In Part 2 of this two-part conversation, retired ATF agent Bill Buford takes listeners back inside the gun room during the February 28, 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. He walks through the exact sequence of the firefight: the moment a rifle round came up through the floor and hit him, the two AK-47 rounds that followed, and the fellow agent bleeding out beside him from a severed femoral artery. He describes climbing off the roof of the compound with no memory of how he did it, and the ATF medic, Ken Chisholm, who covered him with his own body while starting an IV under continued gunfire.

Buford also shares a story from his time as a Green Beret in Vietnam, a moment when an enemy soldier's rifle failed to fire at point-blank range, and the bullet he has kept ever since as a reminder of how close that day came to ending differently. The conversation turns to the origin of ATF's first Special Response Team, formed in the raid's aftermath, and closes with Buford's own explanation, in his words, of why he chose to go back to a job that had nearly killed him.

This episode honors the four ATF agents killed in the line of duty at Waco: Robert J. Williams, Steven Willis, Todd W. McKeehan, and Conway C. LeBleu.

Heroes Behind the Badge is a production of Citizens Behind the Badge, telling the real stories of the men and women who serve.

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.

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Learn more at citizensbehindthebadge.org.

Jim Freeman spent 32 years as an FBI Special Agent, rising to Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau's San Francisco field office. In the final two years of the 17-year hunt for the Unabomber, Freeman took direct control of the UNABOM Task Force.

In Part 2, Freeman picks up moments after Ted Kaczynski's arrest outside his remote cabin near Lincoln, Montana. With no electricity and no safe way to enter overnight, investigators waited nearly a full day before executing the search warrant. When they finally got inside, portable generators and an x-ray machine revealed what was hidden there: a typewriter used to type Kaczynski's manifesto, carbon copies of the document itself, and — underneath the cot where he slept — a live, fully assembled bomb.

Freeman recounts the physical evidence that made the case airtight, the journals in which Kaczynski described his own motives, and a chilling detail: Kaczynski had addressed one of his undelivered bombs to return to an FBI office, so that whoever opened it would be killed instead. Freeman also reflects candidly on what he sees as a more divided FBI today than the one he served in.

This is the story of how physical evidence, not just investigative instinct, closed one of the most notorious domestic terrorism cases in American history — and a firsthand account of what it took, and who it took, to get there.

This concludes Heroes Behind the Badge's two-part conversation with Jim Freeman on the Unabomber investigation. If you haven't already, go back and listen to Part 1 for the full story of the 17-year manhunt and Kaczynski's capture.

New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more at citizensbehindthebadge.org.