4
As soon as the last vehicle was flattened, the AFVs spread out again. They started to circle, the Davidians’ fresh laundry embedded in their tracks. Almost immediately, the screams of the animals boomed out again from their loudspeakers.
People were on the move outside our trailer, making their way to and from the array of shower cubicles, toilets and food wagons that had sprung up on our patch of the seventy-seven-acre tented city. An army may march on its stomach, but US law enforcement drives there in a stretch limo and gets paid overtime.
There was no shortage of bodies to be catered for. SWAT teams, FBI hostage rescue teams, federal marshals, local sheriffs; the place was teeming with them. No fewer than four Pods were sprinkled around the compound. Alpha Pod was right next door to our trailer; the other three had their own command set-up, and, as far as we could make out, were doing their own thing. There were more chiefs than Indians on this prairie, that was for sure, and nobody seemed to be in overall charge. To make matters worse, they all wanted to be, and every man and his dog was clearly itching to fire up the biggest and ugliest military toys they could get their hands on.
This operation had all the makings of a weapons-grade gangf*ck, and there was a rock-festival-sized audience gathering to witness it. Hordes of shiny, aluminium-skinned Airstreams, clapped-out Winnebagos and bog-standard pickups lined the road the far side of the cordon. The rubberneckers were coming from miles around for a good day out, sitting on their roofs, clutching their binos, enjoying the fun. There was even a funfair, and stall upon stall selling everything from hotdogs and camping gas stoves to Davidians: 4, ATF: 0 emblazoned T-shirts [Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Bureau of].
This was certainly cowboy country, in more ways than one. Waco was about a hundred miles south of Dallas, and home to the Texas Rangers’ museum. Everybody I’d seen at the funfair seemed to be wearing a Stetson. Everybody apart from the Ku Klux Klan, that is. They’d turned up three days ago, offering the FBI their help getting in there and killing all them drug-taking, cult-loving child molesters.
Tony and I sank back down and finished off our brews while I got the kettle on for the next round. It was the highlight of the day.
Muffled speech and laughter came and went along the outside of the trailer. I smelled cigarette smoke. The cocking of weapons and ripping of body-armour Velcro signalled the change of shift. By my reckoning there were at least three hundred police officers on-site, with vehicles to match. Most of them were in BDUs [United States Army battledress], and carrying enough weaponry to see off a small invasion.
I also knew that the Combat Applications Group – Delta Force – had a team here somewhere. Delta had been modelled on the same squadron and doctrine set-up as the Special Air Service in the 1970s. They were probably doing much the same as we were, stuck at one of the Pods, being told jack shit about what was going on and sleeping rough in a trailer. I hoped so, anyway.
We all knew that it was illegal for the military to act against US citizens. The Posse Comitatus Act banned it from domestic law enforcement, and ‘domestic’ included a three-mile stretch of territorial water. There was only one exception to the rule: President Clinton had signed a waiver allowing law officers on drugs interdiction operations to use military vehicles and personnel to combat the forces ranged against them. In other words, the ATF and FBI had a Get Out Of Jail Free card, and judging by the Abrams tank parked up across the way, it looked like they intended to play it at the first available opportunity.
David Koresh and his fellow Bible-bashers couldn’t have known what they were letting themselves in for when they resisted the original attack by the ATF almost two months earlier.