OBLC- Week 6

FTX-3 (3rd week of Field Training Exercise) was a short one. With Friday as a training holiday and Monday President's Day, we only stayed in the field for 4 days in order to accommodate the 4 day weekend. How's that for a work to rest ratio?!

This last FTX week, AMEDD (Army Medical Department) skills week put everything we learned up to now to test in a simulated war scenario. As a Dietitian who has specialized outside of the clinical realm for the whole of my career, it's been an adjustment to think of myself as a medical health care provider instead of simply a performance-enhancer specialist. Every time I shout our class motto, "Train to Save" as we're called to attention in formations, I am reminded that I am now part of a team who's primary mission is to save lives on the battlefield.

There are various levels of medical care provided to Soldiers during engagement. Although the lines blur and don't follow such a well-defined linear pattern in today's modern battlefield, the basic concept is the same. Level 5 is the one most folks are familiar with and think of when they hear about casualties of U.S. Soldiers. It's the huge medical facilities found here in the States like Walter Reed Medical Center in DC and Brook Army Medical Center here in San Antonio. Level 4 are places like Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. This is where Soldiers are evacuated from the theater of operations and receive definitive medical care in a permanent facility. But what happens to them in-theater?

It's easier to go backwards from here. The Soldiers on the "front lines" have combat medics embedded with them. For my Navy friends out there, a medic is the Army's version of a corpsman. Like independent-duty Navy corpsman, these Soldiers are not only skilled as First Responders, but also provide the day to day care required to maintain the health of their troops through preventative medicine. Like the Navy corpsman, they are usually called "Doc" even though they aren't Physicians. The immediate care that they provide at the point of injury is known as Level 1 care. The medics are supported by Battalion Aid Stations. The mission of the Battalion Aid Station is primarily to collect the battalion's sick & wounded, stabilize the patient's condition, and provide emergency medical evacuation to a combat support hospital or other facility. The Battalion Aid Station can be split into two functional units that can operate independently for up to 24 hours- a FAS (Forward Aid Station) and a MAS (Main Aid Station). For our exercise, I was assigned to a FAS. In this pic, you can see the "wounded" that we collected and were getting ready for evacuation. Click on the pic to see how we identified the "gunshots to the buttocks" injury!

The next level of care is level 2 which is the first level of resucitative care. Level 2 consists of highly mobile forward surgical teams that directly support the gunslingers in the field. Level 3 is known as a CSH (Combat Support Hospital, pronounced "cash"). CSH is a modernized version of MASH (yes, like the TV show!). The Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals of yesterday could provide intensive surgical capabilities but was not equipped for primary care capabilities (e.g. internal medicine, pediatrics, OB/GYN, etc.) required by today's battlefield environment. Today's CSH is a mobile 200+ bed hospital that can do all that as a single unit or can be broken down into smaller forward deployed units. This pic of me is as a casualty at Level 2 with two nurses attending to my "shrapnel to the abdomen" wounds as I awaited a simulated helicopter medivac (Medical Evacuation).

At first I was pretty disappointed when 5 minutes into the start of the "war" one of the cadre handed me a small card that contained a description of my injury and told me to lay down on the ground. I soon recognized what a great learning experience this was for someone who's normal working environment has not been clinical care based. The blur of Powerpoint slides from the first 3 weeks of this course started to make sense as I was loaded onto a litter and taken through the various steps of care. I'm a hands-on learner, so the whole week proved to be highly beneficial in my learning process.

Well, that was it for our field training, next week we'll be back in the classroom. I hope that my attempts to decipher all the Army acronyms and describe the training I'm receiving help you to visualize what this experience is like. I'm still giddy about being back in the military and am enjoying the learning process. I'm hopeful that my new found ability to exercise patience beyond any level I've been able to achieve in the past will stick with me as I move on in my Army career!