It’s been thirty years since the disastrous events near Waco, Texas. In the nineties I read and reviewed five books related to them; I’ll link to them at the end of this review. Jeff Guinn’s Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage is a new addition to the literature.
The first third of the book, except for a short introductory chapter, is about the history of the Branch Davidians before the ATF raid. Much of what it covers predates Vernon Wayne Howell’s taking leadership and assuming the name David Koresh. This is an important area for anyone studying the matter in detail, but I was more interested in information about the ATF raid, the subsequent siege, and the final assault on the buildings. Getting through the material about the Adventists and the earlier leaders of the group was an effort for me.
When the book finally gets to the ATF raid, it provides more detail than other sources I’ve read. The others focused more on the subsequent siege and the April 19 assault and deadly fire. In general, the passage of time has let Guinn focus on people’s thoughts and roles, not just on the actions and outcomes.
Guinn presents the ATF as well-intentioned but inept in many ways. It was determined to get some glory, leading to a series of bad decisions. The code word for launching the raid was “Showtime.” Many of the issues it addressed, such as Koresh’s marriages to multiple underage brides, were outside its scope and would doubtless have been handled better by less militaristic law enforcement people. Because of bad intelligence and a single-minded focus on the planned raid, it dismissed simpler alternatives that probably would have worked, including arresting Koresh when he went outside the compound or just asking him to come into town and talk. Its undercover operations were so inept that they only raised the Davidians’ suspicions that something big would soon happen.
The ATF lost the element of surprise, because of a chance encounter on the road between a Davidian and a loose-lipped cameraman. They had no contingency plan, but the raid proceeded anyway. Guinn addresses the questions of who shot first and whether there was fire from the helicopters without reaching any firm conclusions. It’s not unusual for law enforcement officers on a raid to shoot without being shot at, and shooting dogs as a preliminary measure is still common. On the other hand, a religious cult expecting an end-of-the-world scenario is apt to be trigger-happy. We’ll probably never know for sure.
The description of the raid shows suffering on both sides. One ATF agent said afterward, “I’m mad at ATF management. We were not prepared, not trained, we didn’t get the equipment we needed. Management lied about the element of surprise.”
The discussion of the siege after the raid and before the final assault is relatively brief. It makes it clear that the FBI’s actions could only have confirmed the Davidians’ belief that they were facing a world-ending fight against a ruthless enemy. The compound was surrounded by tanks, and speakers saturated the compound with “a high-decibel outpouring that included sirens, bagpipes, squawking seagulls, crying babies, dentists’ drills, crowing roosters, dying rabbits, Buddhist chants, Muslim prayer calls, Christmas carols, and pop tunes.” High-powered beams of light were directed at the windows at night. If I were in that situation, I’d assume I was facing unhinged, armed lunatics.
Guinn discusses four hypotheses for the cause of the April 19 fire. He quickly dismisses the idea that the FBI set it deliberately; reckless as they were of human life, they weren’t that openly brutal. It could have been an accident, most likely because of the CS gas shells that turned the place from a mere firetrap to a tinder pile. The Davidian leaders may have set it, believing that the end had come; if that was their decision, most of the Davidians had no say in it. Or perhaps they set it in the belief that it would create a “holy barrier.”
Some things are clear about what happened that day. The FBI pumped in CS gas while absurdly declaring over speakers, “This is not an assault.” They quickly followed this by driving tanks into the walls. The FBI used combustible shells to deliver CS gas and then denied doing that. Many died in a tunnel that collapsed because of a tank ramming the buildings. The FBI delayed the arrival of fire trucks. Seventy-four people died in all, twenty-one of them children. Bill Clinton smugly declared that “some religious fanatics murdered themselves.”
The chapters on the public reaction after the fire aren’t as well focused, talking mostly about militias and that vague category called “antigovernment” groups (which you’d think means anarchist but doesn’t). Timothy McVeigh’s avenging the killing of innocent people by killing an even larger number of innocent people gets a brief mention.
Abuse of law enforcement powers continues today. The way people react could use some in-depth analysis. The people outraged by the FBI’s actions in 1993 and the ones outraged by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 are largely disjoint groups, even though both are addressing parts of the same phenomenon. If you say that all lives matter, you get spat upon.
In the nineties, the April Waco assault was the law enforcement overreach that self-described liberals loved. The Davidians were “religious nuts” and deserved no sympathy. And it’s true, they held dangerously irrational beliefs and let Koresh have full sway over them. But governments shouldn’t decide which religious beliefs are acceptable. Too many people have already burned to death from such exercises of power.
What Guinn does best is show what it was like to be there, on both the law enforcement and the Davidian side. Whenever authorities send armed forces into battle, the people they send often pay as heavy a cost as the ones they’re fighting. The Davidians didn’t die because of homicidal intent, but because of bureaucratic arrogance and stupidity.
It could happen again. If people understand how it happened in 1993, perhaps they can spot the signs of a recurrence and prevent it.
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