The official name is the M1117 armor security vehicle.

It's primarily used by military police teams.

The two main armaments that it has is the Mark 19 is the primary weapon and the coax is a fit to caliber.

And it can take a beating. It saved our lives.

They started walking the rockets up and down the staging area where our vehicles are at and it just all hell broke

loose. It was bad. And one of those rockets hit us direct impact through the engine block.

Hi and welcome to The Spear, a podcast by the Modern War Institute at West Point.

I'm John Amble, editorial director at MWI, and The Spear is our platform to explore the

combat experience. Each episode includes a single one-on-one interview with a guest who walks us through

a particular event and their role in it.

A battle, a firefight, a mission.

It's a first-person account of combat.

This is a special episode.

It's the first time a listener has heard the podcast and reached out to tell us that he

was also present for the event described in it.

We recently aired a conversation with Major John Chambers about the time in 2007 when the

combat outpost in Baghdad where his battalion was located was hit by a new weapon that hadn't

been seen on the battlefield in Iraq yet, an improvised rocket-assisted munition.

Chambers was a lieutenant at the time and the battalion engineer.

Also there that day was Patrick Melton.

This was his first deployment and he was part of the military police element that also lived on and worked out of the outpost.

When the IRAMs hit, he was in a vehicle as his team was preparing to leave on a mission.

...