Waco survivors is keeper of Branch Davidian flame
Clive Doyle presents sect’s version of a contested history.
On April 19, 1993, Clive Doyle was one of nine Branch Davidians to emerge from the fire that consumed Mount Carmel, the small religious sect’s communal home a few miles outside of Waco. He was burned, but alive.
“Twenty-five years, a quarter-century, it’s hard to believe,” an emotionally exhausted Doyle, 77, said at the conclusion of a nearly three-hour memorial service Thursday for the 76 Branch Davidian men, women and children who perished that day. Six of their brethren and four agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were killed in an exchange of gunfire when the federal officers on Feb. 28,1993, sought to serve a search warrant for gun violations on the Branch Davidians by “dynamic entry,” weapons drawn and National Guard helicopters buzzing above.
In the 25 years since, Doyle, who still lives in Waco, has taken it uponhimself to be the keeper of the flame for the dwindling-to-disappearing band of Branch Davidians, presenting their version of the very contested history of what happened in 1993, and of what they saw in their leader, David Koresh, the man they believed to be a prophet who spoke with God.
“He wasn’t a gifted speaker. He was kind of like me. He was a high school dropout,” said Doyle, who came to the United States from his nativeAustralia to be with the Branch Davidians, a breakaway group of Seventh Day Adventists, before Koresh became its leader.
“When David started speaking he made the Book come alive,” Doyle told the gathering of some 75 surviving Davidians and their supporters, both political and
religious, at the Helen Marie Taylor Museum.
They were labeled a cult by the government and many in the media who alleged they were brainwashed by a madman who was accused of stockpiling weapons, some of them illegal. Koresh, who also was suspected of having children with young women and girls — at least one below the age of consent, believed his offspring would occupy 24 heavenly thrones wearing crowns of gold from the Book of Revelation.
“If you’re brainwashed by the Bible, you’ve got to be crazy,” Doyle said of the prevailing view from outside.
In 1993, James Tabor, a biblical scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, worked with Koresh’s attorneys and Phillip Arnold, a religious scholar from Houston, to broker a deal between Koresh and the FBI to end the standoff by allowing Koresh to complete a manuscript decoding the Seven Seals in the Book of Revelation, and then surrender. That deal collapsed when the tanks rolled.
At 5:50 a.m. April 19, federal agents called the compound to deliver an ultimatum: give up or be gassed. At 6:04 a.m., an armored vehicle smashed through the compound’s front wall and tear gas was sent in. Armored vehicles continued the assault for hours. At 12:10 p.m., flames and smoke poured from the huge wooden building. By 12:39 p.m., it was gone.
On Thursday, Tabor recalled President Bill Clinton’s words at a Rose Garden news conference the next day: “I hope very much that others who will be tempted to join cults and to become involved with people like David Koresh will be deterred by the horrible scenes they have seen over the last seven weeks.”
“The word ‘cult’ is a nasty four-letter word,” Tabor said. “If we are going to have religious freedom we must get rid of this word.”
“The problem with Waco is if you’re not a Baptist or a Catholic, you’re a cult,” Doyle said.
Doyle told the American-Statesman on Wednesday that of all the pressure applied throughout the siege by the FBI, which took over for the ATF after the initial raid, the working assumption of the government and the broader public was “if we did all these terrible things to these people out there, natural parental instinct would kick in and they’ll rescue their kids and come running out, and I say, ‘Yeah, that’s what normal people would have done.’ But in times of crisis, (like) the people at Masada, 2,000 years later, we’re reading about them and figuring they were a bunch of heroes.”
The 25th anniversary has occasioned a deluge of renewed media interest in what became known nationally as simply “Waco.”
“Unfortunately, most of what I’ve seen has not been very accurate, has not been very sympathetic,” Doyle said. “The press in most cases seems to go along with the government cover-up. The story is good guys came, bad guys shot at them, and people got killed.”
But, he said, the county sheriff had a good relationship with Koresh, who, Doyle said, was very accessible and easily could have been served the warrant without bloodshed.
Toward the end of the service, Catherine Wessinger, a Loyola University New Orleans professor of religious studies, said a few words about each of those who died, including the four ATF agents, accompanied by a slide show of images of the departed, each bio punctuated with the gentle gong sound of a Tibetan singing bowl.
Wessinger helped Doyle with his 2012 book, “A Journey to Waco: Autobiography of a Branch Davidian,” based on her interviews with him.
Doyle lost his youngest daughter, Shari, in the fire.
His older daughter, Karen, 21, was living with Davidians in California and was not at Mount Carmel in 1993.
“I wish I could have been there,” she was quoted as saying at the time. “That’s where the truth was.”
“My daughter was planning on being here today,” Doyle said at the outset of the service. “She was killed in a head-on collision three weeks ago.”
After the fire, Doyle spent three weeks in Parkland Hospital in Dallas recovering from burns, his ankles shackled because he was one of 11 Branch Davidians under arrest for conspiracy to murder the ATF agents. In a trial in San Antonio, he was acquitted. A year to the day after the initial raid, he was free. He returned to Waco. “I came back to what I was familiar with,” Doyle said. In Waco, he found other survivors, “who looked like they didn’t know what to do with themselves. They needed somebody.”
A generation later, he said, “One by one, they’re dying off and moving away. There are some that have joined since, but they are few and far between.”
Doyle acknowledged having survivor guilt. “There’s a certain amount of guilt,” he said. “I felt guilty when I came out, that I was one of the few that survived the fire. Then, when we had the court case, I was one of three that walked away from the trial exonerated and all the rest went to prison. So you feel guilty about that.”
“People would say to you, ‘Well, God must have a reason for you to not be locked up in jail, or not dead,’ and I’d go, ‘Well, God doesn’t talk to me audibly, out loud. I wish he’d tell me what job he’s got for me, what he wants me to do.’ ”
“I just try to do the best I can,” Doyle said. “I figure as long as people are alive that witnessed it or were a part of it, you kind of hope that each one of them will feel the responsibility to share their story and give the story a more positive slant than what the government gives it.”
But, he said, “I’m getting old and tired.” And if his voice falls silent? “Well,” Doyle said. “I usually appeal to people, all you ones who have been coming on regular basis. If you’re impressed that this needs to be kept going, if you feel that somebody has to speak for the downtrodden or the persecuted or you need to talk against the government — not that I recommend doing that just for the sake of doing it — but if you have information that didn’t come out before and is being revealed now, by all means, get up and say something.”