrified to think of what it felt like to a child, feeling their throats beginning to close. He stayed silent as fire consumed the compound.
“What is this?” he said finally. “What has America become?” McVeigh felt an impotent rage crawl along his skin and nerve endings. He’d just watched human beings attacked, murdered, and then incinerated by the government he paid taxes to. He vowed to avenge the Davidians. “The blaze at the Waco compound,” wrote his biographers, “more than any other event, was a turning point in his life.”
Chuck Hustmyre, the ATF agent, was in Louisiana. Two Texas Rangers had come to the office to interview some of the agents who’d taken part in the February 28 raid. They were investigating the murder of the four agents. Hustmyre and some others met them at the little ATF office in Metairie, Louisiana. After the interview, they went down to the Sheraton Hotel and the bar there. They were having a few drinks and they looked up at the TV and saw fire.
Hustmyre hadn’t followed the siege all that much. He’d been too busy with funerals and work. At Todd’s funeral, they’d driven the rural Tennessee roads on the way to the graveyard and people stopped their cars and got out and the men took their hats off and held them to their chests. It surprised Chuck, he’d never seen anything like that.
So that day, he didn’t know who was inside; he wasn’t aware there were children still in the building. His general impression was that a bunch of people had left Mount Carmel, and the people still remaining inside were the real hardcore guys. The ones who’d shot his friends.
And what he thought was “Holy shit, this is great. All those assholes are gonna die.”
Byron felt stupefied. He walked outside toward the compound. He could feel the heat from the fire on his face. The building was visible, the walls tumbling and the roof collapsing until what mostly remained was a layer of rubble about a foot and a half high. He could smell the fire, too, and the things it had consumed.
He felt that he had failed, and everyone else within a half-mile radius had failed, too.
Not quite steady on his feet, Byron crossed Double EE Ranch Road and walked up the driveway. The fire had mostly burned itself out, but there were patches of flame and a thick haze of smoke low on the wreckage. Ammo cooked off in bursts and cans of food exploded in the heat. Guys from the Hostage Rescue Team had gone down into the construction pit to reach the underground bunker, where the children were believed to be.
