The Fire That Time
(Page 5 of 7)
Sage We had no control over where those devices went inside the compound. For a while, we had terrific technical coverage of the trash pile. But what we were able to learn, after listening in, was that everybody was calm and content. There was no hysteria. And talking to David, it was clear that he was not a man in crisis. He was in his element.
Doyle When we first went into this, none of us knew how long it was going to last. I don’t think any of us thought, “Let’s make them mad by staying in here for as long as we can.” But we had enough provisions to hold out for a long time. We had a walk-in refrigerator with lots of fresh and frozen food, and once our electricity was cut and we had to eat that food in a hurry, we started rationing MREs. We had enough MREs to last a year. Even though the helicopters had shot up all our water tanks, we still managed to get the drinking water we needed. We stuck buckets out of windows and in secluded areas around the building where we couldn’t get shot. Any rainwater that ran off the roof would fall into those buckets, and we rationed water to about half a glass a day per person.
Sage We didn’t realize it until much later, but we were playing right into their hands. We were stalling for time, because in a classic negotiation, the passage of time is a good thing. Eventually, the individual who is in crisis realizes that the situation he is in is never going to end the way that he wants, that he is not in control, and that he is going to have to strike the best deal that he can. But what the Davidians were doing, I think, was stalling for time because David was becoming an international celebrity. It was about this time, if you’ll recall, that he was featured on the cover of both Time and Newsweek.
James McGee, 50, was an FBI special agent assigned to the Hostage Rescue Team. He is now a professor of risk and threat assessment at the University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg. Koresh routinely made himself openly visible to our tactical teams. He would literally sit on a window ledge and eat a bowl of ramen noodles, thumbing his nose at our sniper observers. At night, he liked to serenade us and play guitar solos. He was the king in his kingdom inside that compound, and he was in no hurry to come out.
Sage The tactical commander, Dick Rogers, had made the decision that his guys didn’t need to know what the negotiators were doing. He thought that it wasn’t any of their damn business. Their job was to keep their eyes on target and be ready to engage any hostile force that should exit the compound. So they never understood what we were trying to do. While they were lying in a bar ditch in March freezing their asses off, they thought we were a bunch of weak sisters who were back at the command post with, you know, the fireplace crackling. They thought that we had gone over to the dark side, that we sympathized with the same people who had just murdered four federal agents. At one of the tactical sites, I remember someone wrote inside a Port-A-Potty, “Sage is a Davidian.”
McGee Koresh was a master manipulator. He was pulling all the strings. The tactical team’s perspective was “Here is how a negotiator can best serve us: Convince Koresh to step in front of that window, and then the sniper will take care of the rest.”
Sage All told, the negotiation team got 36 people out, including 21 kids.
Thibodeau There was a period of time when the negotiations were pretty harmonious. I thought the FBI was being reasonable with David, considering everything that had happened. But at a certain point we realized that their word meant nothing. The negotiators would tell us one thing, and the guys in the tanks would do the exact opposite.
Doyle The FBI was mooning our women from the tanks, dropping their pants and giving them the finger and all of that kind of stuff. That made a lot of people upset.
Noesner Effective negotiations ended, I believe, on March 23. That was the day the last adult came out. Nine people had come out over the span of two days, and it was a remarkable time for the negotiation team. I mean, we weren’t exactly ready to open champagne bottles, but we finally felt that what we were doing was working. In the wake of that, inexplicably, the tactical team went forward with tanks and crushed cars and knocked over water towers. The on-scene commander thought that Koresh had not let enough people out. You should reward positive behavior, not punish it—that’s Psychology 101. Yet that’s what happened. Negotiations continued, but in reality, the chances that we would succeed had become so slim by then that our goals had become almost unachievable.
“‘FLAMES AWAIT.’”
Hoping to make life so uncomfortable for the Davidians that they would have to leave the compound, the Hostage Rescue Team—against the wishes of negotiators—was allowed to begin engaging in psychological operations. Defense attorney Dick DeGuerin, whom Koresh’s mother had asked to represent her son, was allowed past the perimeter and into Mount Carmel in hopes that he could broker a surrender plan. The decision—to allow a defense attorney into an unsecured crime scene where federal agents had been killed—was unprecedented. Inside the building, conditions were deteriorating.
Doyle Toward the end of March, they started trying to disrupt our sleep. They shone bright lights into the building all night long and blasted stuff over the loudspeakers: reveille, Tibetan monks chanting, Nancy Sinatra singing “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” even some Christmas carols. They slowed songs down and then sped them up so they sounded distorted. They played telephones ringing and babies crying and rabbits being slaughtered. Once, they made a recording of a helicopter that had been buzzing the building the day before. They played that over and over, and I kept instinctively flinching and ducking my head down, even though I knew the helicopter wasn’t actually there.
Ray There we were, out on that rolling prairie, surrounded by farms that had been handed down from generation to generation. There were cows and horses and swing sets in people’s backyards and little red wagons out on front porches. And then there were these gigantic spotlights and these speakers blaring and these armored personnel carriers barreling around this pastoral setting. I’ll tell you, it was completely surreal.
Noesner The Davidians believed in a confrontation between good and evil, and of course Koresh and his followers’ interpretation was that they represented the righteous and the good and that the authorities were agents of evil. They looked at themselves as martyrs.
Thibodeau Scripture talks about how, in the latter days, the Beast will war against the people of God and destroy them—or, basically, exactly what was happening to us. Everything that David had been teaching us was actually taking place. It did seem like prophecy was being fulfilled.
Doyle We had hardly any water for bathing, and we were all getting pretty rank. We had to use five-gallon buckets to dispose of our waste because we couldn’t go outside to our outhouses. I was getting one, maybe two hours of sleep a night.
Thibodeau If I had been on the outside while this was going on, I would have been the first person to say, “These people are nuts, man! What are they doing staying in there? It’s time to come on out.” But having been there, I can’t say that. I challenge any American family to think about what they would do if they were invaded by a hostile force. If tanks pulled up outside their house and there were armed men inside, would they send their kids out? A lot of Americans would fight that to the end.
Sage We pleaded with them every single day, for 51 days. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, they had the option of coming out. And they never did.
