Kevin Cook - Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of Americas Modern Militias

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To the memory of
the Branch Davidians
and ATF agents who died
at Mount Carmel

The FBI struck before sunrise. The Branch Davidians, holed up in their ramshackle retreat near Waco, Texas, always expected the final battle to come without warning. Thats what the Bible predicted. Instead there was a brief warning, a wake-up call delivered over loudspeakers moments after 6:00 a.m. on April 19, 1993:

We are in the process of placing tear gas into the building. This is not an assault. This is not an assault.

At 6:02 a.m., tanks broke through the compounds walls, filling the front rooms with tear gas. Some of the people inside screamed, some prayed. Some ran for shelter. Some strapped gas masks over their faces. Others grabbed rifles and started shooting at the tanks and federal agents outside.

Come out of the compound with your hands up, the loudspeakers blared. You are under arrest.

David Koresh was shocked. It wasnt supposed to go down this way. He had spent the night writing out his interpretation of the Seven Seals in the Bibles book of Revelation. As soon as he finished, he said, he would lead his people out. And now thisafter two months of stalemate, a surprise attack.

Still, he stayed calm. Only a fool imagines he can foresee Gods ways. The thirty-three-year-old leader, who ruled every facet of the Davidians lives and slept with female followers as young as twelve, may have been zealous. He may have been reckless, rapacious, and vain, but he wasnt a fool. With his dimpled chin and shoulder-length hairJesus hair, his followers called ithe had the look of a messiah. Koresh had pictured this moment, even prayed for it. Now it was here. The final battle was unfolding the way hed told them it would, quoting Revelation: Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you be tested. Be faithful unto death.

Koresh rallied the others. The apocalypse was deafening, the FBIs loudspeakers booming at full volume. Helicopters circled in the dawns early light. There was gunfire and wailing as tanks equipped with battering rams punched through walls. If Koresh ever needed proof of his preachings, here it was: American tanks crashing through walls, rolling toward American women and children.

There wasnt much time. After fifty-one days, the end of his standoff with federal agents was here. Or was it the end of the world?

Vernon Howell, who would later take the name David Koresh, was born in Houston on a sweltering morning in August 1959. His mother was fourteen years old.

Bonnie Clark told friends she was sort of engaged to the babys father. Bobby Howell was a high school senior, a good kisser with a pickup truck. Bonnie dropped out of eighth grade to have their baby. The age of consent was seventeen, but a fourteen-year-old Texan could marry with parental consent. Daddy signed the papers, but Bobby backed out, she remembered. God had a plan for my life and Vernons life, which didnt include Bobby.

Bonnie gave her son his fathers name anyway. She named him Vernon Wayne Howell and raised him while working two or three jobs at a time. She waited tables. She worked in a nail salon. She cleaned houses and offices for a realtor. After a brief marriage to an ex-con who beat her, she lied about her age and worked as a waitress at a nightclub on a tumbledown block of Houstons Canal Street. With its mirrored walls and green neon, the Jade Lounge seemed posh to her. A lot of prostitutes hung around, she recalled, but they didnt work out of there.

The owner liked the lively new girl with the auburn hair. My knight in shining armor, she called Roy Rocky Haldeman, a burly navy vet, the sort of proprietor who could break up a bar fight or win one.

By the time they married in 1965, Roy was thirty-six. Bonnie was twenty and pregnant again. She delighted her new husband by giving birth to a boy they named Roger. Haldeman sold his share of the Jade Lounge and moved the four of them to a farm near Dallas.

He didnt think much of his wifes first kid. For one thing, five-year-old Vernon was so hyper that Bonnie called him Sputnik. For another, he stuttered. Worse yet, the boy was shaping up to be what his stepfather considered a pussy. He cried every time he got dropped off at day care. Roy would tell him not to cry, she recalled. He said, Be a man! Roy beat him on his butt and left it black and blue. Thirty years later, Koresh described those beatings to an FBI negotiator. His stepfather spanked him so hard, he said, he made me fly like a kite.

School was no easier. The boy was dyslexic as well as hyperactive. Vernon flunked first grade twice. After that, a teacher told the eight-year-old hed been assigned to special education, and for a moment he thought she meant he was special. Other kids disabused him of that notion by giving him a nickname: Mister Retardo. When my mom picked me up after school that day, he recalled, I busted out howling, Im a retard!

His boyhood took a turn for the better on the day of a middle-school sports festival. Even the special-ed students were expected to compete in one event or another, so a coach entered Vernon in a cross-country race. I didnt know I could run fast, he recalled of the day he won a blue ribbon. But Vernon and his half brother used to chase each other around Haldemans land. We didnt have bikes or expensive toys. We built up leg strength racing, so when I ran against them city boys, I ran em ragged. He began to believe there might be something special about him, a touch of greatness.

He also had a God-given knack for shooting guns. Even Haldeman was impressed when his stepson drew a bead with a BB gun and hit squirrels between the eyes. As he grew his first whiskers, he developed other passions: for cars, girls, and, to Bonnies surprise, God. He owed his interest in religion to Bonnies mother, Erline Clark, a Seventh-day Adventist who took Vernon to Sabbath services in Tyler, Texas, and gave him his first Bible.

Seventh-day Adventists celebrate the Sabbath from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, the Old Testament way. They believe human history will end soon with the Second Coming of Jesus. Vernon preferred the rigor and drama of his grandmas religion to the chaos in the Haldemans house, where his mother and stepfather drank, fought, and split up only to kiss and make up to the sound of grunts and thumps in the bedroom next to his. When they were on the outs theyd send him to stay with his grandma for months at a stretch. It took Vernon a while to make sense of the old-timey language in the Bible she gave him, but once he got the hang of the thees, thous, and shalts he was pleased to find all sorts of violence and sex in its onion-skin pages. By the age of twelve, despite his struggles in school, he could recite long biblical passages from memory.

Haldeman was a mean drunk who got meaner and drunker with age. Finally, Bonnie left him. Vernon claimed she slept with men for money after that, but she swore it wasnt so cut-and-dried as that. According to her, she paid their bills with help from some rich boyfriends.