Every Second Counts: Emergency response teams conduct training on post

"There's nothing behind you; the hallway is clear," Jason Durr said to his partner, Ricky King, as they slowly searched room by room for injured personnel. Durr and King, tactical medics with the Richland County Emergency Management Service, were responding to an active shooter exercise on Fort Jackson.

Someone had shot up the building and set off an explosive device wounding many Soldiers inside. It was the medic's job to search each room, evaluate casualties and move them quickly to safety.

"Copy," King said as he tightened tourniquets on a Soldier with two leg wounds.

The first floor hallway was cavernous dark, but the medics saw him lying in a doorway halfway down the hall, his bleeding legs nearly blocking the passageway. After quickly assessing the victim they prepared to move him outside to safety when a bone chilling cry echoed down the halls from someplace upstairs.

"Help! Please! Help!" The haunting voice continued to shriek. "Help us!"

The medics found two wounded Soldiers on the bottom floor while upstairs they found two more and many inconsolable Soldiers mourning for their wounded friends.

After quickly assessing and treating the casualties, the medics carried the injured personnel outside where victims and respondents shared a laugh before the Soldiers wiped on more fake blood for the second round of training.

The realistic emergency response training was hosted by the 171st Infantry Brigade March 17 to give civilian first responders real world training with their military counterparts who specialize in treating combat casualties.

Staff Sgt. Peter Bassman, an IET instructor at the Medical Simulation Training Facility who set up the training, said the training is beneficial for both civilian and military.

He initially envisioned his Soldiers embedding with the civilian tactical EMS, "to get some of our guys on their team with them because this is what we do for our job; and we had actually hands-on, on-the-job training with them in high stress situations."

"Doing training like this can help both sides," he said. Today's training "has tactical elements to it, while we have tactical combat kind of care. They are pretty much the same, but they are different. Training in both aspects helps us grow as medical professionals in what we do on the tactical side."

"It's as realistic as they can make it," Durr said after his round of training was finished. "It definitely tests your skills, your lungs, your muscles. It really puts it into perspective; it's about as close as we can get to the real thing."

Durr, King and other tactical medics carried, lifted and dragged role players through groups of curious bystanders to get the wounded to collection points outside.

Medics have to come in "evaluate the casualties, triage those, collect those in an area and prepare for evacuation out of the area," said Dr. Steve Shelton, a tactical physician with the Richland County Sherriff's Department Special Response Team. Shelton and Dr. Lesley Osborn, a resident with Palmetto Health's Emergency Medicine Division, evaluated the tactical medics on their responses to the training scenarios.

The civilian emergency responders had nothing but good things to say about the Soldiers they trained with. Medics from the MSTF, who normally are schooling Initial Entry Training Soldiers in first aid, gave the training a sense of realism by role playing wounded Soldiers and their bereaved comrades.

"The Soldiers are great they are providing everything we need," Shelton said. "They are providing the casualties for us. They are providing their expertise from things they have been exposed to as well as some of the nuances of battlefield medicine they've experienced so as to stress our medics."

Normal medics "have one patient and it's in a controlled environment," Durr said. "Here we got lots of patients and an unknown area we go to. It's an unknown building we have to go in and get them out -- it's a lot more stressful."

Sgt. Joseph Norman, one of the Soldiers dragged out of the building by Durr and King, said he was proud to help the civilian first responders.

"We get to do these things during deployments and they don't always get experience without it being a real-life situation," Norman said as he dipped his hand in fake blood in preparation for the next round of training. "In a real-life situation you might freeze up your first time seeing it, but at least they get to see something as life-like as we can make it."

As an instructor, Norman was uniquely qualified to rate the care he was given.

"It was a little rushed," he said. "But they didn't expect it and I was the main concern so they got me out of here as quickly and safely as they could in a timely manner."