Adrenaline boils, fueling first-responder instincts as 10 hospital corpsmen respond to an ambush in the dead of the night. There is little to no visibility in the crude field hospital, and the corpsmen are armed with only their M16s and jungle medical packs. Welcome to the Jungle Warfare Training Center at Camp Gonsalves, Okinawa, Japan. This is where corpsmen learn to save lives in difficult conditions.

Video by Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Jeanette Mullinax

Transcript

[Ahhh! Help!] We’re gonna… test them to their limits, mentally and physically, and just overall… they’re going to be a better corpsman when they leave here. [Help! Corpsman!] (Student) The jungle is just super hot, humid, gross, sweaty. A lot of heavy lifting around, everywhere you go. So, make sure you’re ready for that. (Navy Seaman Mitchell Bromley) This is really difficult terrain, and you have to know how to deal with the jungle, or it will bite you back. (Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Alfredo Gregorio) You’re learning different techniques like how to sustain yourself and how to sustain the patient as you battle the jungle, really. (Navy Seaman Ava Hill) You know, you might feel like, “Oh, this Sucks,” you know? “I don’t like this.” But it still has a purpose. You know, just taking a step back and kind of realizing that helps. [You guys down there, you guys are going to have to shoulder him. OK ] (Student) Whew. It’s good. It’s real. It’s tough. (Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Kevin Gizara) OK, yeah, training’s definitely hard. We’ve all done it. And we all kind of sat down and said, “Yeah, this is going to be really, really hard.” But it’s there for a reason. (Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Phillip Morris) We’re starting out with basic infantry skills that would correlate with medical skills. [Rushing water, jungle insects, splashing.] And then adding all that together through an exercise where we have mass casualties, prolonged field care, up to 72 hours at some points. (Gizara) It really is “Go! Go! Go!” And it’s stressful, and we are at that point testing them. [Corpsman!] [Techno music plays, patient gasping.] (Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Phillip Morris) As corpsmen, we’re gonna go where the Marines go. Whether that’s the jungle, the desert, we’re gonna be there with them. So, just because we’re not in the 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. (Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Windell Kellogg) They can look to 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 rappel, that you’re going to be capable of doing that. And I don’t have to do a hip-pocket training, if you will, right here on the spot, while we’re under fire. (Gregorio) You really need to be careful about what moves you take. What you use. What you do. Every movement counts. [Straight legs. Lean back into that seat, too.] [Step down. Lock him out!] (Bromley) There’s some really dangerous points where you can really get hurt. But, at the same time, it’s honestly worth it, ’cause it puts everything into perspective for me. Just getting a patient out of the jungle is extremely difficult. (Hill) It all plays back into, you know, your medical training at the end of the day. (Gizara) Because everybody can regurgitate what’s on a test. We wanna see can they take what we’ve taught them and apply it to the situation without prompting. That’s the ultimate goal. [Go! Go! Go!] [Water splashing] We really took a step back and said that the jungle has to be the emphasis. Once we found that really adapting to our surrounding just the most that we possibly could, we really started to understand what jungle medicine actually is. (Kellogg) 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 in our modern medicine techniques and equipment. To kind of find that mesh between the two and see where that takes us in the next 20 years. (Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Kevin Gizara) 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. [Dramatic music] And even in countries that have deserts, there are also areas of subtropical rainforest. (Morris) So, we can’t just focus on two hours we’re going to have a medevac. We may have to sit on that patient for a day or two, maybe three. And so, it’s very vital, especially in an atmosphere like this and the terrain, you just never know when and where you can get something.