I remember just waking up in 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'm,

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 is 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 cow

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.

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 circumstances to become that sharp fighting end.

For this episode, I had the chance to talk to Major John Chambers.

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

...