By Carl Hoover
Waco Tribune-Herald
WACO, Texas — What started as a quiet Sunday morning on call for CareFlite Dallas senior flight paramedic Larry Johnson 33 years ago would change his life, and he captures the experience in a new book.
A dispatcher’s call broke the quiet for Johnson and his pilot, who were notified they were being sent south to an incident near Waco with “multiple shooters, multiple down.”
| MORE: The call that never cleared
As they flew toward Waco, the radio crackled with messages by law enforcement and first responders converging on the same scene, an Elk-area site where a Branch Davidian community had been living.
“As a flight paramedic, when you’re called, you’re going out to the bad stuff. It’s very stressful,” the 65-year-old Johnson said.
However, his training and experience did not prepare him for what they found when their helicopter arrived: a compound with occasional gunfire still going on, four Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents and six Davidians dead and dozens wounded in the aftermath of a federal raid.
“It looked like a battlefield,” he said.
Johnson and his team treated the more seriously wounded, who were taken to Methodist Dallas Medical Center and Parkland Memorial hospitals in Dallas, with Waco’s Hillcrest and Providence hospitals handling the others.
Johnson’s memories of his time as a paramedic during the Branch Davidian raid, siege and fire are wrapped up in his memoir “Into the Fire: A Paramedic’s Battle with Waco and the Aftermath,” released in August. He will be in Waco on Saturday for a book signing from 3 to 5 p.m. at Fabled Bookshop & Cafe, 215 S. Fourth St.
While the first day of what became a 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian complex had plenty of trauma, the days that followed brought their own haunting memories as Johnson was part of the emergency medical staff that rotated on the siege perimeter.
Chief among those memories for Johnson, who found himself stationed in the days that followed at nearby Texas State Technical College, was interacting with the Branch Davidian children raised at the complex, some of whom were released in the siege’s early days.
“They were like zombies: no expression, no reaction,” he said.
The fact that one was close in age to his son hit even harder.
After the fire that ended the standoff and the lives of some 76 people, including more than two dozen children, Johnson was among the crews who walked through the ashes looking for survivors, then bodies.
“I had a hard time with it, especially the children,” he said.
Johnson, who earlier had helped start the nation’s first all-paramedic flight program, Columbia One Dallas, continued in emergency medicine in the years that followed. He served a few years as clinical director for Allegiance Mobile Health after his wife, Lorie, landed a job at Baylor University as an English professor and they moved to Bruceville - Eddy.
He was at Waco’s Common Grounds coffeehouse in 2017, waiting for his wife to finish teaching, when what became “Into the Fire” started pouring out into a journal he kept to manage the stress of his work and what would be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Life as a paramedic, particularly a flight paramedic, had a cumulative effect as traumatic experiences added up, including crashes that killed pilots and flight medical staff.
“After a while, I’m beating the odds,” Johnson said, explaining his shift into administration and training.
The Johnsons moved on to Las Vegas and, ultimately, back to his native New Mexico. They now live outside Albuquerque, where she is retired and he is approaching retirement from his role as emergency medical services commander for Albuquerque Ambulance Service.
He did not initially plan on publishing his Branch Davidian experiences, but thousands of readers of an EMS newsletter he produces appreciated the first-responder perspective he brought to the occasional anecdotes he shared.
That convinced him he had a distinctive view not covered in the scores of books and thousands of articles written since the 1993 tragedy.
“There were 900 first responders there. I have to write for them,” he said.
Sharing his experience with PTSD, which still causes nightmares and hypervigilance in public spaces like restaurants and movie theaters, was also a factor.
“It was a very bad experience. However, I’ve grown a lot from it,” he said.
Reaction to “Into the Fire” has been positive, with articles in Wacoan and D Magazine, Johnson said. He has not stepped away yet from that life-changing experience, however, and is now digging in deeper for a forthcoming follow-up: “After the Fire,” which will look at the investigations that followed the siege.
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