“What in the hell is going on here?” a police officer yelled at the man who would become David Koresh. “What in the goddamn hell is this? This kind of shit don’t happen in America!”
It was 1987, Stephan Talty recounts in Koresh: The True Story of David Koresh and the Tragedy at Waco, and Vernon Wayne Howell was on the ground, being bitten by ants, after a raid on the Mount Carmel compound of the Branch Davidian religious sect, in Waco, Texas. Howell had been the one doing the raiding, on this occasion, leading seven members of his own splinter group of Davidians—fortified by eating garlic cloves and armed with .223 Ruger semi-automatic rifles, .22 rifles, and a pair of shotguns—out of exile in Palestine, Texas, and into a shootout with George Roden, the black-hatted, Uzi-toting rival prophet who’d taken charge of Mount Carmel.
