Five Meridian SWAT team members and three narcotics agents were in critical condition after encountering an unidentified sweet smell during a drug raid at a local motel. At least that was the training scenario when the Mississippi National Guard’s 47th Civil Support Team rolled into the Regional Counterdrug Training Academy at Naval Air Station Meridian last week.

The Civil Support Team, which became operational late last year, conducts monthly training exercises to stay sharp for what every American hopes will never happen: an attack involving weapons of mass destruction.

The exercise held Wednesday was a first. The Civil Support Team was immersed in a realistic drug-culture environment, complete with a methamphetamine lab, compliments of the Mississippi National Guard’s Regional Counterdrug Training Academy.

“We have the facilities to help them train,” said Lt. Col. Danny Pepper, commanding officer of the Mississippi National Guard’s Counterdrug Task Force.

“We teach counterdrug and counterterrorism tactics. And our first responder courses teach those who go into an incident, and become the incident commander, how to get in touch and interact with the CST.”

Conducting the training at the academy brought an additional learning opportunity, since it is located at NAS Meridian.

NAS Meridian provided firefighters to role-play the incident commander, the local person in charge and the safety officer. By doing so, NAS firefighters and the CST had an opportunity to exchange ideas.

“The information exchange here is just priceless,” said Lt. Col. Gordon Ditto, commander of the 47th CST.

“You just can’t give out a brochure, talk on the phone or send an e-mail to explain what we do. We really need to set up the whole footprint and do a vehicle-by-vehicle explanation of our operation. This lets the first responder go through all the briefings that would occur in a real incident, and understand the thought process. It makes them better, and it makes us smarter.”

With a combination of military and off-the-shelf civilian technologies, the CST has the tools that normally only large cities like New York, Los Angeles or the District of Columbia can afford.

They can quickly identify any threat (or “presumptive identification of biological agents” for the technically inclined) by processing samples in their analytical lab system, essentially a truck packed with all the biological and chemical testing gizmos a microbiology enthusiast would ever want.

In the RCTA training scenario, the unidentified sweet smell turned out to be simulated somin gas, a poison in the G-series nerve agents. Along with sarin, tobin and cyclosarin, the G-series are among the most toxic chemical warfare agents known to man.

“Our charter is to respond to any type of terrorist event in the state,” Ditto said. “Normally we would interact with, and assist, police or fire departments, local hazardous material (HAZMAT) teams, or other first responders that have run into an incident that exceeds their capabilities.”

Although this was the first training event at the RCTA, it will not be the last.

“We like coming to RCTA because they have so many different scenarios they can set up for us,” Ditto said. “These people speak the lingo of the environment we work in. The smarter the people we work with, and the harder it is for us, the better we are going to be.”