A few minutes later, an agent rushed up to me and said, "Where are you hit?"

I looked at my hands. They were soaked in blood. "I'm not hit." I wiped my hands on my thighs. They left thick red streaks on the front of my blue pants.

Also on the road, Ken King, the supervisor who'd been blasted off the roof, lay on a gurney waiting to be loaded into a helicopter for a medivac flight to a Waco hospital. He'd been shot to pieces. I thought for sure Ken was going to die, but he had a secret weapon. Kenny King's 50-year-old body was wrapped around a core of iron, a core honed to an edge in the jungles of Vietnam. He simply refused to die.

Arial view,compound,after raid

After the dead and wounded were shipped out, the rest of us loaded onto a bus that delivered us to a nearby community center. There, someone passed out dry socks and ammo. We were going back to the compound someone said. An hour later we got back on the bus, but instead of going to the Branch Davidian stronghold, the bus took us to our original staging area. We were back where we'd begun, back where we'd left our cars. A short time after that we checked into a hotel.

I took a shower and washed off the blood. That night several other agents and I went out to dinner — almost as if nothing had happened.

©2003 Chuck Hustmyre. All Rights Reserved.