Bill Buford — Surviving the Waco Raid as an ATF Agent | Part 1

Bill Buford spent nearly three decades in federal law enforcement, first as a Green Beret in Vietnam, then as a Special Agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In 1993, he led the ATF Special Response Team out of Little Rock, Arkansas, and was one of a small group of agents who made it inside the compound at Mount Carmel during the raid on the Branch Davidians.

On February 28, 1993, Buford's team lost the element of surprise before they ever reached the compound, but the order to go in came anyway. What followed was one of the deadliest days in ATF history: four agents killed, dozens wounded, and Buford himself shot four times before he was pulled off a roof and rushed to the hospital.

Buford walks through what it was like inside the compound's gun room during the firefight, the moment a fellow agent gave his life to save him, and what he's carried with him in the more than 30 years since. He also addresses head-on the persistent theories about how the siege ended on April 19, sharing what independent arson investigators actually found.

This conversation is a rare, unfiltered account from one of the few agents who was inside the building that day, someone who lived through both the raid and the decades of public criticism that followed it, and who chose to go back to the job anyway.

In Part 2, Bill takes listeners back inside the gun room for the full, moment-by-moment account of the firefight, a near-death encounter half a world away in Vietnam, and the reason he says he owed it to the men he lost to keep serving.

New episodes drop every other week. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more at citizensbehindthebadge.org.

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Dave Hinners — The Arrests, the Trial, and What It Cost | Part 2

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Bill Bratton — Sweet Alice, the Bronx, and What the Job Costs | Part 2

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Bill Bratton — Broken Windows, Stop-and-Frisk, and the Defund Years | Part 1

Bill Bratton is the only person ever to have led both the New York City Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department. He joined the Boston Police Department in 1970 at twenty-three, badge 1...

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Barry Black — Building the Case Against Timothy McVeigh | Part 2

Barry Black retired from the FBI after thirty-one years as a master bomb technician and master instructor. On April 19, 1995, he was one of only two FBI bomb technicians in the state of Oklahoma. Part...

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Barry Black — The FBI Bomb Technician at the Oklahoma City Bombing | Part 1

Barry Black spent thirty-one years in the FBI. He joined wanting white collar work, having changed his major and his university to get an accounting degree because that was what the Bureau was hiring....

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Frank Pegueros — Answering D.A.R.E.'s Critics, and What the Job Costs | Part 2

Part 1 covered what D.A.R.E. teaches now. This half is about the people who teach it, and about the criticism the program has carried for forty years.Frank Pegueros — retired LAPD captain, President a...

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Frank Pegueros — What the D.A.R.E. Program Actually Teaches Now | Part 1

Francisco "Frank" Pegueros spent 26 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, retiring as a captain, and has spent the 30 years since as President and CEO of D.A.R.E. America. He has now been with...

25 Elo 35min