Cult leader David Koresh was no better than mass murderer Charles Manson, and those who condemn the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for the tragedy at Waco, Texas, are overlooking the threat posed by Koresh's Branch Davidians, the former ATF director, Steve Higgins, said in an Op-ed piece published in the Washington Post on July 2, 1995, and in the Albuquerque Journal on July 8, 1995.

Had Steve Higgins stopped there his comments would not have attracted my attention but he added, "I think it's worth remembering that Waco was not The Alamo, and Davy Koresh was no Davy Crockett. He (Koresh) showed that he placed no more value on human life than did Charles Manson, the Son of Sam and those cowardly individuals who placed the bomb in Oklahoma City." With one fell swoop, Higgins, fueled the over a century old debate about what happened at the Alamo. He equated Santa Ana with Charles Manson and the Son of Sam in the process.

Here follows an Hispanic Opposite Opinion of what happened at the Alamo, based on recorded history. General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana entered San Antonio, on February 23, 1836 and besieged the Alamo, which a year earlier had been captured by a force of renegade Texans. This was Mexico at the time, it was not until March 1st. that Texas declared its Independence. Santa Ana demanded unconditional surrender; the garrison, greatly outnumbered, chose to fight. On March 6, the Battle of the Alamo ended. Santa Ana suffered about 600 casualties; all 189 defenders perished.

Today, people from all over the world visiting The Alamo, try to imagine themselves in the dark corridors of a past lit by words like liberty and glory. They often stand, rapt, in front of the mottled white face of the Spanish mission church, founded in 1718 and later converted to a Fort. Its pastels are said to come from goat's milk that women donated to mix with the mortar and from the blood of the defenders.

Like the limestone walls of the Alamo itself, the truth is fragmentary, much of it lost with the passage of time or magnified by legend. But the battle remains in America's collective memory as the ultimate symbol of self sacrifice and patriotic courage, when the huge weight of the republic balanced on a single point. "I understand the large hearts of heroes," Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself capturing what Americans felt, I am the man, I suffered, I was there.

What really happened at the Alamo? In the 1800s, Texas fever mesmerized the country with its promise of rich land, brimming larders, adventure and a fresh start. G.T.T. many scrawled on their cabin doors; "Gone to Texas" Frontier life was harsh but exhilarating, full of hunting and trapping and shoot'em-up heroics. Women, it ground down on the cold stone of harsh work, but high-spirited men found, as one pioneer put it, that Texas was heaven for men and dogs, hell for women and oxen. Mexico actually owned the territory but, by 1830, 75 percent of its settlers were North American. Though Mexico had freed its slaves with much pride, North Americans in Texas had refused to do so. North American traders conducted a brisk smuggling traffic. Settlers often refused to pay taxes, and they ignored Mexico's requirement that all families become Catholic. Outraged, Mexican authorities objected, and the Texans decided the only solution was to break free. To the Texans, the Alamo was the Fort where gritty, defiant, liberty-loving common men made a last-ditch stand against tyranny. To the Mexicans, it held rebellious, slave-owning, largely Anglo-Saxon colonists who chafed at Mexican rule. Both sides felt that God and justice fought with them. With his huge, smartly dressed and well-drilled army, Santa Ana would have been better off pursuing bigger game up north, like Sam Houston. He might simply have boxed the Americans in and starved them out. The Alamo defenders might have done better blending their forces with the rest of the Texas army. Instead, both dug in for a ruthless fight.

William Barret Travis, the 26-year-old hot-head who commanded the Alamo, refused unconditional surrender when he had the chance, and taunted Santa Ana and precipitated the carnage.

For his part, the vain, egomaniacal Santa Ana, who declared himself the Napoleon of the West saw San Antonio's fall to the Texans as a national outrage, an insult to his pride. This was a man who collected Napoleonic memorabilia and traveled with monogrammed china, a tea caddie and silver chamber pot, but no doctor for his troops. Victory would be sweet, but what Santa Ana really craved was revenge. First, he flew a red flag from a church window only 800 yards from the Alamo, to signal the bloodletting to come. During the battle, his buglers played the Deguello, a gruesome tune that meant no mercy and whose name came from the Spanish verb meaning to slit the throat.

"Victory or death!" Travis wrote in his eloquent appeals, which messengers risked their lives to carry to close-lying towns and far-flung generals. But, incredibly, reinforcements never came. Their lands threatened, 32 men from Gonzales joined them, but that was all. In the Alamo, 189 steely men from unrelated walks of life, lawyers, farmers, doctors, clerks, a hatter, a jockey, a house painter, a poet, a preacher, as well as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, became welded together by fate. They had little in common, and yet everything. Driven west in search of land and opportunity, they were restless and often troubled men, drifters, people looking for a fresh start. It was the Romantic Era, when Sir Walter Scott, Byron and others wrote of knights, chivalry, crusades. Too young themselves to have fought in the Revolutionary War 60 years before; they had fathers who told vivid stories about it. Liberty was still a tang in the air. In many ways, Santa Ana reminded them of the fight they had missed; taxation without representation, religious persecution, a dictatorship that denied them self-rule. Furthermore, Santa Ana's sights, it seemed to them, were set on conquering all of North America. These men may have fled to Texas for personal reasons, but they ended up being overwhelmed by the thrill of a noble cause.

Until recently, looming behind the Alamo shrine, the Crockett Hotel blinks green neon at the disbelieving world. Why didn't they escape? Visitors ask themselves, trying to fathom complex motives 170 years old.

Consider what the motives of the Alamo's three leaders might have been; Travis, Crockett and Bowie.

Travis, in a fit of jealous temper, supposedly had killed his wife's lover back in South Carolina, then fled to the frontier. By all accounts, and from his scrupulously kept dairies, he appears to have been a literate, religious, self-dramatizing man who had a wicked temper and an absolute code of honor and duty. A highly ambitious man with an acute sense of mission, he already had written his autobiography by the time he was 23. He appears to have been no less of an egomaniac than Santa Ana. Reinforcements would show up any minute, he felt. In any case, the Alamo was the key to holding on to Texas.

Jim Bowie, a colorful rogue with a reputation as a brawler, was a child of Louisiana's roughest wilds. He mainly lived on the wrong side of the law, made and lost vast fortunes, trafficked in slaves with the pirate Jean Lafitte. His brother, Rezin, invented the knife Jim made famous, a thick butcher knife with an up-tilted blade used for duels. He liked to fight close, with one arm tied to his opponent's, for instance, or with their pant legs nailed to the same spot. That, and his knack for fighting Indians and riding alligators, insured his swash-buckling fame. Courtly, polished, and gentle with women, he married the richest and most beautiful Mexican woman in San Antonio, providing her father with a dowry of forged documents. He adored her. When she died of cholera, it stunned him into drinking even harder than usual. Roaring drunk is how Travis described him. Like Travis, he believed that holding the Alamo was critical to holding Texas.

Davy Crockett is perhaps the best known of the Alamo leaders, but he was already legendary in his day, as a naturalist, frontiersman (who shot 47 bears in one month), Congressman from Tennessee, practical joker and world-class yarn-spinner. High-spirited and witty, with a strong streak of public concern, he'd just been defeated once again in his attempt at reelection. He told his constituents; You can all go to hell! I'm going to Texas. He arrived and swept up the Texas fever, with a yen to play a major role in the new republic's government.

So there were plenty of reasons, selfish and self-sacrificing, for the men to stay and fight. The defenders numbered 189 non-professional soldiers, while Santa Ana had 2400 trained in the Napoleonic style, with another 4000 at his disposal. Hour by hour, those at the Alamo prayed for reinforcements, the last-second miracle they expected. Give me help, Oh, my Country! Travis begged Sam Houston. It was only on the eve of battle, when his boyhood friend and top messenger, James Bonham, rode back into the fort with the grim news that no help was coming, that all hope was truly lost. Witnesses said Travis took out his sword and drew a line in the dust, asking all who would stay and die with him to step across it. He meant to fight furiously to the end, inflict heavy losses on Santa Ana's troops and buy time for the rest of Texas. Those who wished to try to escape could. All but one crossed the line, including Jim Bowie, who bedridden with tuberculosis for most of the siege, asked that his cot be lifted over the line.

Before dawn, to the brutal strains of the Deguello, the Mexicans attacked, with mortar, gun and bayonet. They killed the defenders in the blazing dark. By sunrise, it was all over. Santa Ana ordered the bodies burned in a heap, denying them a Christian burial. "It was but a small affair," he said to one of his officers afterward with a wave of his hand. But he had been detained 13 days, his losses were heavy, and when news spread of the Alamo's martyrdom and Santa Ana's cruelty, the country boiled with outrage.

Six weeks later, Sam Houston and his troops surprised Santa Ana at San Jacinto and defeated him in 18 minutes. Remember the Alamo! was the battle cry as they charged.

"War is hell." it has been said. Santa Ana was a general fighting a war for his country. The enemy were the North Americans, whom he defeated in war at the Alamo and who defeated him in war at San Jacinto.

For Steve Higgins, the discredited former ATF director to compare the Alamo with Charles Manson and the Son of Sam atrocities is stereo-typical behavior of the latent hate paradigm still extant deep within White North America in this country.

Sources: Viego a Los Estados Unidos, Lorenzo de Zavala; George Bancroft, American History; Diane Ackerman, Parade Magazine