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When an Exercise Feels Real
My first assignment out of Officer Training School, as a newly minted butterbar, was to the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Propulsion Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio as an acquisition officer. Wright-Patterson is primarily an acquisitions base. At one career development briefing, the officer said it would be possible to keep an acquisitions officer at WPAFB for his full career and fully develop him. There’s the lab, the program offices for most of the big programs, National Air and Space Intelligence Center, AFRL headquarters, the Materiel Command Headquarters, and the Air Force Institute of Technology for Masters and Ph.D. education. The only operational mission on the base was a reserve unit with a flying mission.
Within my first year, I had to participate in a base exercise. The main unit deploying from the base was the medical personnel so the focus of the exercise was medical. We had to arrive at o’dark thirty at the rallying point and then we were bussed to a back part of the base to begin training. The first part of the day was instruction and the second part was application. The medical personnel had some different training from the non-medical people but there was overlap.
We learned self-aid buddy care; how to take care of wounds, how to transport patients with litters and without, etc. There was a lesson on erecting an Alaska structure although I don’t think we actually put one up. A demonstration on how to properly put on your gas mask by an instructor who taught it like an evangelical preacher. I wish I could remember the religious-like language he used. It was beautiful.
We broke for lunch and were given Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) or Meals Rejected by Ethiopians, a phrase I’m sure is frowned upon in today’s woke military. After we’d finished and were waiting for the break to end, we noticed a guy sitting with a lit match and pouring sugar on it. Someone asked what he was doing and he said “I’d heard something in the MRE is flammable.” I replied, “I think it’s the creamer.” so I lit a match, sprinkled some creamer, and received a nice puff of flame. Causing creamer to explode occupied most of the remaining lunch break.
— ONT WTF (@OntWtf) December 4, 2021
Training continued for the rest of the afternoon. Then the exercise started after dusk. The situation was that we were a field hospital miles behind the front line. They really didn’t know what to do with us acquisition types and we ended up being grunt labor. We were told that there’d been some event and casualties would be inbound. The hospital had three tents set up to receive patients. One was for minor injuries, one for serious injuries needing immediate attention, and the third was for patients beyond the help of the limited resources. If they were still alive when everyone else was taken care of, great, but most likely they were going there to die. The harsh realities of the battlefield.
Our instructions were that the inbound truck had been triaged in the field and loaded based on severity. The serious patients were at the back, the minor ones in the middle, and the worst at the front. The base had a moulage team to apply fake injuries to the people playing as the wounded and this group of patients had one great actor.
When the truck arrived it had turned dark and the site was lit in lights. As the back of the truck opened, we acquisition guys were ready to pull off the litters. Somehow some of the guys who had started the day had vanished so there were only about six of us. We’d learned how to do a four-man carry as well as a two-man carry earlier in the day. Because the numbers were low and we wanted to get the patients help as soon as possible, two of us grabbed the first litter. Someone yelled out, “Real world safety”. This meant that something outside of the exercise had to be addressed. Even though we’d been taught how to do it with two people, they wanted four people carrying a litter to lessen the chance of an actor rolling off a litter and needing real medical attention.
This lengthened the amount of time it took to unload the truck. As we unloaded people, a medical person would tell us which tent to go to. During this whole time, an airman at the front of the truck was screaming at us to get his buddy out. His buddy had a head wound and needed attention now. Why aren’t you helping him? It was realistic and not overdramatic. Probably because of a combination of darkness, the moulage, and multiple trips of carrying real people between a truck and different tents to include the worse case tent, the exercise was taking on a touch of realism for me. I was one of the front two people to grab the litter with the head wound case, last patient on the truck, and when the nurse told us Tent Three, I choked up for a bit and thought, “he’s going to die”. It was weird how real it had become. Not much longer the exercise objectives had been met, we were given the end exercise call, and we loaded up on the buses to return to our cars.
Published in Military
I like it.
Not that I ever managed it but if you don’t vent the heating element it’s supposed to explode.
Anything that is organic and that finely ground will explode. See the history of flour mill explosions.
It’s been a lot of years, but he might have gotten a reply of “duh, the food heater” with a comeback of “no something in the condiment bag”. I too heard stories of exploding heating elements but never a confirmation.
Yep. I was living in Wichita when there was a big grain elevator explosion.
A lot of interesting history in these types of explosions.
I have spent a lifetime in Dayton one week.
Mythbusters vs Coffee Creamer:
T-shirt seen: “In my defense, I was left unsupervised”.
At OTS did they not send you through the gas chamber and and pump it full of tear gas? Once you’ve gone through that you learn real quick how to put on your gas mask.
ETA: And also how to clear it.
Nope. It probably was a budget thing but I didn’t see a gas mask at OTS. I never got the full gas experience but heard plenty of stories from the older guys.
The mind is very trainable and susceptible as the case may be. There, for a moment, you were helping a man that was going to die. There was and is a very short space between what is reality and what is simply a different reality. We don’t always catch it when it happens like you did or maybe we do, but we don’t think about it as being a different reality.
Disclaimer: I have no formal training. I’ve just been around and may or may not have experienced different realities that may or may not have involved myself or other people who may or may not have been present.
T’was fun! As was the portion of annual weapons qualification with the gas mask on.
You left out Hangar 13, where the Roswell aliens are on ice.
Good one BW. Made me think about what my alternative Navy service would have been like. Accepted into Navy OCS and thought about supply corps. But decided to skip it and gamble on getting into NRTOC to get through law school and it all worked out. The “pork chops” on the ships worked like dogs and did a great job. Never knew if they had to do stuff like your EMT exercise. The carrier I was on had a very large medical detachment so probably unlikely.
One site thinks they went to Hangar 18. There is no Hangar 18 on current maps but there is a Building 18, where I worked. At the time, there was a site about the aliens with a base map and my building circled. A lot of people there had fun with the rumors.
On a business trip I decided to ask my boss about the aliens. He said that over the years he’d worked in every building where it’s claimed the aliens were brought.
In one telling of the story, the aliens were brought to Kirtland AFB, where I currently work, and stored in the commissary’s freezer until being flown out the next day.
Ages and ages ago, I’d head out down Springfield Street to WPAFB to get to one of the computers. I want to say it was in Building 30, but I don’t remember anymore.
One advantage to being on a big ship was the squids outnumbered the jarheads 50 to 1. So they didn’t give us a hard time.
Good thing that’s not a Navy base, or those aliens would have been midrats.
Great story, thanks for sharing. I will always treasure my military experiences, even the sometime exasperating training exercises. The MRE’s I have heard referred to as 3-Lies but the meals rejected by Ethiopians is much more creative. We ate WWII era C-rations during our field exercises in the late 70’s and early 80’s; my wife checks the expiration dates on our canned goods (usually a couple of years from production). I always ask why canned C-rations have such a long life–at least compared to our commercial products.
Wow, it’s WPAFB 6 degrees of separation here today. That was the last base my dad was stationed at (1965-68) before he decided to retire. (Dad was a Base Ops guy, though, I believe.). We lived in nearby Fairborn.
We stayed in the area until 1971, when my parents wanted to go somewhere where their chronic allergies bothered them less. Thus we packed up and moved to AZ. This was before the days of Walmart and Costco, and they had teenagers in the house, so they used to go to Luke AFB every couple of months to stock up at the Commissary and BX. Anyone stationed there?