STERLING, Virginia  -- Anyone expecting this morning's news that Dr. Ben Carson is nearly neck-and-neck with Donald Trump in the race for the Republican presidential nomination to go to the neurosurgeon-turned-politician's head would have been disappointed Sunday night.

At his first campaign event since the news that a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed him second in the running for the 2016 GOP presidential race, nipping at Trump's heels, trailing by just one point, Carson maintained his cool, calm and collected temperament, showing the crowd of about 1,600 enthusiastic supporters packed inside the athletic facility at Park View High School in Sterling, Virginia, that his slow-and-steady-wins-the race mentality hasn't changed with his new gilded status in the 2016 race for president.

Carson stayed close to his campaign playbook on the hot-button issues, sticking to the positions he spoke about with Martha Raddatz this morning on "This Week" regarding criminal records of immigrants coming through the U.S.-Mexican border and his comment that a Muslim should not be president.

Among the crowd there was a noticeable connection to the military -– with handfuls of people wearing items showing their connection to service, and several attendees holding signs such as a "Military Wives For Ben Carson." Therefore it was no big surprise that his remarks about beefing up the U.S. armed forces, and particularly the need to destroy ISIS, drew the most raucous applause.

Remarking that as far as ISIS and "global jihadists" are concerned that people who are afraid to "make the mistake again" of getting involved with war in the Middle East.

"Guess what?" Carson said. "This is a very different ditch than that -- we are now talking about our existence."

"Now, we have the ability to make them stop looking successful if we just let the military start doing their job," he continued, to raised clapping and cheers.

Carson added, garnering him his biggest, loudest reaction of the night, "Basically we either let them destroy us or we destroy them -- and I like the latter better."

During a very short press availability after glad-handing the crowd, Carson attributed his success in the polls to his consistent approach of talking about issues that matter to people, which he said earlier during his speech are bipartisan, not so much leaning towards either Republicans or Democrats.

For the third time just today, Carson also argued that his comment that a Muslim should not be president in American were taken out of context, and gave his stalk walk-back answer about what he meant, specifically in regards to the religion’s relationship to the tenets of Islam and Shari’ia law.