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This is the value of getting combat experienced trainers into the school system. Combat experienced trainers save lives. We are seeing combat experienced NCO's being sent to train new Lt's, basic and MOS schools ect.
From Army Times.
Life-and-death lessons
Combat-experienced trainers turning out battlefield-ready medics
By Gina Cavallaro
Staff writer
FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas — The scene was mayhem, a blood bath of body parts and moaning wounded made worse by thick smoke, screaming women and intermittent darkness. The soldiers who arrived first were medics-in-training, but they did their best on the people they thought they could save.
It was a rough, stressful experience, but then the lights came on, the air compressor was switched off and the mannequins stopped breathing.
“This is the good one. They always let him die,” Sgt. 1st Class Shay Black, an instructor at the Department of Combat Medic Training, said, pointing to a uniformed mannequin propped up against a wall in a sitting position and sporting a gory, bloody facial wound.
“Their first instinct is to lay him down and check on the others, but when they come back to him, he’s dead. He ends up drowning in his blood. It’s a good lesson.”
That lesson was just another one in a day at the blood lab, the name for the room where students are first exposed to a messy mass casualty. Like all the scenarios at the school, it is based on a scene someone actually witnessed while on duty in Iraq.
Dozens more reality-based trauma scenes are replayed outdoors in wooded areas, in crude mock-up villages and in a night-vision laboratory where the medics-in-training perform under extreme pressure.
The students who make it this far in the 16-week combat medic course have already cleared some difficult hurdles, but they still have to prove they’ve got the right set of nerves to operate in that environment.
Down the road in the dirt and leaves under a tree, fake bullets flew and bombs exploded near a triage where a student medic worked nervously to save a couple of patients.
It was one of seven trauma lanes simulating as many critical cases for the young soldiers training to be medics.
The instructors knew what the outcome would be because each scenario is written out to standard and hung on a clipboard in the tree above. But the student is in the dark, nervous and sometimes making mistakes.
“This is where the rubber meets the road. This is it,” said Sgt. 1st Class Jeffrey Sliva, 38, the trauma lanes noncommissioned officer in charge. He spent 10 years as a combat medic in the 82nd Airborne Division and has combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A former Marine, Sliva said he and his contemporaries had only a fraction of the training today’s Army medics are getting. They strive to keep the scenarios as close to reality as possible because they know these soldiers could go straight into war when they leave the school.
Using lessons learned in the field, they teach practical trauma care and validate their students’ feelings of anxiety when the tasks seem overwhelming … or when a patient dies.
“The day I stop getting that adrenaline rush is the day I stop,” he said. “You don’t want that guy. When you lose that compassion, you need to retire. You can’t really be mentally prepared, but you can get the right mind-set.”
And there’s nothing more colorful than a real story coming from the guy who saw it.
“They tell us some of the things we’ll see and they’re horrible,” said Pfc. Sean Butler, 18, of the Kentucky National Guard, who went to basic training last year after his junior year in high school and came to combat medic training this summer after graduation.
Oklahoma National Guardsman Pfc. XXXXXX, 19, already has his paperwork in to get onto an ambulance as an emergency medical technician as soon as he graduates combat medic training. He plans to go into the ROTC in January and stay in the medical field, but he is aware he might end up in combat before any of that and acknowledged it may be a tall order.
“Some of the fear has a lot to do with being uncertain about the future, but seeing these guys firsthand gives me a lot more confidence,” Bethard said.
7,000 graduates
Butler and Bethard are two of more than 6,000 soldiers who will have graduated the combat medic course in fiscal 2006.
Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the DCMT trained about 400 soldiers a year. Next year, they are expecting more than 7,000 to graduate as 68Ws, the military occupational specialty code for “health care specialist,” a deceptively demure description of what soldiers call combat medics.
The 68W MOS is a name change from the 91W as of fiscal 2007, which began Oct. 1. The school’s 150-strong training cadre is saturated with combat vets who teach combat and clinical medicine, but 68Ws now get training in international humanitarian law, detainee care and pediatric care, as well.
The students average in age between 18 and 23; one-third are womaen and the attrition rate is about 20 percent. Most of those who drop out do so in the first six weeks of the curriculum after failing to pass the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians basic exam, which wasn’t required until October 2001.
“In FY ’05, we lost 362 to that exam,” said Col. Patricia Hastings, director of combat medic training, who likened the fast-paced training curriculum “painting a moving train.”
“Medics mature very quickly because they’re expected to take on very tough themes in their jobs. Sometimes it matures them far beyond their years,” she said.
After the first six weeks, trainees move on to primary care and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives training. This is followed by tactical combat medicine and hands-on situational training exercises, such as the blood lab and trauma lanes.
This is week 13 of the students’ training; instructors are there and watching, but they’re giving no assistance.
In the blood lab, the students are staged in the hallway before going in and being briefed about a suicide bomber who has targeted a forward area.
Some of the mannequins die, but the students usually get things under control in about 10 minutes, Black said.
Still, it’s unnerving.
“We had no idea what to expect today. It was loud, there were flashing lights, screaming. It was a surprise,” said Pvt. Sheila Miles, 20, who is on her way to Fort Benning, Ga., after medic training.
The Army’s medics are meeting tougher standards than ever because their chances of hitting the war zone are practically guaranteed. They know that almost every one of their instructors has been there and done that — at least once.
“Some of these students will leave here and they already know they’re meeting their units in Iraq,” said Black, 36, who was there with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment early in the war. “At the end of the day I can hit reset and [the mannequins] are back. [The students] know it won’t be like that in Iraq.”
From Army Times.
Life-and-death lessons
Combat-experienced trainers turning out battlefield-ready medics
By Gina Cavallaro
Staff writer
FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas — The scene was mayhem, a blood bath of body parts and moaning wounded made worse by thick smoke, screaming women and intermittent darkness. The soldiers who arrived first were medics-in-training, but they did their best on the people they thought they could save.
It was a rough, stressful experience, but then the lights came on, the air compressor was switched off and the mannequins stopped breathing.
“This is the good one. They always let him die,” Sgt. 1st Class Shay Black, an instructor at the Department of Combat Medic Training, said, pointing to a uniformed mannequin propped up against a wall in a sitting position and sporting a gory, bloody facial wound.
“Their first instinct is to lay him down and check on the others, but when they come back to him, he’s dead. He ends up drowning in his blood. It’s a good lesson.”
That lesson was just another one in a day at the blood lab, the name for the room where students are first exposed to a messy mass casualty. Like all the scenarios at the school, it is based on a scene someone actually witnessed while on duty in Iraq.
Dozens more reality-based trauma scenes are replayed outdoors in wooded areas, in crude mock-up villages and in a night-vision laboratory where the medics-in-training perform under extreme pressure.
The students who make it this far in the 16-week combat medic course have already cleared some difficult hurdles, but they still have to prove they’ve got the right set of nerves to operate in that environment.
Down the road in the dirt and leaves under a tree, fake bullets flew and bombs exploded near a triage where a student medic worked nervously to save a couple of patients.
It was one of seven trauma lanes simulating as many critical cases for the young soldiers training to be medics.
The instructors knew what the outcome would be because each scenario is written out to standard and hung on a clipboard in the tree above. But the student is in the dark, nervous and sometimes making mistakes.
“This is where the rubber meets the road. This is it,” said Sgt. 1st Class Jeffrey Sliva, 38, the trauma lanes noncommissioned officer in charge. He spent 10 years as a combat medic in the 82nd Airborne Division and has combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A former Marine, Sliva said he and his contemporaries had only a fraction of the training today’s Army medics are getting. They strive to keep the scenarios as close to reality as possible because they know these soldiers could go straight into war when they leave the school.
Using lessons learned in the field, they teach practical trauma care and validate their students’ feelings of anxiety when the tasks seem overwhelming … or when a patient dies.
“The day I stop getting that adrenaline rush is the day I stop,” he said. “You don’t want that guy. When you lose that compassion, you need to retire. You can’t really be mentally prepared, but you can get the right mind-set.”
And there’s nothing more colorful than a real story coming from the guy who saw it.
“They tell us some of the things we’ll see and they’re horrible,” said Pfc. Sean Butler, 18, of the Kentucky National Guard, who went to basic training last year after his junior year in high school and came to combat medic training this summer after graduation.
Oklahoma National Guardsman Pfc. XXXXXX, 19, already has his paperwork in to get onto an ambulance as an emergency medical technician as soon as he graduates combat medic training. He plans to go into the ROTC in January and stay in the medical field, but he is aware he might end up in combat before any of that and acknowledged it may be a tall order.
“Some of the fear has a lot to do with being uncertain about the future, but seeing these guys firsthand gives me a lot more confidence,” Bethard said.
7,000 graduates
Butler and Bethard are two of more than 6,000 soldiers who will have graduated the combat medic course in fiscal 2006.
Before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the DCMT trained about 400 soldiers a year. Next year, they are expecting more than 7,000 to graduate as 68Ws, the military occupational specialty code for “health care specialist,” a deceptively demure description of what soldiers call combat medics.
The 68W MOS is a name change from the 91W as of fiscal 2007, which began Oct. 1. The school’s 150-strong training cadre is saturated with combat vets who teach combat and clinical medicine, but 68Ws now get training in international humanitarian law, detainee care and pediatric care, as well.
The students average in age between 18 and 23; one-third are womaen and the attrition rate is about 20 percent. Most of those who drop out do so in the first six weeks of the curriculum after failing to pass the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians basic exam, which wasn’t required until October 2001.
“In FY ’05, we lost 362 to that exam,” said Col. Patricia Hastings, director of combat medic training, who likened the fast-paced training curriculum “painting a moving train.”
“Medics mature very quickly because they’re expected to take on very tough themes in their jobs. Sometimes it matures them far beyond their years,” she said.
After the first six weeks, trainees move on to primary care and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives training. This is followed by tactical combat medicine and hands-on situational training exercises, such as the blood lab and trauma lanes.
This is week 13 of the students’ training; instructors are there and watching, but they’re giving no assistance.
In the blood lab, the students are staged in the hallway before going in and being briefed about a suicide bomber who has targeted a forward area.
Some of the mannequins die, but the students usually get things under control in about 10 minutes, Black said.
Still, it’s unnerving.
“We had no idea what to expect today. It was loud, there were flashing lights, screaming. It was a surprise,” said Pvt. Sheila Miles, 20, who is on her way to Fort Benning, Ga., after medic training.
The Army’s medics are meeting tougher standards than ever because their chances of hitting the war zone are practically guaranteed. They know that almost every one of their instructors has been there and done that — at least once.
“Some of these students will leave here and they already know they’re meeting their units in Iraq,” said Black, 36, who was there with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment early in the war. “At the end of the day I can hit reset and [the mannequins] are back. [The students] know it won’t be like that in Iraq.”
