Lab readies corpsmen for combat - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Lab readies corpsmen for combat

CAMP JOHNSON, N.C. — The reality for Navy corpsmen in the field is often treating unimaginable combat injuries.

“When I saw my first double amputee I was like ‘wow,’ ” said Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Shannon Book. “The shock never goes away.”

But instructors such as Book, assigned to Field Medical Training Battalion-East at Camp Johnson, say that ultra-realistic training will better prepare future corpsmen for what lies ahead. To that end, the battalion officially opened its Combat Casualty Simulation Laboratory here March 14.

For corpsmen, this training is their Crucible, the culmination of eight weeks with the battalion. The concept for the lab is to toss students into a stressful and chaotic environment, filled with the uncertainty of combat, as they work to treat the injured.

Blasts rattle their heads and the sound of gunfire pierces their ears as the students work on $65,000 lifelike mannequins that moan and wheeze to simulate distressed breathing, bleed, blink, secrete fluids, sweat and respond to treatment.

“They can die on you if not treated properly,” said Navy Capt. Efren Saenz, FMTB-East commanding officer.

The treatment students provide to the mannequins is recorded into a computer, and the data allows the sailors to go back and look at what they did wrong and what they did right.

Each class will consist of 200 to 260 students. The first group has begun the eight-week course; they will endure the combat simulation in the seventh week.

The action takes place in a long, rectangular building, its interior divided into a hallway and various rooms and decorated like a horror movie set. The walls are smeared with graphite and red paint, designed to give the rooms the bloody, blown-out look of a close-quarters battle.

The demonstration began with an explosion, and corpsmen were put to the test responding to mock casualties. Afterward, all that remained in the dimly lit, smoke-filled rooms were near-naked mannequins lying in pools of red liquid. Some of the dummies had grotesque, gaping wounds.

Book said he wished he had had access to such realistic training when he was a student in the mid-1990s.

“The more prepared that they are when they go to combat … it takes away the shock value initially,” he said.

That mental preparation will allow corpsmen to begin treatment faster — a good thing, considering that the first problem most corpsmen must treat is extreme hemorrhaging.

Instructor and Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Esneider Herrera was dressed as an Iraqi civilian who’d been badly burned in the attack staged for the demonstration.

“You’ll always come up to a casualty and be like ‘wow,’ ” he said. “But this will shorten that reaction.”