Photo Gallery: Realistic Training Prepares Medics for Combat

The blood was fake, but the teamwork was real on Camp Pendleton Wednesday when some 200 sailors and Marines of the 1^st Medical Battalion trained for their upcoming deployment to Camp Leatherneck Afghanistan.

Strategic Operations, A Kearny Mesa-based company, provided actors and hyper-realistic props for the medical unit’s sailors and Marines to practice.

In a scenario, about six actors pretended to be Marines and Afghans wounded in a blast.  They were transported to a mobile hospital where trauma patients have a 97 percent chance of survival.

“We only see critical patients here,” Hospital Corpsman 1^st Class John Hawley said. “We don’t (do) sick call here.”

Navy Commander Bill Haggerson, a general surgeon, “operated” on an actor who had suffered a liver laceration and hip fracture.

The actor wore a fake torso in front of him that contained realistic organs that had simulated blood flowing from them. A representative from Strategic Operations told the surgeon about the specific injuries the patient endured.

“It forces you to go through the steps,” Haggerson said.

In past training, a surgeon would be able to say he or she could say he or she did a procedure and gloss over the steps. That would keep an assistant from learning such tasks as finding a particular surgical tool.

Navy 2^nd Lt. Tom Diggs, is an intensive care nurse and former paramedic who is used to seeing trauma. But he has never deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq—where bomb blasts leave their signature of multiple wounds such as severed limbs, injured organs and concussions.

The tools he used Wednesday, prepared him for the multitude of injuries he could see on a single patient in Afghanistan.

“It’s as real as you can get,” he said.

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