Into the Fire: A Paramedics Battle with Waco and the Aftermath

On February 28, 1993, the radio call came in without warning:

"We've got a mass casualty incident. Multiple shooters. Multiple down. Head toward Waco."

Larry Johnson, NRP, CHW was the Senior Flight Paramedic for CareFlite Dallas when the ATF raid on the Branch Davidian compound at Mount Carmel Center went catastrophically wrong. He treated the wounded. He flew the dying. And he rotated on the medical perimeter for all fifty-one days of the standoff that followed, through the FBI negotiations, the siege, and the fire of April 19, 1993, in which seventy-six Branch Davidians, including twenty-two children, perished.

For thirty-three years, Johnson carried that story in silence.

INTO THE FIRE: A Paramedic's Battle with Waco and the Aftermath is the first firsthand account of the Waco siege ever published from inside the emergency medical response. Every previous account has been written by journalists, investigators, or surviving Branch Davidians. This is the story told from the perimeter, from the back of a helicopter, and from the ground where four ATF Special Agents gave their lives on February 28, 1993. It is the perspective that has been missing from the historical record for over three decades.

But INTO THE FIRE is more than a historical account. It is a deeply personal reckoning with what the work of emergency medicine and law enforcement actually costs the people who choose it. Johnson writes with unflinching honesty about the psychological aftermath of sustained trauma exposure, the weight that every paramedic, firefighter, and law enforcement officer carries home, shift after shift, year after year, long after the calls have cleared.

The fire at Waco burned for a few hours. The fire that every first responder carries burns for a lifetime.

INTO THE FIRE is published by Vista Bonita Publishing and is available in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover editions.