SOUTH BASE, Serbia -- Army combat engineers with the 37th Infantry Brigade Combat Team and soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment participated in combat life saver training, conducted by three Ohio Army National Guard medics and a Macedonian medic during Platinum Wolf, an annual, two-week multinational training exercise focusing on peacekeeping operations.
Training consisted of application of a tourniquet, managing hemorrhage, penetrating wounds, chest wounds and how to set up a landing zone and call for a medical evacuation. "Today we've been doing medical training for emergent field care, so (it can be used) for any major battlefield injuries," said Spc. Ariel Groom, a combat medic with the 585th Military Police Company and one of the CLS instructors.
"One of the major causes of death on the battle field is blood loss, so that's one of the major things we have addressed in this training is how to effectively stop bleeding." Groom said although there is a language barrier, through the use of translators and hands-on demonstration, the training was very successful.
"The benefit of multinational trainers is you can have all different approaches," she said. "Not just from my experiences. We can get experiences from the other trainers. We are working with a Macedonian nurse, so she's going to have a different point of view than we will." Along with multinational trainers, the CLS lane incorporates training tools from different nations as well.
"One thing that has been really helpful that the Serbian military has provided is there is a dummy -- a mannequin -- that can spurt blood and the limbs move to simulate the injury better," Groom said. Cpl. Richard Stewart, a section commander for 2nd Battalion, C Company of the Royal Irish Regiment, also said the robotic dummy was a good training asset. "It was good that the limbs moved. It sort of simulated a patient struggling," Stewart said.
During the training, soldiers from different nations interact with one another and share their tactics and thought processes on how to approach different situations. "My goal as a section commander is to teach my young rangers who have recently finished training a couple of months ago, to better them and make them more accepting of other cultures." Stewart said.
One of the goals for the CLS lane is to expose soldiers to different treatment approaches for battlefield wounds and facilitate open communication on the best way to save causalities during combat.
"The primary goal of this training is to save as many lives as we can," Groom said. "Ultimately, this is just to give people more information, more tools in their toolbox as far as how to address injuries and how to save lives."
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