‘Waco,’ 30 years later, is still with us

On Feb. 28, 1993, an 80-vehicle caravan organized by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms left Fort Hood before dawn and headed toward Waco, 65 miles to the northeast. The caravan, a mile-long melange of nondescript cars, station wagons, pickups and two cattle trailers, carried 76 heavily armed agents. At a staging area in a Waco suburb, they donned riot gear and equipped themselves with flash-bang grenades and zip-tie handcuffs.

Once they reached their destination, a ramshackle religious retreat 10 miles northeast of Waco called Mount Carmel, the agents would pile out of the plywood- and tarp-covered trailers, subdue any resisters among the 80 or so men, women and children living on the property and arrest the group’s leader, a charismatic young sociopath named Vernon Wayne Howell (better known as David Koresh). That was the plan, at least.

ATF personnel believed that Koresh and his followers — they called themselves Branch Davidians — were illegally altering guns from semi- to fully automatic, intending to sell them or use them to ignite a biblically-inspired apocalypse. They also suspected that Koresh was abusing children (“beating babies,” they told U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno).

Counting on the element of surprise, ATF’s strategy was to arrest “the sinful messiah” (as the Waco Tribune-Herald labeled Koresh), gather evidence and leave the compound without a shot being fired. Some of the women agents stuffed their pockets with candy, hoping to assure the Branch Davidian kids they had nothing to fear.

As the nation still remembers 30 years later, the raid, ill-conceived from the beginning, went awry almost immediately. A gunbattle commenced on that Sunday morning, lasting almost two hours. Four agents died; 20 were wounded. Six Branch Davidians died; among the wounded was Koresh himself.

TV and newspaper images remain fresh, even today: a wounded agent in black tumbles off a roof. Distraught agents comfort a critically wounded comrade they have stretched across the hood of a truck as it inches its way down the Mount Carmel driveway. Video of the tan two-story building surrounded by Central Texas prairie, a flimsy fortress for Koresh and his followers, who are besieged for more than a month by more than 700 law enforcement personnel, including not only the FBI but also U.S. Customs officers, members of the Texas National Guard, Texas Rangers, Texas Department of Public Safety officers and numerous local law enforcement personnel.

Of course, the most enduring image is that rickety wooden building engulfed in angry orange flames and billowing black smoke, as FBI agents in Bradley fighting vehicles and Army tanks launch a final tear gas assault 51 days after the initial raid. Fifty-three adults and 23 children burned to death inside that building, making April 19, 1993, the deadliest action by federal forces on American soil since soldiers killed nearly 300 Lakota people at Wounded Knee in 1890.

“Waco” remains shorthand for the deadly standoff three decades ago, and yet the city itself, for the most part, has transcended its Branch Davidian association. (A powerhouse husband-and-wife team of “fixeruppers,” home-renovation stars of cable TV, have had much to do with helping their hometown eclipse its association with tragedy.)

For the nation itself, though, “Waco” remains insidious, its “tail” long and lingering. Fort Worth writer Jeff Guinn, author of a recent book about the Branch Davidian siege, describes the incident’s influence as a “legacy of rage.” Simmering through the years, it deserves our ongoing attention.

During the siege, a modest hilltop about 3 miles south of the compound became a gathering place for curiosity seekers, journalists, T-shirt vendors and Koresh admirers. Among them was a young Gulf War veteran selling bumper stickers that read “FEAR THE GOVT THAT FEARS YOUR GUN.” His name was Timothy McVeigh.

On the second anniversary of the Branch Davidian conflagration, April 19, 1995, McVeigh set off a bomb in a rented truck parked outside the ninestory Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. He killed 168 people, among them 19 children who had just arrived at a secondfloor day care center. Oklahoma City was revenge for Waco, McVeigh said.

The two young men who killed 13 people and wounded more than 20 others at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., on April 20, 1999, timed their attack close to the Oklahoma City and Waco anniversary.

In 1999, a young radio and cable TV rabble-rouser from Austin announced a fundraising drive to build a new church at Mount Carmel, calling it a memorial to the Branch Davidians the federal government had murdered.

His name was Alex Jones.

At the dedication ceremony the next year, Jones proclaimed that the FBI had “machine-gunned men, women and children as they tried to exit” the compound and that the Oklahoma City bombing “was an inside job — a false flag operation” coordinated by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Despite a recent billion-dollar judgment against him for defaming survivors and family members of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012,

Jones is still talking.

The militia movement continues to grow, particularly after the 2016 election of a president considered by the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and other far-right militia groups to be sympathetic to their anti-government cause. On Jan. 6, 2021, several thousand Donald Trump supporters — some militia members, some not — stormed the U.S. Capitol, intent on keeping newly elected Joe Biden from being certified as president. Waco, a cause celebre for extremist groups, helped ignite their anti-government fury.

Before being convicted of seditious conspiracy last fall, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes warned federal agents not to “Waco” today’s militants. Three Percenters cofounder Mike Yarbrough has warned, “Waco can happen at any given time. But the outcome will be different this time.”

“The modern-day militia movement owes its existence to Waco,” Daryl Johnson, a domestic terrorism expert formerly with the Department of Homeland Security, told Kevin Cook, author of another new book about Waco.

In his book “Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage,” Guinn quotes Rachel Carroll Rivas, an analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Waco is the one (cause) that has continued,” she told him. “It is still this topic that people talk about. It is still there.”

As Rivas points out, the “ongoing tragedy” of Waco is that it has spawned government distrust and paranoia among non-militia members, as well. “It connects to something current, the far-right activity like Jan. 6,” she told Guinn. “Of the 700 arrests after Jan. 6, only about 80 (were) members of hate groups. So, how do regular people get pulled in? That’s why Waco is notable in this moment.”

Waco is notable, as well, for the troubling and insistent questions it raises about the power of the state, the role that violence plays in this nation and the militarization of law enforcement. QAnon adherents and other deep-state conspiracists may be wacko, but Waco reminds us that something feeds their paranoia. We need to pay attention.

We remember Pearl Harbor. We remember 9/11. We remember Waco for what it tells us about who we are and who, together, we must avoid becoming.

The Branch Davidian siege still burns among the extreme right.