A few days after we returned from our Road trip to Maine, I left for our two weeks of field exercises and Jill headed for North Carolina to see a good portion of her family vacationing in the Outer Banks. It sounds like they spent some wonderfully relaxing days on the beach and fishing, catching crabs and hitting the local eateries. In fact, one evening they were there the rip tide was substantial enough that a news crew came out to the beach to interview them about the water conditions. Jill snapped some photos of John being interviewed in his swim trunks.
I remember lying in my cot under our tent about nine in the evening and the sides of the tent are rolled up because it was still almost 90. I’m holding the phone a little bit away from my ear to keep the sweat from dripping on it while I’m checking my voicemail and here’s Jill’s sweet little voice: “Hey baby, I sure hope that you’re doing ok, because it’s hot out here. I sure am glad that Sonny and Nancy put A/C in their beach house because it must have been 85 degrees out today…” I got a good laugh out of that. Actually, I really enjoyed our time out there. I missed Jill and would have loved the time with the fam out at the beach, but experiences like those are the reason that we’re here, and the military medical school. For those of you who saw the first piece that the local Fox News station did on our “boy scout camp”, you probably already have an idea what I’m talking about. (You can find the links to both stories on the USUHS homepage, or go directly to the Fox News links: Battlefield Medicine Part 1, Battlefield Medicine Part 2) I don't think that they used any of the footage from my squad in those videos, but there’s a guy making a documentary about USUHS and I may be in some of his footage. I’ll tell you when it comes out.
So, the details: The first week we spent being patients for the 4th medical students (called operation Bushmaster). We would sleep (briefly) in barracks, then up at 0430, ride out to the site in a five ton truck, eat an MRE breakfast, get your wounds made up (moulaged) and rotate through these different medical aid stations. Sometimes we’d be staged out in the woods and they have patrols find us and call a Medevac, other times we’d walk into base for “sick call”- a regular doctor visit in the field. You could take a break between rotations and get a snack, read or sleep for a bit, or say have an MRE milkshake drinking competition (six shakes in less than five minutes was the camp record- and one I didn’t even attempt), and then go get moulaged again. In the evening they would start staging us for a Mass Casualty (“mascal”). About eight pm we’d hop into the 5 tons and they’d take us out into the woods, stage us and rev up the sweet sound mortar fire. We’d spend the next couple of hours being treated, evac’d, and doing after action reports (talking about what went right and what didn’t.) We’d usually get back to the barracks about 2330, shower, tick check, and lights out by 0030. The whole process actually taught me a great deal, and I know that it was big-time for the 4th years; at least one couldn’t take the pressure and became a “real world” casualty. (Anytime someone really did get injured we had to start every sentence with “real world” so they’d know it wasn’t an act.) But better it happens here, and it gets fixed now, than in the real deal when somebody’s really taking fire. There is so much that you just don’t think about until you go through the process of being a patient (even if it’s being a fake one). Things like: don’t set anybody in the sun if you can avoid it, make sure they have their gear when the evac to the next level of care, let them know what you’re doing and seeing, and even if you can’t treat them right away, make eye contact and reassure them that you haven’t forgotten about them.
I had some pretty good injuries, too. I got shot in the buttocks, had meningitis, crabs, a seizure, burns and lacerations to the back, an evisceration, and some battle fatigue where I was going psycho because all I could find of my battle buddy was his index finger and thumb. That one surprised people a little, when they’d see this very life-like bloody finger that I was holding while I rocked back and forth screaming. And I don’t mind saying that I played a psycho pretty well. Not sure if that means I’d make a good psychiatrist, or just a good psycho. The other half of the time we in the field (operation Kerkeschner) it was doing things like learning hand to hand combat and grappling techniques, repelling off a fifty foot wall, doing night and day land navigation with a compass and map, completing these obstacle courses with the rest of our squad, shooting M9’s (9mm pistols), applying the lessons from the combat casualty care courses that we had last year, starting IV’s on each other (I must have been stuck six or eight times), all kinds of fun stuff. Each activity was called a lane, and the lanes would start at 0730 and usually we were done by 2100 (except night land nav which started at 2200).
Generally, we got more sleep at Kerkeschner, but we worked a lot harder, too. For instance one evening we were driven out to this paintball course for a lane called “care under fire”. All evening we played paint ball and pretty quickly figured out how difficult it can be to communicate and get medical care to wounded soldiers at the point of injury. Even though it was only paintballs, the tactics and environment made it seem very war-like and it gave me a new appreciation for the how vital medics are in completing mission objectives. (You can see one of the paintball welts on my arm in the IV-photo.) Before and after each lane we would meet and discuss the relevance, lessons learned and so on. The entire time we were at Kerkeschner, save on the repelling wall and playing paintball, we carried M16’s; if you were ever caught without your weapon you did push-ups to get it back. And those who lost their weapons only lost them once. Each platoon rotated through the “patrol” lane; we’d walk through the woods and look for bad guys. Inevitably, we’d see a sign of chemical or biological weapons and have to put on our gas masks at which time we’d start taking fire and have to “defend our position” (which is particularly tricky because when the enemy knows we’re shooting blanks). It was only mid 90’s on the day we did it, but I’ll tell you, it should be one of the Geneva Convention tenets that no chemical or biological warfare should be conducted in the summertime within 40 degrees of the equator, because it’s just too hot to have those masks on. Every day (usually by 0800) I’d completely soak my BDU’s- like bill of the patrol cap is dripping, but it was warm enough at night that one of my two pair of BDU’s would be dry by the morning. All in all, the extra wide cabela’s cots, the sunrises, firing weapons, and the free food (all you can eat MRE goodness) made it all worthwhile. In fact, when I got back from this little boy-scout vacation, I was almost (almost) surprised that they had paid me for it. (grin)
