The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog Page 9

  As I got to know the Davidian children, I saw similar contrasts again and again: islands of talent, knowledge and connection surrounded by vast empty spaces of neglect. For example, they could read well for their ages, as they had to study the Bible regularly. But they knew virtually no math. The talents were linked to brain regions that had been exercised and behaviors that had been rewarded. The lacunae resulted from lack of opportunities for development, in Michael’s case, lack of opportunities to make choices for himself, lack of exposure to the basic choices that most children get to make as they begin to discover what they like and who they are.

  Inside the compound almost every decision—from what to eat and wear to how to think and pray—had been made for them. And, just like every other area in the brain, the regions involved in developing a sense of self grow or stagnate depending upon how often they are exercised. To develop a self one must exercise choice and learn from the consequences of those choices; if the only thing you are taught is to comply, you have little way of knowing what you like and want.

  One of my next interviews was with a little girl, almost six years old. I asked her to draw a picture of her home. She drew a picture of the compound. Then I asked her what she thought was going to happen at home. She redrew the same compound building with flames everywhere. Atop it was a stairway to heaven. I knew then—just days after the first raid—that the siege was headed for a potentially cataclysmic conclusion. During that time other children drew pictures of fires and explosions as well; some even said things like “We’re going to blow you all up,” and “Everyone is going to die.” I knew that this was important information to convey to the FBI’s hostage negotiation team and to the FBI’s leadership team.

  Earlier, we had created a group to facilitate communication between the various law enforcement agencies and our team. We’d made a deal with the FBI: if they’d respect the boundaries that we’d created to help these children heal, we’d share any information our work revealed that might help them negotiate an end to the standoff. After I saw these drawings and heard these remarks I immediately communicated my concerns that any further attack on the compound had the potential to precipitate some kind of apocalypse. I didn’t know the exact form it would take, but it seemed it would be an explosive, fiery end. The words, the drawings and the behaviors of the children all pointed to a shared belief that the siege would end in death. What they were describing was essentially a group-precipitated suicide. I was afraid they wanted to provoke the FBI to start this final battle. I met repeatedly with my FBI liaison and members of the behavioral science team, who, I later learned, agreed with me that further escalation by law enforcement would more likely provoke disaster, not surrender. But they were not in charge. The tactical team was, and they would listen but not hear. They believed that they were dealing with a fraud and a criminal. They didn’t understand that Koresh’s followers truly believed that their leader was a messenger of God, possibly even Christ returned, with the self-sacrificing devotion and commitment such a belief implies. This clash of group worldviews shaped the escalating actions that contributed to the final catastrophe.

  AFTER I’D COMPLETED my initial interviews more than a dozen people from my home institutions in Houston joined me in Waco to form the core of our clinical team. Along with the guards, CPS workers and Methodist Home staff, we worked to end the unstructured chaos in the cottage. We scheduled a regular bedtime and regular meal times, created time for school, for free play and for the children to be given information about what was happening at the Ranch. Since the outcome of the siege was unpredictable, we did not allow them to watch TV or expose them to any other media coverage.

  In the beginning there was a push by some in our group to start “therapy” with the children. I felt it was more important at this time to restore order and be available to support, interact with, nurture, respect, listen to, play with and generally “be present.” The children’s experience was so recent and so raw, it seemed to me that a conventional therapeutic session with a stranger, particularly a “Babylonian,” would potentially be distressing.

  Incidentally, since Waco, research has demonstrated that rushing to “debrief” people with a new therapist or counselor after a traumatic event is often intrusive, unwanted and may actually be counterproductive. Some studies, in fact, find a doubling of the odds of post-traumatic stress disorder following such “treatment.” In some of our own work we’ve also found that the most effective interventions involve educating and supporting the existing social support network, particularly the family, about the known and predictable effects of acute trauma and offering access to more therapeutic support if—and only if—the family sees extreme or prolonged post-traumatic symptoms.

  I thought these children needed the opportunity to process what had happened at their own pace and in their own ways. If they wanted to talk, they could come to a staff member that they felt comfortable with; if not, they could play safely and develop new childhood memories and experiences to begin offsetting their earlier, fearful ones. We wanted to offer structure, but not rigidity; nurturance, but not forced affection.

  Each night after the children went to bed our team would meet to review the day and discuss each child. This “staffing” process began to reveal patterns that suggested therapeutic experiences were taking place in short, minutes-long interactions. As we charted these contacts we found that, despite having no formal “therapy” sessions, each child was actually getting hours of intimate, nurturing, therapeutic connections each day. The child controlled when, with whom and how she interacted with the child-sensitive adults around her. Because our staff had a variety of strengths—some were very touchy-feely and nurturing, others were humorous, still others good listeners or sources of information—the children could seek out what they needed, when they needed it. This created a powerful therapeutic web.

  And so children would gravitate toward particular staffers who matched their specific personality, stage of development or mood. Because I like to joke around and roughhouse, when children wanted that kind of play, they would seek me out. With some, I would color or play a game and answer questions or respond to fears. With others, I played a different role. There was one boy, for example, who liked to sneak up on me. I played along, sometimes acting startled, sometimes letting him know I saw him coming, other times genuinely surprised. This form of peek-a-boo—hide-and-seek—was engaging and playful. These short interactions helped create a sense of connection for him and, I believe, safety. Because I’d interviewed all of the children and because they could see that the other staff deferred to me, they knew that I was somehow “in charge.” Because of how they’d been raised, they were acutely sensitive to signs of dominance and cues related to who currently had the most power. These cues were, due to the patriarchal system Koresh had imposed, explicitly gendered.

  For this boy, then, the idea that “the dominant male in the group is being playful with me” conveyed a real sense of security. Knowing that he could interact and predictably get this dominant male to be friendly gave him a sense of control—a stark contrast to the powerlessness and fear he’d previously lived with. Similarly, a little girl who was worried about her mother might go to a female staffer to talk about it. But when the conversation got too intense, too intimate, too threatening, she could walk away and do something else or simply stay alongside the woman and play with her toys. In staff meetings we would chart each child’s daily contacts so that everyone would know the full story of what was going on with each child and be able to guide their next engagement with him or her appropriately.

  But these children needed more than just the ability to choose whom to talk to and what to discuss. They also needed the stability that comes from routine. In the first days following the assault with no external organization imposed upon them, they immediately replicated the authoritarian, sexually segregated culture of the Davidian compound, where men and boys over twelve were segregated from women and girls, and where D
avid Koresh and his representatives ruled with absolute power.

  Two of the oldest children, siblings, a boy and a girl, declared themselves “scribes.” The female scribe dominated and made decisions for the girls, and the boy led the boys and also held sway over the female scribe, with the other children falling into line and complying without complaint. The girls and boys sat at separate tables for meals; they played separately and deliberately avoided interaction if at all possible. The oldest girls, who had been in the process of preparing to be David’s “Brides,” would draw stars of David on yellow Post-it notes or write “David is God” on them and put them up around the cottage.

  But none of the children knew what to do when faced with the simplest of choices: when offered a plain peanut butter sandwich as opposed to one with jelly, they became confused, even angry. Inside the compound almost every decision had been made for them. Having never been allowed the basic choices that most children get to make as they begin to discover what they like and who they are, they had no sense of self. The idea of self-determination was, like all new things for them, unfamiliar and, therefore, anxiety provoking. So the children turned to the scribes for guidance and let them make these decisions.

  We weren’t sure how to deal with this issue. We wanted them to have a sense of the familiar and to feel “at home,” and we thought that allowing them these rituals might help them feel safe. On the other hand we knew that they would need to learn what would soon be expected of them in the outside world.

  We had only trial and error to guide us. My first attempt to break the segregation between the boys and the girls was a disaster. One day I sat down at the girls’ table for lunch. Immediately, all of the children seemed to tense up. A three- or four-year-old girl challenged me, saying, “You can’t sit here.” I asked why. She said, “Because you’re a boy.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, trying to use humor to defuse the situation, but she stuck with her challenge and looked to the female scribe, who confirmed to her that I was male. When I continued to sit there almost all of the children became angry and the air became so charged and hostile that I was afraid they would riot. Some of them stood up, taking an aggressive stance. I backed off. After that, we allowed them to maintain their separate tables and the bizarre dietary restrictions that Koresh had imposed, such as not eating fruit and vegetables at the same meal.

  We decided that all we could do was to allow them to see how we adults lived and interacted with each other, and hope that over time they would see that there would not be negative consequences if they chose to live as we did.

  Discipline was an especially charged issue, of course. We intentionally avoided imposing rigid restrictions, corporal punishment, isolation, or physical restraint—any of the disciplinary techniques that had been used at the compound. On the rare occasions when children did become physically aggressive or said something hurtful, we gently redirected their behavior until they calmed down and had them apologize if necessary. Because the post-traumatic response can keep a child in a persistently aroused, fearful state, we knew that fear might prompt them to act impulsively or aggressively and that they might not immediately be able to control these reactions. We didn’t want to punish them for these natural responses.

  And we began to see that as children cope with the aftermath of terrifying experiences like the first raid on Ranch Apocalypse, they respond to reminders of what happened similarly to the way they responded at the time. So, for example, if they were able to flee, they may respond with avoidance; if they fought back, they might respond aggressively; if they dissociated—that phenomenon in which a person’s mind and body feels disconnected from the reality of the event—they do that again. When the Davidian children were upset, or when they had to confront things they were not yet ready to think about—for example, in interviews with law enforcement—we would see these reactions.

  During an interview with one of the girls, Susie, a six-year-old, I saw one of the most extreme dissociative responses I’d ever witnessed. I had asked Susie where she thought her mother was. She responded as though she had not heard the question. She crawled under a table, tucked herself into a fetal position and did not move or talk. Even when I tried to touch her to comfort her, she was so nonresponsive that she didn’t notice when I walked out of the room six minutes later. I watched her through a two-way mirror from another room for another three minutes before she slowly began to move and become aware of outside stimuli again. The children, usually boys but sometimes girls as well, would sometimes behave aggressively, throwing things when asked a question that made them recall what had happened, or responding verbally with anger. Some would break crayons or get up and walk away.

  Our questions, of course, were not the only reminders of what they’d witnessed. One day a press helicopter flew over the cottage when the children were playing outside. They had been told by Koresh that the FBI would fly over them with helicopters, douse them with gasoline, and light them on fire. Within seconds, the children had disappeared and taken cover, like a platoon in a combat movie. When the helicopter had passed, they formed two single file lines, one of boys, one of girls, and marched into the building chanting a song about being soldiers of God. It was one of the eeriest things I have ever seen.

  Similarly, upon seeing a white delivery van that looked like one of the ATF vehicles they’d seen near the compound before the raid, the children once again fled and hid. As we had hypothesized and other researchers have also confirmed since, post-traumatic stress disorder is not signaled by a constellation of new symptoms that develop long after a stressful event but is, in many regards, the maladaptive persistence of the once adaptive responses that began as coping mechanisms in response to the event itself.

  DURING THE STANDOFF at Waco our team literally lived with the Branch Davidian children. I would make the hours-long drive to Houston now and then to take care of the bare minimum of my administrative duties and family responsibilities. I spent hours in meetings with partner organizations dealing with the crisis, trying to ensure that when they left us, these children would go to safe, healthy families, and also trying to see to it that those who needed it received continuing mental health care. I also spent many frustrating hours trying to get the information we’d learned about the high probability of a mass suicide or suicidal terror attack on the officers surrounding the compound to someone who would listen and who could change the tactics being used. I told the FBI about the fiery drawings and the threats the children had repeated; I described how, when they came into the interview room, which was filled with toys, every boy and girl immediately gravitated to a very realistic-looking toy rifle and looked down the barrel to see if it was loaded. One four-year-old girl picked it up, pulled the toy bolt-action mechanism, then said with disgust, “This isn’t real.”

  Unfortunately, however, the tactical team in charge of operations continued to see Koresh as a con man, not a religious leader. Just as the group dynamics within the cult pushed them toward their horrific conclusion, so too did the group dynamics within law enforcement. Both groups tragically disregarded input that did not fit their world view, their templates. The law enforcement echo chamber magnified rumors about Koresh beyond belief; at one point, there was actually concern that he’d developed a nuclear weapon and was planning to deploy it at the compound. Both groups listened primarily to people who simply confirmed what they already believed.

  Working with the Davidian children—and seeing the unfolding crisis in Waco from the inside—repeatedly reiterated to me how powerful group influences are in human life and how the human brain cannot really be understood outside of its context as the brain of a member of a highly social species.

  EARLY IN THE MORNING of April 19, while in Houston, I received a call from an FBI agent I didn’t know. He said that I needed to come to Waco immediately: the government had begun a raid on the compound intended to end the siege and free the young people who remained inside. As I drove I listened to the radio.
When I crested the hill at the boundary of the city, I saw a massive pillar of thick gray smoke and orange fire. I continued immediately to the Methodist Children’s Home. The adults looked stricken, but they had managed so far to avoid betraying their distress to the children. They’d been preparing to care for the twenty-three children still inside the compound, getting to know them through their siblings and through videotapes made of the children inside the compound by Koresh and released to the FBI. Now they felt their loss, and were all too aware of how their deaths would affect the children they were already treating.

  Adding to our pain was the fact that we knew that much of the trust we’d developed with these children would probably now evaporate. We’d told them that we were not their enemies and that their parents, siblings and friends would not be killed. But events would now further confirm the accuracy of Koresh’s prophecies: just as he’d told them that the “bad guys” would attack the compound, he’d also accurately foreseen the fiery end of the group. That would add to their ongoing trauma. And, of course, the next part of the prophecy was that Koresh would return to earth to slay all the “unbelievers,” a group that the children who had been moving away from his teachings would now quite logically fear included them.

  We had to carefully decide the best way to break the news. Due to the unfolding of events, we waited until the next day because we didn’t have information about survivors until then.

  We set up a meeting in the living room of the cottage. Each child there had developed a close relationship with at least one or more of the staff in our team. Our plan was that I would tell the group what happened in as factual and clear a manner as possible. We would ask them if they had any questions. After that, each child or sibling group would spend time with the two or three staff members they were close to.