There was a sense of shock and a sense of outrage.

You know, that really did feel like an attack because that was on our home ground.

It was in Salisbury.

I mean, it would be like someone, it would be like someone contaminating Monticello.

I mean, you know, the Magna Carta is in Salisbury.

It's a beautiful cathedral town.

It's a really nice market city.

And yet somebody had done that to the extent that we had to deploy our military on our home soil to clean it up.

If you're in a CBRN kit, your peripheral vision is down, you've got less tactile,

you can't feel what's going on, you can't hear what's going on as easily.

We practice every now and again with tear gas or anything, but you know that that's, it's not really a problem because you might puke or cry a bit, but at the end of the day you're not going to die from tear gas.

This was something which we knew, if we didn't do our drills and skills properly, there would be very serious consequences, I mean exceptionally serious consequences.

Hey, welcome back to another episode of The Spear, a podcast by the Modern War Institute at West Point.

I'm John Amble, editorial director at MWI, and as regular listeners will know, the Spear is our platform to explore

the combat experience. And I think that one of the things that the dozens of stories we've

featured demonstrate collectively is how many different forms that experience can take. It can be a

long battle or a quick firefight. It can mean fighting on the offense or the defense.

That has encouraged us to really explore the boundaries of what it is that defines combat.

That's why this episode is a really special one. Last year, after an incredibly dangerous

nerve agent was quite shockingly used in the British city of Salisbury, authorities looked

to the armed forces to play a role in the response.

My guest on this episode, Major Clodio O'Neill, was part of that response.

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