The Jungle Warfare Training Center at Camp Gonsalves, Okinawa, Japan, is a rigorous 10-day Jungle Medicine Course, designed to train medical personnel to operate and treat patients in a tropical combat environment.
Transcript
[Philip] We’re gonna test them to their limits, mentally and physically, and just overall they’re gonna be a better corpsman when they leave here.
[Soldier] Help!
Jungle’s a super hot humid, gross, sweaty.
[Soldier] A lot of heavy lifting around, everywhere you go, so make sure you’re ready for that.
[Mitchell] This is really difficult terrain, and you have to know how to deal with the jungle or it will bite you back.
[Alfredo] You’re learning different techniques like how to sustain yourself and how to sustain the patient as you battle the jungle really.
You know you might feel like oh well this sucks you know I don’t like this but, it still has a purpose. Just taking a step back and kind of realizing that kind of helps.
[Soldier] You guys down there, you guys are gonna have to shoulder him okay?
Whew, it’s good, it’s real. Its tough.
Oh yeah, training’s definitely hard. We’ve all done it, and we all kind of sat down and said yeah this is gonna be really really hard. But it’s there for a reason.
We’re starting out with basic infantry skills that would correlate with medical skills. And then adding all that together, doing exercises where we have mass casualties, prolonged field care, up to 72 hours at some points.
It really is go go go, and its stressful and we are at that point testing them.
As corpsmen we’re gonna go where the Marines go. Whether that’s the jungle or desert. We’re gonna be there with them so, just because we’re not infantry or marines, we still need to learn how to track, we still need to land nav ’cause we might be that person that needs to do it.
They can look for you and know that you’ve been through this before and know that if I need you to get on the comms or get on the weapon or repel, that you’re gonna be capable of doing that and I don’t have to do a hip pocket training if you’re right here on the spot, while we’re under fire.
You really need to be careful about what moves you take, what you use, what you do, every movement counts.
[Soldier] Be back to the D2, step down, back ’em out!
There’s some really dangerous points where you can really get hurt, but at the same time it was honestly worth it because it puts everything, into perspective for me. Getting a patient out of the jungle is extremely difficult.
It all plays back into, you know, your medical training at the end of the day.
Because everybody can regurgitate what’s on the test. We wanna see can they take what we’ve taught them apply it to the situation without prompting. That’s the ultimate goal.
We really took a step back and said that the jungle has to be the emphasis. Once we found that really adapting to our surroundings just the most that we possibly could, we really started to understand what jungle medicine actually is.
For the last 20 years our focus has been primarily on desert warfare, so that’s where everything has shifted over the last two decades. So now is the great time to start building up our foundation for that new set of corporate knowledge to take everything in the history, and incorporate that into out modern medicine, our modern techniques and equipment, to kind of find that mesh between the two and see where that takes us in the next 20 years.
[Kevin] So with the future of the military and the future of medicine in general, we need to remember that it’s not always going to be a desert. And even in countries that have deserts there are also areas of sub-tropical rainforest.
So we can’t just focus on a two hour parameter medevac. We may have to send a patient for a day or two, maybe three, and so its very vital, especially in an atmosphere like this and the terrain, you just never know when and where you can get something.