I remember just waking up and the whole room is just shaking.

The drop tiles and the ceiling were falling.

The light fixtures were falling and stuff is going everywhere.

And I remember, you know, just kind of quickly coming to this realization that this building is going to collapse and I'm going to die here.

You know, after, you know, West Point, Bolick, Ranger's School, all this training, you know, it's come down to it and I don't have a chance to do anything.

I'm sleeping in my sleeping bag with my wooby in boxer shorts and a t-shirt,

and this boy's going to clap some of me, and I'm going to die.

And that's when I first noticed really the, just the extent of the damage.

I mean, you walked out and it was like Mad Max.

You know, there's all these humvees on fire.

There's this ASV that's split in half. There's 50-cowl rounds cooking off everywhere.

And there's just smoke as far as you can see, obscuring, you know, everything.

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.

For this episode, I talked to Major John Chambers.

In 2007, he was a second lieutenant and deployed to Iraq.

The small outposts where he and the rest of his battalion lived was hit almost daily by rockets, mortars, and RPG fire. But one day in November of that year, they were hit by a series of what are called improvised rocket-assisted munitions, I-Ramps.

Soldiers also often call them lob bombs because of the way that they're fired high up into the air to fall on their targets.

In this case, actually the very first attack that used these lob bombs against U.S. forces in Iraq, the target was Chambers' battalion.

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