The Fire That Time
(Page 2 of 7)
Doyle David opened the front door, and the next thing I knew, he was yelling: “Hey, wait a minute! There are women and children in here!” And almost immediately there was a huge barrage of gunfire outside, and then all hell broke loose.
Catherine Matteson, 92, is a Branch Davidian who was living at Mount Carmel at the time of the raid. She lives in Waco. The windows were shot out, and there was glass all over the floor. You could hear bullets ripping through the walls. The women took the children into the hall on the second floor and put their bodies over them to shield them. This was war.
Sheila Martin, 60, is a Branch Davidian who was living at Mount Carmel at the time of the raid. She works at a day care center in Waco. My son Jamie—who must have been ten, I think—was lying under a window. He’d had meningitis when he was a baby, so he wasn’t able to walk or stand up or anything. It left him blind. And he was just lying there, with bullets coming in and glass falling on him. I remember thinking, “Is this how he dies? After all this sickness, is this how he leaves me?” When the gunshots stopped, I crawled to him on my hands and knees. As I reached him, the shooting started again. I carried him to the other side of the bed, where my two youngest kids were, and I pulled the mattress over us. He had blood around his mouth, and at first I thought that he’d been shot, but he’d gotten cut by all that glass. The poor little thing was just sitting there, in all that chaos, screaming, just screaming at the top of his lungs.
Doyle The government tells it as though we were waiting for them in ambush, and then we just opened up and blasted the daylights out of them. That’s not true. If we had been waiting for them, they would never have gotten out of those trailers. Now, David had shown us in the Scriptures that it was okay to defend your family and your property. So after that huge barrage of gunfire, some people grabbed guns. Whether they already had them or whether they went and got them, I don’t know, but they retaliated.
Buford Oh, it absolutely was an ambush. They had set up and were waiting for us to arrive. It was as intense as any ambush I was in when I was in Vietnam. Before I could even get out of the trailer, I was able to hear specific weapons, like AK-47’s and an M60 machine gun, which makes a very distinct sound. And we didn’t have any of those.
Hustmyre We were trapped. It was just a big open field, and the only place to take cover was behind some junked cars in front of the compound. They could pick us off left and right. Once in a while I would hear an explosion. I found out later that they were chunking homemade hand grenades out the windows at us. Most of the agents were armed with only 9mm pistols, so we weren’t quite evenly matched.
Buford The agents out front weren’t able to make entry because of the volume of gunfire. We went around to the side of the building, put ladders up, and made it onto the roof. One of the guys, Conway LeBleu, was shot almost immediately. Glen Jordan, Keith Constantino, and I broke the window of the Davidians’ arms room and stepped inside. Shortly after that, Glen yelled out that he had been hit. He was bleeding very badly. Rounds were coming through the walls, and I was returning fire.
McLemore Mulloney and I were crouched behind a bus about fifteen yards from our news unit. The bus was being fired at from every direction. I can still recall hearing the sounds of gunfire and people screaming. One agent started yelling, “Hey, TV man! Run and call for help!” And I’m thinking, “Me? I’m fine right here behind this bus.”
Buford Shots started coming up through the floor. The first round that hit me got me square in the butt and lodged in my thigh. I was trying to talk to Glen to find out if he could move, because we needed to get out of there. The next thing I knew, I’d been hit in the hip and the upper thigh with an AK-47. That knocked me down. Constantino covered us, and somehow Glen and I got out the window we had come in. I pulled myself down to the edge of the roof and rolled off. When I hit the ground, I broke a bunch of ribs. At that point, I thought I’d been shot in the chest.
McLemore I took off from behind the bus and ran for the news unit, and there were bullets hitting everywhere. I called the station and got the news director on the phone and said, “It’s a war zone. Get every ambulance in the county out here.”
Buford An agent who was assigned to our Little Rock office, Rob Williams, was about ten feet from me. He shot at a Davidian who had shot at me while I was lying on the ground. But in doing so they were able to see where he was, and he was shot and killed. Rob was a great kid. The next day would have been his twenty-sixth birthday. In Vietnam I saw a lot of people get shot, and the minute he was hit, I knew he was dead.
Byron Sage, 60, was the supervisory senior resident agent in the FBI’s Austin office and the bureau’s primary negotiator during the standoff. Now retired, he lives in Round Rock. Shots were still being fired when I got there. I went to the basement of the Waco Police Department, where their 911 consoles are, and Larry Lynch was talking on two different phones to people inside the compound, trying to secure a cease-fire. That was the first time I got to speak with David. I identified myself, and then I asked him, “Is it ‘Kor-esh’ or ‘Kor-esh’?” David said matter-of-factly, “Mr. Sage, have you ever heard a person die?” And I said, “Yes, I have.” He said, “Then you know how to pronounce my name.” I said, “What do you mean by that?” And he said, “It’s like that last exhalation of breath, like the death knell: ‘Koreshhhhh.’ He strung it out for a few seconds like that. I mean, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. It does even now, revisiting it. I looked over at Larry, and both of us shook our heads like, “We’re in for a hell of a ride.”
“‘CEASE FIRE!’”
Negotiations had begun minutes after the raid started, when Sheila Martin’s husband, Wayne, called 911 and pleaded with Lynch to ask the ATF to pull back. “Tell them there are women and children in here and to call it off!” he cried. Lynch tried in vain to reach ATF commanders, who did not respond. Thirty-one minutes passed before radio contact was established, and it was an hour before he could reach the ATF on a secure line.
The shoot-out lasted, on and off, for nearly two and a half hours, until Lynch secured a cease-fire at around noon. Each side agreed to hold its fire so the ATF could retrieve its dead and wounded. In the end, four federal agents and six Branch Davidians had been killed.
McLemore About an hour passed and nobody moved. There was dead quiet, dead silence. And then in the rearview mirror, I saw an ambulance creeping toward us. It was just crawling along, going about five miles an hour. Apparently the Davidians had allowed the ATF to bring one ambulance onto the property to care for the wounded.
Hustmyre Agents were yelling back and forth, “Cease fire! Only shoot if they shoot at you.” One of our guys, Eric Evers, had been bleeding in a ditch forever, and I said, “What are we going to do about him?” I think everyone was wondering if the Davidians were trying to lure us in to kill us, so nobody said anything. I said, “Hell, I’ll go get him.” A guy with an MP5 went with me. We sloshed through the mud until we reached a fence that extended about fifteen feet out from the compound, and when we looked around it, we saw two Davidians pointing their rifles right at us. I thought, “That’s it. We’re dead.” But they didn’t shoot. I left my pistol in my holster and kept my hands away from my side and yelled, “We’re supposed to pick up the wounded guy.” They started gesturing with their rifles and shouting, “Hurry the f— up!” Evers was still alive, down in this muddy ditch, and we pulled him out. We put his arms around our shoulders and walked him out of there. Once we got him to the road and I could see how many guys were wounded, I started to realize how bad things were.
Jim Peeler, 55, was and is a cameraman at KWTX-TV. I was standing by the side of the road when I saw a guy beating on a car, crying. He was dressed like a civilian. It wasn’t until later, when we were watching the video and we had found out more about the ATF’s investigation, that we realized it was Robert Rodriguez, their undercover guy. He was hitting the car and hollering, “I told them! I told them! I told them!”
