The Branch Davidians: Oh, My God, They're Killing Themselves!

The sun didn't blacken, nor the moon turn red, but the world did come to an end, just as their prophet had promised. The End drove up to their doorstep in a tank, spitting gas, fulfilling prophecies. And if anyone wants to harm them, says the Book of Revelation, fire pours from their mouth and consumes their foes.

Buzzards circled overhead and the wind blew hard on the day the Branch Davidians died. Before the sun came up, state troopers went door to door to the houses near the compound, telling people to stay inside, there might be some noise. Over their loudspeakers, the tired negotiators called one last time for David Koresh and his followers to surrender peacefully. Then they got on the phone and told him exactly where the tear gas was coming, so he could move the children away. The phone came sailing out the front door. They will make war on the Lamb, and the Lamb will conquer them.

The pounding began a few minutes after 6 a.m., when an armored combat engineer vehicle with a long, insistent steel nose started prodding a corner of the building. Shots rang out from the windows the moment agents began pumping in tear gas. A second CEV joined in, buckling walls, breaking windows, ! nudging, nudging, as though moving the building would move those inside. "This is not an assault!" agent Byron Sage cried over the loudspeakers. "Do not shoot. We are not entering your compound." Ambulances waited a mile back; the local hospital, Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center, was on alert. But no one was supposed to get hurt. "You are responsible for your own actions," agents called out. "Come out now and you will not be harmed." Do not fear what you are about to suffer . . . Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.

Koresh left his apartment on the top floor and stalked the halls. "Get your gas masks on," he told them. The masks would protect them for hours, even days if they could manage to change the filters. Once equipped, people went about their chores: women did the laundry, cleaned, or read the Bible in their rooms, even as a tank crashed through the front door, past the piano, the potato sacks and the propane tank barricaded against it.

Once the shooting started, the agents abandoned their plan to target the gas where it was least likely to hurt the children. The vehicles exhaled clouds through the entire building, punching hole after hole through the walls as the rounds of bullets rained down. Fleeing the gas, women and children clustered in the center of the second floor, from which there was no exit. Then suddenly the firing stopped, and a white flag emerged from the front door. "Outstanding!" thought the leader of the Hostage Rescue Team. "It's gonna work." Koresh's chief lieutenant, Steve Schneider, retrieved the telephone, and the agents felt a moment of hope. But the firing began again. Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth.