Neosho Police Patrolman Josh Buckner feels the blood rushing in his ears, his heart pounding faster as he advances, gun drawn, down a smoky hallway.

The milky fog is so thick he can hardly see the three other officers that advance not more than a couple of feet ahead of him. Buckner guards the bottom point of the diamond formation.

Flashing lights pierce through and reflect off the smoke, throwing off depth perception.

Reverberating all around the cops is the thump, thump thump of excruciatingly loud techno music, but strangely enough, Buckner can’t even hear it. His mind is focused on the mission, which is to neutralize suspected shooters that are supposed to be somewhere in the building.

Pop! Pop! Pop! Shots penetrate the air in rapid succession and projectiles whiz by the police officers, fired by an unseen shooter hidden somewhere in the thick soup.

Buckner is too frustrated at the lack of visibility to be frightened.

In the back of his mind, he knows it isn’t real.

But no one told his heightened nerves that.

Buckner, who has been with the Neosho PD for just over seven months, took part in a training exercise Monday at the former, and now empty, First Baptist Church building on the corner of Jefferson and Main Streets.

The Immediate Action/Rapid Deployment Drill was designed to school local police on how to better respond to an intruder on campus situation. To that end, Sgt. Pete Russell, head of the department’s Special Response Team, and the other team members pulled no punches in simulating a real-life shooter situation.

Incorporating fog machines, strobe lights and cranked up stereos to deprive the officers’ senses, the SRT team members — i.e. the “bad guys” — prowled around the labyrinth-like church armed with semi-automatic airsoft rifles.

It was the Neosho police officers’ job to take them out, hopefully through negotiation or non-deadly methods.

 “That was really intense,” Buckner said after the exercise was over. “Even though there’s a part of your head that knows it’s not live fire and you’re not going to die, you have to go in with the mindset of ‘If I get shot, I’m really shot’ and you have to deal with it.”

Other than a basic scenario, none of the training was scripted. Officers were left to react to the situation as they saw fit at the time.

The “situation”, at first, was supposed to be a routine call to check out a suspicious person carrying a black bag. It quickly got out of hand. By the time the first officers “arrived” on the scene, shots had already been reported fired. Back-up appeared every minute and a half or so.

Teams of four policemen each moved in at intervals from different locations, carrying look-alike airsoft 9mm pistols. 

“We’re basically training officers how to communicate and work as a team,” Russell said. “They have to know their responsibilities as a team and the tactics to deal with an active shooter who could harm a large group of people. And that’s really what we’re trying to get them trained in — how to isolate that person and get him into cuffs before more lives are lost.”

According to Russell, the Neosho Police Department began hosting such training sessions shortly after the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. Officers had already undergone classroom training before putting what they learned to practice on Monday at the empty First Baptist Church building, which Russell noted was “perfect” because it was laid out much like a school and also had the church element.

After the exercise, the SRT instructors gave oral assessments on how the police teams had performed. The officers will later receive written evaluations. 

The final showdown of the scenario took place in what was once the main sanctuary of the church, where three shooters had retreated. Of those, one was shot, one negotiated onto the floor and placed into cuffs and the other physically taken down.

Before that, however, Buckner’s team had entered from a hallway filled with smoke, manufactured by a fog machine. Strobe lights flashed and techno music blared.

Buckner didn’t remember the music, though, as he had toned it out. He did recall the emotions he felt advancing blindly down the hall.

“It was sheer frustration,” he said. “Your flashlights are useless and your communications lack at that point because you can’t use hand signals. Everything has to be verbal so you’re constantly giving yourself away. You feel helpless and it’s do or die.”

The reason for the smoke was not to simulate a fire, according to Russell, but to deprive officers of their sense of sight. The same with the lights and the loud music.

The point, Russell said, was to overwhelm the senses in an effort to mimic what officers might feel when faced with a real situation.

“You never completely simulate a real environment, but we’re trying to get as close as we can with this,” Russell said.