I wouldn’t let our guys gear up like they were getting ready for World War III, but they did have their gear out of sight nearby just in case. I wanted to work this out peacefully, and you do that by deescalating the situation whenever you can.
Then it starts to go down. The plane lands and the controllers guide it right to where we wanted it. A few more units drive out and surround it. The plane is now totally closed in.
We send one of those ladder trucks up to the door and I go to the foot to wait. My men are behind the vehicles surrounding the aircraft, weapons out of sight. I’m maybe 25 meters out front. I have an earpiece in and I have comms with everyone, including my snipers. I had my issue .357 SIG Sauer, and I had a couple extra 12-round mags just in case. I was hoping not to have to use them.
At that point, before the door opened, I’m still pretty sure I’ll be able to talk those boys into turning around and flying back home. But they had other ideas.
The first guy out is Deputy Raymond Hough, who I knew in the past from some joint fugitive investigations. I didn’t think much of him, to be honest, but he wasn’t stupid. He comes down the ramp with a bunch of his boys and they’re decked out for war. Armor, helmets, M4s. My guys see it too, and I can hear the chatter in my earpiece. I whisper, “Relax. Just keep your heads and this will all work out.”
The feds were trying to show me that they came to play, so I just kept calm.
Hough is all in black—they were all in black. Right off, he tells me, “You and your men are obstructing a federal law-enforcement operation! If you don’t stand down, you’ll be arrested!”
I say, “Now Ray, you seem to be a little outnumbered here. Why don’t we talk this over?”
“Nothing to talk about,” he says. “We’re here to do a job, and we’re doing it.”
Now, more of his guys are coming off the plane, stepping past me and Hough, and fanning out. My guys are keeping calm, but these feds are all carrying heavy weapons and they are getting jumpy.
I don’t like how it’s going, so I say, “Ray, maybe you can ask your boys to get back on the plane and we can talk about this. There are a lot of guys with weapons out here, and you know how one stupid move can send things out of control real quick.”
But Hough wasn’t listening. They’d been trained to use overwhelming force to dominate the situation, and they were reverting to their training. They were trying to dominate a situation they didn’t have control over. My guys were just standing off, behind their vehicles, heavy weapons out of sight. But the feds were spreading out to confront them.
“At least tell your guys to sling their rifles, Ray,” I said.
But he wasn’t having any of it. He goes, “Get your fucking state troopers out of our way, Zamora. Do it now! Where are our buses?” We had intercepted the buses they chartered and sent them away.
So I say, “You’re not leaving this airfield, Deputy. Now, how about we do this the smart way?”
Then he says, “How about I cuff your ass?”
I kept trying to turn the heat down. “I figure that’ll be a bad idea, Ray. Let’s not get stupid,” I say.
But even as I was talking, about 75 meters away a deputy marshal named Wayne Grohl was in a staring contest with a Texas state trooper named David Rodriguez. Grohl lived, though with a few holes in him, and testified that Deputy Rodriguez was making a move on him. The camera footage shows that never happened. The deputy never even put his hand on his service weapon. Grohl shot him in the face, and all hell broke loose.
The feds heard Grohl’s shot and just opened up on us. They had their rifles up already, so for a couple seconds they had the advantage. Our guys on the tarmac dropped behind their vehicles and went for their own heavy weapons, but a couple got hit on the way down.
I saw what happened and yelled for Hough to call “cease fire,” but he was either stupid or pumped with adrenaline or both, because he turns and brings his M4 up at me.
One of my snipers took off most of his head.
Hough staggers and falls. Now bullets are flying everywhere and I’ve got two problems. First, I’m 25 meters in front of my men and their barricade of vehicles out in the middle of a bunch of stupid, scared feds. Second, and worse, with Hough dead, there’s no one in charge of the feds to get them to stop shooting.
I don’t recall drawing my SIG—years of training made it instinctive, I guess—but it’s in my hand when a young fed comes out behind the stairway and sees me. I yell “Get down,” but he starts taking a bead on me.
I took aim center mass and fired—right into the Kevlar plate I knew he was wearing. I knew it wouldn’t penetrate, but the .357 slug did knock him on his ass. Broke a couple ribs, but kept him out of the fight. First guy whose life I ever saved by shooting him in the chest.
Bullets are whizzing around. I can hear brass falling from the door of the jet and hitting the tarmac around me from the guys shooting up there. Now our guys are firing back and tearing the jet up—bullets are punching into the sheet metal and cracking the windows. I’m crouching by the stairway just trying not to get shot as I try to retake control.
“Cease fire! Cease fire!” I’m yelling into my comms, but when somebody’s shooting at you, you know, you shoot him. There were about 12 feds on the tarmac when Grohl fired and pretty soon every one of them was down, either dead or wounded.
I saw a marshal in the door of the aircraft firing full auto and then take one in the neck and fall backwards. Then the firing petered out.
After a couple minutes, we started talking to the guys on the plane. It wasn’t flying anywhere, that was for sure. It looked like Swiss cheese, so we needed to figure out what to do with the survivors. Eventually, they gave up their weapons and we kept them in a hotel until we could bus them out. They weren’t prisoners—except for Grohl.
I’m not proud of what happened there. It makes me sick. But I did my duty, and I gotta say I’m happy I didn’t have to kill anyone myself. I know it broke up the Texans who did. It’s bad enough killing a bad man. Another cop, even one who is enforcing unconstitutional laws? It makes you want to throw up. We killed nine United States marshals and wounded eight more. They killed one Texas Ranger, a guy who had been in my wedding, and one state trooper, Deputy Rodriguez, plus wounded six more. It was a tragedy, and it was all the Clinton administration’s doing.
Now, the administration was stunned. This was something entirely new—active resistance. They immediately claimed we “ambushed” the marshals and the mainstream media parroted that line. We weren’t dumb, though. We had cameras all over the place, and our governor let the administration tie itself into a false story, then called a press conference. Even the mainstream media had to show up for that—this was huge news, flood-the-zone coverage.
He had me walk through the events using our footage, which the public had not seen until then, and it was very clear that the feds escalated the situation and started shooting, and there was no doubt at all that the administration was lying.
Of course Hillary threw the attorney general under the bus. The AG resigned, and her replacement negotiated with us, dropping the contempt order. The administration also agreed not to try and enforce the new gun laws in any state that refused to allow it, and 32 states refused. We gave them back Deputy Marshal Grohl instead of trying him for murder ourselves. They let him plead guilty to a federal manslaughter charge.
Right after the shootout, we were not sure what to expect next. There was a lot of talk about “civil war,” but that was foolishness. No one wanted any more real fighting. Our country had deep problems, but we needed to solve them using the means in the Constitution. It was the Clinton administration ignoring the Constitution that had got us where we were in the first place.