He has all his, the pins pulled from his grenade, so just the spoon is remaining.

And there's hornets stinging his hand.

So he's having to cling to this grenade as hornets are stinging him.

And that's when another grenade comes over spinning over the side

the wall lands next to the four of us and there was nothing we could do it was just so far

enough that none of us could do anything to it except brace and in the end it was a dud

and once it didn't explode, suppress the fire over onto

that position and Eric throws a grenade over, eliminates that, and we began clearing down the alley.

I'm pushing the game fire superiority and Sarnan Hansbrose has an M320 grenade launcher.

And he's pulling the rounds off of his rack and then shoot him in there.

And only like every three are actually exploding because they need a certain amount of time to activate.

And they were so close that we weren't getting a lot of them to explode, which told us how

close the proximity of the fight was.

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.

We chose the spear as the name of the podcast to capture two ideas.

First, that combat is that unique experience that takes place at the tip of the spear.

And second, that in our modern wars, it isn't just combat forces that can find themselves

fighting. Any part of the military, any part of the spear, combat or support can be forced by

...