A week in the field

After a week of stressful final exams, USUHS reminded us what an awesome medical school we go to be sending us out for a week of field training. Our whole class formed up at 5am to get on buses to Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania.

Being up for sunrise isn't so bad

"cornbread stuffing"

For lunch I got to experience my first MRE. They were definitely not as bad as I expected, but some were worse than others. We really had no room to complain eating them only once a day, when past classes had to eat them for all 3 meals. No time was wasted as we started learning about basic life saving techniques on the first night. We learned how to treat a pneumothorax (collapsed lung) and how to properly apply a tourniquet, some of the most commonly used techniques in the battlefield. Showing this scene from the movie Three Kings certainly made the treatment for pneumothorax stick in our minds. I didn't know before that there was a wrong way to apply a tourniquet, but if it's not applied tight enough it can actually make the bleeding worse.

Our first full day began with Army hand-to-hand combat. This was my absolute favorite thing we did! I don't know why I found ass-kicking to be so fun, but it was. We learned dominant positions, a few choke holds, how to disarm a knife, and grappled with each other. In the afternoon we learned about the organization of health service support for operations. We used sand tables and did a rock drill (side note: I found some interesting opinions, but no real definition when I googled "rock drill") planning medical support to go with some theoretical operations. It was definitely interesting and useful information, but a TON of acronyms, which are different for each branch of service.

alphabet soup

Day 2 started with the Leadership Reaction Course. We were divided up groups of about 8 people and cycled through 6 different obstacle courses. Each station would have a designated leader assigned to help us accomplish the task. It usually involved crossing some sort of invisible river with 2x4's. It was pretty fun! Our team only completed one of the six tasks, but it was about the journey, not the destination :)

LRC

The next evolution was the M9 marksmanship. Many people had never shot any firearm before, so it was a basic introductory course. I think I did okay!

The third day began with learning medevac skills. We learned how to put people on litters, carry injured people and put them into military ambulances. Fireman carries are a lot harder than they look! We also learned how to improvise and make litters out of blankets or shirts and tent poles. Definitely all good things to know! The medevac exercise was combined with learning tactical movements. We learned how to low crawl and high crawl with a rifle, clear a room, and move in tactical formations. The sessions culminated in a joint exercise where the tactical team had to escort the medical team from place to place. They had a pretty amazing facility for all of this - basically a fake little town!

fake town

The last day of training started with land navigation. Who knew I could find a point on a map with only a compass? We were given 6 coordinates to find in the woods with our fire teams (our smallest division - 4 people). The first point we tried walking straight along our azimuth, but ended up being off by a bit. After that we utilized a leap-frogging technique which was much more effective. 2 people walked along the azimuth while 2 stayed back to correct their position before moving forward.

My fire team doing land nav

On the last afternoon we learned about preventative medicine. Basically it was all about what sort of environmental factors we would need to look at when setting up a new post. We also learned how to do some battlefield ultrasound! The 2 techniques we learned were FAST (focused assessment for sonography with trauma) and how to check for pneumothorax. Definitely important things to know for rapid triage! It was pretty cool to be able to practice those techniques and see our classmates organs:)

Every night we watched a movie or documentary and discussed leadership shown in each. I had seen Fighting for Life and Argo before, but Restrepo and When I Have Your Wounded were new to me. Definitely some powerful films and I would recommend watching all of them.