Mount Carmel, after the fire: Part 6, Grandma

When I left Mount Carmel, it was for five days of frivolity. My grandmother is what they used to call “a notable clubwoman”. Every year she and her friends used to have a holiday season. I would attend luncheons in nice homes, club meetings, dine in state, and, near the end of the visit, dance with grandfathers in tuxes at their Christmas Ball. In the meantime, my husband amused himself by bringing in a paycheck and cooking things I don’t like to smell, such as liver and onions.

So, I would let her choose my dress and jewelry, and out we’d go. None of these Texas ladies I met would have shirked her duty at the mission walls, although, like all Dallas ladies of that generation, they would have been well-groomed for the event. I didn’t get any whiff of Alamo Syndrome.

One night we were taking a break from big doings and the food that makes elderly ladies celebratory but faintly nauseous afterward. I told my grandmother that I’d spent an afternoon at the site of David Koresh’s conflagration. That I’d learned that the news would rather tell a story than the truth. That people worry about their faith.

“Well, my gosh, honey,” she disapproved. “I wouldn’t think you’d need to go there to know that.”
“Well, I did have to go.” I told her about it. She shook her head, slowly.

“The world is so full of evil, I don’t know how you young people are going to manage.”

“Well, Grandma, you lived through the Depression,” I reminded her. “You lived through World War II. Your sister died of tuberculosis, and you and Grandpa nearly died in a ship fire. I don’t see that the challenges we have are any worse than that.”

“Well, that’s true,” she said, brightening up. I finished parboiling chicken breasts and added the broccoli. A couple more minutes, and her digestion would be in a better place.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I was almost taken by a masher in front of a speakeasy?”

“No, really?” She told me stuff I never got to learn as a kid. She was almost kidnapped into what was called white slavery. Now it’s called human trafficking or forced prostitution. Mostly I think she was afraid, running around Chicago after dark, alone, to meet some guy in a bar. But you never know: grandmothers do crazy things when they're young. Sometimes longer.

The chicken was a definite hit. We were eating it while we were watching Jeopardy!

“You know, Grandma, I don’t think the end times are near, either.”
“I don’t think about the end times,” she said. “I just pray for all of you every night.”

Mount Carmel, after: Part 5--Back of Beyond?

The first thing that worried me was my dossier: would people think I was some sort of a crank, coming out there with magazine pictures? And the people there, rubbernecking after the fact. Were they cranks?
Yeah, we were. (Well, you're not going to back out now, Ann T. Get out of the truck.)

The first thing to notice is how close to the road the compound was. That house in the background was across the street. That's the one with the Big Wheel and sandbox in the front yard.

The Side by the Side of the Road
I didn't have a camera. The included pictures are from Wikipedia, 2 years later. They resemble what I saw. Here are my notes:

off some unnamed road off old mexia road near 84/ Ranch Apocalypse--the Branch Davidians have a display here amid a lot of construction trash/ a blue building/ "The Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventist office"

The inside had wooden chairs in it and the building was totally blue in my notes, (although in picture it looks like the blue is going over white). It was not covered in inscriptions. The platform was part of the foundation, like a grand stage, for perhaps presentations on Branch Davidian/Waco Siege material. As you can see, it looks like a modified building, something that had been worked over to a new purpose. My notes say:

Pier and beam foundation/ Platform 3 plywood sheets long, sixteen feet wide (so, 16 x 24 feet long)/ A stage/ The back side was exposed plywood sheets

Behind this, was an area with a table consisting of a wooden pallet and four columns of stacked 5-gallon buckets for legs. This area also held stand-up information boards, also made of plywood with little peaked roofs on them. I'll get back to the information boards in a second.

[a drawing of an information board]/ pallets over cement liner bricks in puddle--holes w/ yellow grass and oiled gravel/

The white building behind was about the size of a garden shed from the 1930's or 40's.  The back of it was covered in sheet plastic, clear, and it had lighting. Amo Bishop Roden, widow, lived in that shed. Since the plastic was translucent, I could see she was sleeping on the floor. My notes say:

A lean-to shed/ vinyl siding/ padlock on the door [drawing of the electric meter on a post with a lot of crazy wiring going to the roof]

Amo Bishop Roden
After the fire, Amo Bishop Roden returned to the site.  She was the "contract wife", (whatever that means) of George Roden. George Roden's mother Lois was the leader of the Branch Davidians until her death. She was also one of David Koresh's wives starting at age 67.

In 1989, George Roden fought David Koresh (then known as Vernon Howell) for possession of the compound. After one or more pitched gun battles, Roden lost. With Koresh gone, you could say the Rodens were back. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) she was not there when I was. Only her dog, a short-haired mostly white collie was hanging around, untethered. The dog was neither friendly nor unfriendly. The lot behind the building had randomly lined-up five-gallon buckets filled with pieces of wood and empty cranberry juice bottles. I guess Amo Bishop Roden was pretty much living on Ocean Spray.

Another Whacky Takeover
Since ABR had taken over the premises, she was the one who got to present her version of events and take in whatever donations. Neither her presence nor her version were universally accepted by the rest of the Branch Davidians. Eventually she was displaced.

Two information boards, one plywood sheet each, both sides covered with presenations: the little roofs on them jut out about a foot on either side. The information was presented in bad handwriting on paper, then put in acetate sleeves and stapled to the wooden surface. You could buy the whole set for $10.00, but Ms. Roden wasn't around.

Mt. Carmel
A history of Mt. Carmel is written in the rubble here. In front of you is the heating and cooling system of the church torn down by David Koresh in 1989 for building materials. The old white bus behind you was used in the March 1988 takeover of this property for David Koresh by thirty Branch Davidians led by Perry Jones.
(next sheet)
As you circle the fence to the left there is a view of David Koresh's underground room. Throught the left hand end of the far quarantine fence gate the concrete chunks bulldozed into the swimming pool may be discerned by careful study. Also on this side of the fence you can see the piles of lumber to finish roofing the underground rooms and bales of the concertina wire used to encircle the compound
(next sheet)
during the standoff. On the back fence are the remains of the retirement community torn down by David Koresh for building materials. near David Koresh's tour bus is the tree that sheltered George Roden when David Koresh shot him Nov. 3, 198, note the bullet marks. Here also are spilled fuel tanks pushed away  from the compound during the standoff and more bales of concertina wire
(next page, but I stopped writing)

What I also remember, is that the "Story of Vernon, Squared" was also posted in the same handwriting. In it, the writer explored some rambling connection between George Roden at a psych hospital at Vernon, Texas, and Vernon Howell/David Koresh driving him to it. (George Roden was tried for killing his housemate as a spy for David Koresh before being put in an asylum.)  In these pages, coincidence was considered a significant sign of--some force at work--

The Other Visitors
People wanted to talk. Some were truck drivers, parked in Waco or Bellmead for the night who had rented a car. Some were vacationers and at least two were members of a biker association. None were locals.

All the ones I talked to wanted to revisit their own faith and put it next to these who had died for theirs. None of them wanted to talk about the government. They were all there on a pilgrimage of faith. I was on a pilgrimage about doubt, and that didn't decrease with the conversations. I do believe it's necessary sometimes to die for what you believe, but was it necessary in this case? I never said that to any of them. They were all finding themselves wanting. A dissenting voice would only have driven them closer to some brink. They were all quite vulnerable, I thought.

This is a picture of Carol Moore Baechler, longtime activist, in late 1993 at the compound. I don't know her, but the point is, there is some of the fuel tanks, etc, still hanging around.

You walked down a grade past the collie dog and ABR's sleep-shed. In front of the fenced-off compound was a gravestone, low, dark brown granite, at least in my memory. It was crowned by barbed wire. It is not, I think, the stone you see there now, which is grey. For sure the barbed wire "crown of thorns" is gone.

The fence behind Ms. Baechler is nothing compared to the fence I saw. It was tall and had warnings against entry, saying that the material beyond the fence was Hazmat, especially any standing water. Maybe my memory is poor, but the fence seemed a lot higher. It doesn't matter. That was the extent of the governmental control--keeping people out of the bunker and swimming pool, the teargas residue, explosive residue, and whatever else.

Beyond that, two rusted buses sat apart from each other and the rest. I walked out to one of them and discovered what was wrong with all the newsmagazines. Because I looked backward. And wow.

I remembered a photo in one of my news magazines. It was of Koresh with one of his teen wives with the exact same vista. The house with the Big Wheel in front of it was clearly in that vista. And in the news magazine, that house had been covered by an inset photo, strategically placed to reinforce the appearance of Koresh's isolation. I was mightily angry then.

So this is what I learned:
1. the press constructs stories along some tragic parameter, and they're honor-bound to keep the theme going, whether it turns out to be the best explanation or not. That's CNN, Fox, everybody.

2. people react to events separate from themselves according to what they need at the time (reassurance of faith, a desire to strengthen their faith, a need to verify doubt, reinforce the unreason of the Bible Belt, whatever.)  In other words, they personalize outside events. Those events usually get twisted into a pre-existing world-view.

3. you need to pick your leaders carefully.
4. you need to pick your causes carefully.
5. you need to examine your journalists carefully, even/especially the visual record.

6. no truth was coming out of there anytime soon. That didn't make the messages meaningless. To the contrary: it gave them more meaning, and a lot more unpredictability.
7. Sometimes you have to go and see for yourself.

I guess it doesn't sound like a big deal, but it was to me. One last post, and then I'm done.

Mount Carmel, after: Part 4, Eureka! No Way!

I asked directions from a middle-aged woman working in a convenience store/gas station. She didn’t want to tell me. Finally she flicked her hand nervously and said, “Turn right at the first road.”

I felt, for the first time, what it might have been like to live near the attention.

In an effort to keep people like me away, all the street signs had been taken down. That’s how I knew I was close; I was headed into the unknown. I just gradually got to the right place. But to get to the middle of nowhere, I was driving through a neighborhood.

Or not a neighborhood, exactly: suburban farmland, the kind of area where people buy one to five-acre lots. It’s subdivided and zoned for residential. People keep chickens, horses. But they have ranch houses, cars, horse trailers. They live outside the city and commute in. A lot of them probably wore cowboy boots, but I wouldn’t say they were cowboys or ranchers. All or most of them probably owned handguns and hunting rifles, but I doubted they wanted explosives in the neighborhood.

Mount Carmel did cover a fair parcel of land (77 acres). But in most of the pictures, it looks more isolated than it is. It was surrounded, and not so far away, by families. Across the street from the entrance, a ranch house sat. In the front yard a Big Wheel was parked next to a sandbox. A kid’s bicycle sat next to the front steps. I turned left. The compound was down a hill. Some of its buildings were very close to the street.

Ranch Apocalypse was also a lot closer to Bellmead than Waco. Score one, two, for my investigation: not isolated, not Waco. I looked down on my second-hand dossier. It suddenly looked exceedingly whack, compared to the nearly-ordinary, very quiet scene I was in. That frightened me. But I parked anyway.

Everybody in the neighborhood had work to do. But they had a lot of tourists there. I was not alone.

**

I've looked it up. I can't prove this with Google maps, not that I'm any good with that program. One house close by was rented by the ATF prior to the raid as a (poorly-handled) undercover outpost. I hear, some unremembered travel blog, that this house has been destroyed. In the meantime, the Branch Davidians have reconstructed.

The east side of Ranch Apocalypse was a farm, and the owner heard machine gun fire often--when leadership between the Roden vs Koresh faction occurred, and other times (weapons practice?)--I came in from the west side.

The next post will be the hardest to construct.

Mount Carmel, after the fire: Part 3, Travelogue

After the swamps, bridges, and call-boxes, you gradually hit Port Chuck, which has a huge edifice of refineries, later repeated in Orange, Beaumont, Houston. One Port Chuck refinery has a tall torch that burns off residue, almost Olympic in its waste of natural gas. At night, the glow on the horizon looks like the city is on fire. Even by day, you feel like you're headed to perdition. The water stinks of sulphur there: ick.

On I-10 through west Louisiana, all cars bounce from concrete plate to concrete plate. (A-chunk, A-chunk, A-chunk.) Eventually I hit that pinnacle of road-building skill that signifies Texas to the cross-country driver. I-10 stretches 878 well-tended miles through the state with Alamo Syndrome, from east of Orange to El Paso. I stuck with it into Houston’s sprawl, then headed north to Waco on I-35, through sprawl again, looking for the hills that seemed right.

The Waco siege is dogged by questions of the press, and procedures that were hampered by the press:
1. The Waco paper began an article series on Ranch Apocalypse the day before the ATF planned to serve their warrant. That would have freaked Koresh out and made him notice intruders even more than he usually did. Many accounts suggest he was already quite wary of other intruders.

2. The ATF invited or tipped the press that a raid would occur. What with all the tipping, Koresh and his followers knew about it in advance. Why did they go in then? The Charge of the Light Brigade?

3. With wide press coverage, the ATF and then the FBI had to issue statements of their side, constantly. They couldn't sound weak to the American public, but it ended up sounding threatening to the compound.

4. One of the things David Koresh wanted was a chance to be broadcast, on KRLD and on CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network. This netted some hostage releases, but then it wasn't enough for either side. Maybe that offer should have been tossed around again. I don't think it was much hardship for the media.

5. The negotiation sounded more like a pissing match. That always bothered me. I wondered why there wasn't anyone conciliatory on the law enforcement side. I specifically wondered why they didn't get a woman negotiator to talk to Koresh, at least to say 'uh-huh' twenty-four hours a day, since he clearly liked women.

6. All that scrutiny, and still nobody could figure out what happened.

The sky stretches endlessly in Central Texas. In December, cloud cover makes this sky mostly a flat gray. Also in December, the plains of Texas are covered in a dull yellow grass, with a leafless few blackjack oaks that look like nerve endings from far off. Plairies are not flat. They roll gently, long low hills you travel up and down. Most of the land is fenced, though. There are always gas stations, warehouses, billboards for Dairy Queen or invitations to subdivide and build.

Eventually you climb in elevation, hundreds of miles from where I started in the swamps. Two hours from Houston, you are almost in Waco, going from one huge city to a smaller one. I wouldn’t say it was the middle of nowhere.

But the landscape is stark. In Louisiana, the eye trains on little particularities, small vignettes, large potholes. You don’t get a long view. I was thinking of northeastern journalists, used to hiding between skyscrapers, now stuck in a Motel 35, and homesick.

Baylor University, a Baptist institution, resides in Waco. The journalists made much of this, implying and sometimes outright stating that the city was a center of Christian fundamentalism.  I was raised neither Baptist nor Adventist. But I didn’t see what a four-year, state-accredited institution with a pretty good football team had to do with an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists standing off with law enforcement. That was another clue that everything had been oversimplified to a lie. Those northeastern journalists, bored and picking on people. Go find a good book to read.

Photo Credits: This is I-35, northbound into Waco. Image from aaroads.com/texas, looks like April and not December. Dairy Queen sign from Kyle, Texas, daily photo blog; refinery, ENS newswire.

Mount Carmel, after: Part 2, My Shabby Dossier

I still have that dossier, and I'm pulling it out. That way, you can see what was available to us back then, and what I had specifically. It comes to a piece of scrap paper, a newpaper article, and stuff ripped out of five magazines. Later I wrote a college paper and did a huge art project from this incident. I kept tracking it. But it's good to know I took about twenty sheets of magazine and a sketch book, and nothing else of relevance.

From those twenty pages, I found as many web-links as I could. Most of them are buried in archives and don't come up on Google without a push. I don't know if anyone needs to review that much. Mostly it gives an option, and shows you that the information I had left me (and still leaves me) dissatisfied.

I already subscribed to Texas Monthly and The New Yorker, which ran stories. Jan Jarboe in Texas Monthly (June 1993) implied that all Texans have some “Alamo Syndrome,” of which this was the proof. For those of you who do not follow Grossly Simplified Texas History, a severely undermanned force including Colonel Travis, Davy Crockett, and Jim Bowie fought in a mission in San Antonio against Santa Ana’s forces and died to a man, so that the Texican forces had time to get to better ground. Mexico was decisively defeated at the Battle of San Jacinto (“Remember the Alamo!”) and became Its Own Country.


Texas Monthly is a good magazine, enjoying Texas mythology but doing good reporting in general. So I was disappointed in this gimmicky approach. However, the painting "The Siege at the Alamo" by Howard Davis Johnson at right certainly gets you to see--ah, something that may have spurred this idea for her.

The New Yorker had a painterly “artist’s notebook” with Bible verses written over them about the end of the world. I admired the artist’s placement and enterprise, but I thought he didn’t have much clarity going for him. (Artist at Large by Gary Panter, "Waiting for Waco", pp. 85-89, painted during the event but not sure of pub. date). However, it did contain an equally inexact map, which was the only map that placed the site, so I was grateful to him.

Much later, I decided his work was some of the most prophetic.

News Magazines

I still didn't know what to think of the news magazines. That was part of my quest. And as it happens, I still have the receipt for these too. I paid 25 cents each for three magazines at Thrift World.)

--Newsweek, May 3, 1993: The fiery cover with David Koresh's face and the words "Death Wish";

The introductory paragraph, page 3, "Death Wish: The last days of the cult";

a. Page 17, a political cartoon where a viewer wants law enforcement to end the madness, and then screams afterward that they should have waited it out. (Uh-huh).

b. A photo essay called "The Killing Ground" page 18, with a double page of the devastated site; "Inferno", the compound on fire, two page spread w/ foldout; "Assault" with (foldout reverse side, 3 Davidians leaving Federal court, the compound being rammed by large equipment, "Day 51" with inset of David Koresh's grandmother and aunt watching helicopters on television;

c. Main article, "Day of Judgment: How the cult standoff with the FBI escalated into a fiery finale", pp. 22-27, with sidebar on Janet Reno;

d. Article, "The Questions Live On", pp. 28-29;

e. Article, "Children of the  Apocalypse: For their parents, death wasn't the worst enemy", page 30;

f. Article, "Hard Lessons in the Ashes; Second thoughts on how to deal with extremist groups", page 31.

This is, including everything, about 12 sheets of paper.

--Time, May 17, 1993

"Dark Sequels: David Koresh's horror tale splits into dozens of stories, none happy", page 15, one paragraph.

"Behavior: Children of a Lesser God: The surviving kids of Ranch Apocalypse offer shocking details of life with David Koresh," page 54. [The dire illustration is a child's picture of her home as heaven. Does this seem odd to parents? Just asking.]

--Time, October 11, 1993

a. "The Week: News Digest", paragraph that Waco reports were completed by Treasury Department, p. 17;

b. pp. 39-40, "Waco: Tripped up by Lies" Treasury Secretary Bentsen is furious and fires 5 top managers at ATF. Sidebar, "Life After the Apocalypse."

--Baltimore Sun, 1993, October 9, "Justice Department clears itself in Waco assault", front page and 12A.

*****************

Sidebar
For material on the Web, there's not much left except fingerpointing. The best collected information is at NPR's "Frontline", a program they aired in 1995. This material includes a very extensive Timeline, amended again as new information came out. There's a readings page, which includes a report by Alan A. Stone, on the failures at negotiation.

Then there are the regretful elegy pieces at BBC (Fifteen years after . . .). Underneath that British deadpan, you hear the wind whistling as they shake their heads. I think Europeans believe this could happen only in the wilds of unsophisticated America. Of course, they got rid of out-sized religious expression in Europe circa 1509. Oh, wait . . .

****************

My story is about journalistic coverage, and a belief that 'going there' would tell me more about how things are reported. Maybe even a little about what happened.

On Interstate 10 out of RiverTown, you drive on bridges with call boxes carefully spaced, because if you break down, there is no place to go. You must rely on the government to help you out. (Later, only people who have lived near there understand this, in regard to Hurricane Katrina evacuation and rescue).

In the state capital, a huge billboard overlooks the city holding the most corrupt state government in the U.S., at least by reputation: "Jesus is Lord over Baton Rouge." (Later, the governor goes to prison.)

But now who sounds like a news magazine?

Turnpike driving clears the mind, forcing you to consider only the present.
All the way there, that little stack of much-thumbed, shabby magazine pages sat in the passenger seat.


(Thank you to artists Howard Davis Johnson and Gary Panter for illustrations, both linked above; also MSNBC for photo.)
(Thank you also to many Texas nationalists of the Hispanic race, who fought in the Alamo, unsung by Grossly Simplified Texas Legend.)

Mount Carmel, after the fire: Part 1

None of this will be earth-shaking. It’s just a memory. Maybe it's a travelogue.

I’m from Texas, but I lived elsewhere during the Ranch Apocalypse/Mount Carmel/Waco Siege/Standoff/Conflict. Something about the press coverage was way off. I could nearly tell what it was.

I began to collect Newsweek and Time magazine issues at the local resale store, and the “true crime” special editions from bent magazine publishers. I even purchased, Lord help me, the National Enquirer. I thought the problem would surely be blatant enough to recognize there. Instead, it was completely obscured by other problems.

The stand-off started on February 28, 1993 and ended on April 19, 1993. These events are still poorly reported in almost all quarters, and there’s a lot of cynicism directed at even official reports. Therefore, the contention still rages. The contention is not about security questions, but civil liberties questions.

In 1993, a man named Timothy McVeigh went to protest the interference of law enforcement with the Branch Davidians at Mount Carmel. Two years later, also on April 19, he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a pickup truck full of homemade explosives, an event which overshadowed the events of Mt. Carmel but also invoked it.

In 2001, we had the attacks of September 11, events which have put the Murrah Building conflagration somehow out of the public’s threat focus.

But in 1993, with hearings and second-guessing and recriminations, it was still a living news item.

When my semester ended mid-December, I packed my battered Toyota truck for my annual five day visit with my Grandmother in Dallas. That year, I determined that I would find Ranch Apocalypse on my way. I had nothing to offer during the conflagration or after. I just wanted to know why I thought the incident was poorly reported. Eight months after the Mount Carmel compound burned down, I thought maybe enough smoke had cleared.

My question was small next to the tragedy itself, but I thought it would help me evaluate tragedy, journalism, and the specific itself more clearly. So I packed my inelegant dossier with my elegant party clothes and hit the road.