A Place Called Waco: A Survivor's Story

In 1990, Thibodeau met a working-class visionary named David Koresh in an L.A. music store, joined his rock band and moved to the Mount Carmel community just outside Waco, Tex., to become his disciple. Three years later, Thibodeau was one of only nine survivors of the assault that destroyed the Branch Davidian compound. The 74 who died were mainly women and children suffocated by tear gas, crushed by falling debris or incinerated in the ensuing fire. Koresh was, if folksy and low-key, persuasive: he convinced the other men at Mount Carmel that, while they had to remain celibate, he had divine permission to sleep with any and all of the women. Indeed, Koresh's overcharged sexuality turned out to be ""the worm in the apple of our collective innocence,"" according to Thibodeau. The other charges against the Davidians (child abuse, weapons stockpiling, drug manufacture) were, Thibodeau asserts, figments of the federal imagination, yet Koresh's penchant for underage females was a flaw not even the most faithful of his disciples could condone. Admirably, Thibodeau never lapses into overstatement, and his book is far from an extremist apologia. Instead, it is an insider's account of an event that tested and found wanting the nation's tolerance for people who, though they chose to live beyond the mainstream, were, apparently, for the most part, innocent of the charges leveled against them. (Sept.)