<i>Waco</i> Skims a Very American Tragedy
The story of the siege in Waco, Texas, in 1993 is such a fundamentally American one—such a charged andtragic conflict between dogmatic believers and overbearing authorities—that it’s hard to grasp how it hasn’t been dramatized into a television series before. It’s a tale of men bearing arms, of charismatic and damaged hucksters, of lost souls putting their faith in a man who promised them both joy and the end of the world. It ended, as most epic American stories do, with a gunfight, drawn out over two months. But no one won. Not the Branch Davidians, around 80 of whom lost their lives, including more than 20 children. Not the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms,whose raid on the religious community led by David Koresh at Mount Carmel was characterized by an impossible number of blunders, and a profound—and entirely unnecessary—number of dead bodies on the ground.
