Rob:  There was a time when living in the mid-section of the country kept you feeling pretty safe from terrorism.  That quickly changed in 1995, with the bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, one hundred and sixty-eight dead and a false sense of security gone forever.  Yet, from our state’s darkest hour, there’s an awareness helping Oklahoma lead the way in not only preventing terror, but helping future generations prepare for it.  We were there in the wee hours of the morning as a mock terrorist raid got under way, in a place few would associate with the threat of terror, small town Oklahoma.
Alisa:  Amid the stutter of the air-soft guns, and the shouts of the security team, these students are learning lessons that will save their lives.
Mark American Horse:  Basically, it’s an end of the year project where the students take all that they’ve learned from the year and get a chance to apply it to a real situation.
Alisa:  Named puppy strike, because new recruits are often called pups, it’s a drill to show all those involved what a crisis situation is really like.  A brain child of criminal justice instructor, Mark American Horse, it’s a different way of teaching that he felt challenged to try.
American Horse:  Our State Director said that he was tired of CareerTech being the best kept secret in Oklahoma.  And I thought, well what I can do to change that?  And it just kind of blossomed from there.
Alisa:  American Horse says he tried to include as many different student classes as possible, consisting of those who would normally be involved in this type of scenario, including hazmat, computer forensics and even EMTs.
American Horse:  Where they see kind of where their little piece of the pie in the working world falls.
Alisa:  Playing the part of the cyber terrorists in the drill, a network security class, hiding data on computers, even booby trapping some.
Nick Legrand:  I have those hidden in a special program I use, and to access it you hit control, alt, shift and H, and it opens up a screen; otherwise it cannot be found; it’s unrecognized by DOS and Windows.  
Alisa:  Both the good guys and the bad guys spent days preparing for what they were about to do.
And then your team will go to the left side, and we’ll go to the right side.
Alisa:  Good guys practice entering a building and securing it while the bad guys try to stop them with trickery.
Clinton Webb:  Training in the classroom and the preparedness that they learn from that, is still nothing compared to actual real world scenarios and getting out in the field and doing the job.
Alisa:  Nerves fraying as terrorists wait for hours not knowing when the authorities could storm the building.
Brian Babcock:  Some of them are doing really good, others are tired.  They are all “caffeined out.”  We’ve gone from really excited, to paranoid, to kind of bored and back to excited.
False alarm.  
Alisa:  The Oklahoma students aren’t alone in their wait.  Across the country in South Carolina, a similar class is taking part in the drill, preparing for a sting with national proportions.  
American Horse:  Each investigation was handled separately, and when they conducted their investigation properly, they discovered that the states were interconnected, that it was a terrorist cell that was operating across state lines.
Alisa:  Alongside the students; real life law enforcement, FBI agents, part of a terrorism task force; all here to mentor these students thru the dangers of a raid.
American Horse:  Just for their advice, but also we wanted to make sure that while we were putting this together we didn’t get mistaken for bad guys and wind up with handcuffs ourselves.
Alisa:  Preparation for a raid, now just minutes away.