Pulsing vision

I went through CRC again because I am headed back out to my little corner of the imperial frontier. Some things have changed. Some things haven't. There was still that one guy who is so devoted to his team that he shows up everyday dressed from head to toe in officially sanctioned team wear. From his hat to his socks, it is all 49's, Yankees, Michigan or Cowboys logoed and colored. I'll say one thing for those guys, they have the best laundered clothes of anybody. Not a spot, a stain or a wrinkle.

They have streamlined the whole training and review process too. It ran more smoothly than ever before. They also gave up on trying to make us civilians temporary soldiers. No more telling us to get into files (mostly), dress right, left face, forward march. This time it was, "All you civilians get into 4 lines. Okay turn to your right and walk up the hill to that building." That worked and worked as well as the military stuff. One of the Sergeants told us they figured if we wanted to do the military thing we would have been in uniform. We all figured that was sensible.

One of the things that hasn't changed was the quality of the first aid training we all received. The guys who gave it were all retired servicemen, mostly infantry it seemed. The training was only about six hours long and most all of us had been through it before but the guys who gave it knew how to present material to people who might not be so interested and they did a great job. They knew the subject matter thoroughly and they weren't afraid to be entertaining.

The material presented over the years has varied depending on what has been learned in the field. This latest version was the best yet. Simple and easy to remember but demonstrated to be effective. The text they followed, near as I can figure, was called Combat Lifesaver Course: Student Self Study. It is available for free on the internet. I urge you to download it and print it up to use as your first aid book. Read it beforehand though.

Here is the website for it. You'll have to cut and paste because I don't know how to set up a link.

http://pdfok.info/combat-lifesaver-course-student-self-study.html

As I said all of our instructors were retired military most of whom were in their 40s and seemed to have been out for a few years. Our frontier wars have been going on long enough that even though the guys have been out for a while, they all seemed to have had combat experience, though maybe not recent. They had seen the elephant but they were old enough that there was calmness about them.

One of the guys though was younger than the others, an ex-Ranger. He appeared to be in his mid-30s and it seemed to me he had left the service more recently because he still had an intensity about him when he instructed. He wasn't any better or worse, they were all good, it just seemed as if he was still burning a little inside when he talked about helping people who had just been torn up in an action.

At one point he stressed the importance of learning this stuff and why it was kept simple by describing what it would be like when it came time to use the training. He said you wouldn't be able to hear anything because there had probably been a big explosion and there might be shooting. You would be sweating so much because of the heat of the day and the body armor that you wouldn't be able feel a hurricane force wind. And your heart would be racing faster than you could count and would be hammering so hard that every time it beat it would distort your visual field. You could see as he talked that he was describing his experience. He knew that almost all of us contractors would never be in any kind of situation like that but he wanted to show us as best he could what kind of conditions the training was made for. I sat there listening with my eyes popped out.

It was one of the most memorable descriptions of what close combat was like I ever heard.

So, that was CRC at Ft. Benning this time around. Pretty easy.