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Old 07-07-2011, 07:47 PM
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pmulcahy11b pmulcahy11b is offline
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When I was in, they told us in Basic that "officially" the filters and MOPP Suit were good in a chemical environment for 24 hours. However, during a break, one of the NBC Instructors told us that what troops are generally not told is that the MOPP suit should be replaced as soon as possible after any chemical attack and became ineffective as little as two hours after a blood agent attack and four after a nerve agent attack. The filters in the mask might help you as little as a half an hour after a nerve agent attack and were essentially useless against a blood agent. And most nerve and blood agents worked so quickly that if you didn't already have your mask and suit on when the gas popped, you were as good as dead anyway -- atropine and 2PAM chloride weren't really very effective as antidotes. Contaminated vehicles and gear were very difficult to clean agents off of to make them useful again. He thought that the only good way to deal with chemical agents was to attack and destroy the enemy NBC units before they could pop anything.

I at first thought that the instructor was simply messing with trainees' heads, but I continued to hear such rumors throughout the time I was in the Army.
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