Abstract: The Maxwell Bloch equations model the resonant interaction of an electric field with a two level medium. Typically, two relaxation terms are necessary to best model the physics, but in certain cases they can be ignored. In this talk, I will show numerical solutions with varying amounts of the relaxation terms. We find that when the relaxation terms are small relative to the size of the initial soliton pulse, the solution is a damped soliton. As the relaxation increases, the ripples of radiation accelerate away from the dying original pulse, forming a new precursor pulse. When the relaxation is very large, the original pulse dies almost instantaneously and the precursor pulse accelerates to the speed of light. In the limiting case of large relaxation, the equations accurately model experimental results measuring the total pulse delay of a laser pulse propagating through a beam of ruby.