356th Broadcast Operations Detachment
Soldiers use modern technological training tools during the 78th Training Division’s Combat Support Training Exercise 78-21-04 in August at Fort McCoy.
The 7301st Medical Training Support Battalion (MTSB) is one of the groups preparing these tools, including animatronic dogs, manikins that can react to treatments, and a suit that can be used to simulate surgery on a human being.
“Right now, it’s still the most realistic training we have,” said Capt. Chad Warren, who was responsible for getting the items ready to go into the field from the 7301st MTSB.
The purpose of this focus on advancement is to allow an opportunity for soldiers to practice job skills that cannot be ethically or practically practiced on a regular basis.
“A lot of our soldiers ... work as doctors and nurses in the civilian world, but a lot of the other folks — the technicians, the medics, those folks — a lot of them don’t do that in the civilian world,” said Michael Roth, a simulations technician and instructor for Regional Training Site (RTS)-Medical at Fort McCoy.
Roth said the training opportunities they provide with these tools at RTS-Medical allow Soldiers the chance to build muscle memory and develop the thought processes needed to effectively care for patients in high-stress environments.
One of the tools used to provide an intense level of realism in practice is the cut suit. This suit allows for surgeons to gain experience operating on living patients without actually needing to cut into a person.
Warren stated that there has been a lot of positive feedback on the cut suit, especially in the special operations community.
“They can go around and do whatever they want without having to injure or cut into an actual person or use a cadaver in a cadaver lab,” Warren said.
Another set of tools are the K9s, Diesel and Hero. These animatronic dogs provide an opportunity that soldiers would rarely encounter in any other training scenarios. The K9 Diesel and its predecessor Hero are made for medics to practice caring for military working dogs when a veterinarian may be hours away.
The K9 Diesel has movable legs and removable intestines. It bleeds, breathes, whines, growls, and bards. It can be intubated and even amputated.
In the facilities at Fort McCoy’s RTS-Medical, the instructors have the ability to provide realistic training with the SimMan 3G manikin in hospital settings and the Multiple Amputation Trauma Trainer in the field.
These manikins can breathe, blink, dilate their pupils in reaction to stimulus, and “speak” with the help of trainers though mics and computers in an office nearby. These manikins have skin, limbs, and veins that can be changed out and manipulated to simulate a wide variety of injuries. They can also react physiologically to treatments the way a real patient would.
The MATT manikins and the K9s Diesel and Hero are built to withstand dirt, rough handling, and general field conditions. The ability to utilize these high-fidelity manikins allows for an ethical and realistic level of training that has been in progress for years.
Having these tools allows soldiers an opportunity to “train how we fight” with the equipment they will be using and patients who look and act like real soldiers would.
“They are very realistic. As an old paramedic myself, it’s amazing how realistic they are,” Roth said. “They don’t want to make it easy for the medical folks to do their job. Because in real life their job isn’t easy. They do as much as they can to make it realistic, but they also do a really good job of making it realistically difficult to take care of the patients.”
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