Medic Bags

[Steeler]

On Call in Hell

Originally Posted by Newsweek

Jadick, along with 54 Navy corpsmen, his young, sometimes teenage medical assistants, moved to the edge of the city as the assault began; the night sky was lit by tracers and rocket fire. The next morning a call came over the radio. A Navy SEAL with a sucking chest wound needed evacuation. A weapons company was heading in to rescue the man. Lacking much military training, doctors normally stay back in the rear area. But ex-Marine Jadick decided to go to the fight. As shots rang out around them, the weapons company ran and dodged down narrow alleyways toward the building where the SEAL lay wounded. Jadick was armed only with a small 9mm pistol. He thought: "If anyone actually gets close to me, I'm going to have to throw it at him." He felt slightly ridiculous, remembering a "MASH" episode in which Alan Alda tried to scare away the enemy.

In the rubble of a shot-up building, he found the SEAL conscious but bleeding badly. "Get me out of here," the man said. Helping to carry the man on a stretcher down the stairs, Jadick could hear rocket fire and shooting. The air was thick with fine dust and a familiar smell: cordite, from gunpowder. He had smelled cordite before at rifle ranges, but never like this. "It just hung in the air," he recalled.

The radio squawked. Two Marines had been wounded in an ambush in the center of the city. Jadick wanted to get his wounded SEAL back to base camp. But the voices on the radio were insisting that the two men down in the ambush were in even worse shape. It was Jadick's call. He loaded the SEAL into an armored ambulance and set off in the vehicle toward the scene of the shooting. He could hear the firing intensify. Jadick wondered, anxiously, if a rocket-propelled grenade could punch right through the ambulance's metal sides.

The ambulance stopped and Jadick peered out at the first real fire fight of his life. There were not two wounded men, but seven. As a middle-class kid growing up in upstate New York, Jadick had avidly read about war, and even applied to West Point. But he flunked the physical—poor depth perception—and went to Ithaca College on an ROTC scholarship instead. He had served as a communications officer in the Marines, but left the corps after seven years, bitter that he had been left out of the fighting in 1991. Attending medical school on a Navy scholarship, he had never seen or experienced real war—the kind of urban combat that can leave 30 to 40 percent of a unit wounded or dead.

"I can't tell you how scared I was," he recalled. "My legs wanted to stay in that vehicle, but I had to get off. I wanted to go back into that vehicle and lie under something and cry. I felt like a coward. I felt like it took me hours to make the decision to go."

But he got up and went. He felt as though he were "walking through water." Desperately seeking cover, he ran to a three-foot wall where the most badly wounded soldier lay. He lifted the man over the wall to safety. "I put him down on the ground, and he was looking at me," Jadick recalled. The man had a gaping wound in his groin. Jadick tried to "pack" the wound, stuffing sterile gauze packages into the hole torn by an AK-47 round, but he couldn't stop the bleeding. Jadick was forced to make the first of a thousand wretched decisions. "I knew I had six other people that I had to work on. So I don't know ..." Jadick paused in the retelling. "I stopped and went on to someone else." It was Jadick's first experience in battlefield triage—forget the mortally or lightly wounded, save the rest—a concept easier to philosophize about than to practice.

Bullets were hissing around him. Afraid of dying, more afraid of failing his comrades, Jadick managed to treat the wounded, to stabilize them and stop the bleeding. As he began loading men into the ambulance, an RPG screamed in—and glanced off the roof without exploding. A second RPG slammed into the wall next to them; it didn't go off, either.

[TychoCelchuuu]

"Clear! You're good to go!"

My point is, that had nothing to do with Battlefield 2

[Steeler]

I thought it was interesting to think about what we consider to be a medic in an "immersive, realistic" combat game, and then read something like this.

[TychoCelchuuu]

I don't know about you, but I've never thought of BF2 as immersive or realistic, and I have never seen anyone (barring you ) refer to it that way. I think the whole "fix bullet wounds with shock paddles" or "repair tank with wrench" or "any soldier knows how to fly any attack helicopter or jet on earth" or any of the millions of other things. You want realism, play Red Orchestra. BF2 doesn't even have blood.

[CymBa]

Originally Posted by Steeler

I thought it was interesting to think about what we consider to be a medic in an "immersive, realistic" combat game, and then read something like this.

Yeah,

That was an interesting and disturbing read...

[Kilrogg]

Yay for gaping wounds in the groin area.

[icky]

Can I be a field surgeon in RO? Can I treat gaping groin wounds? Is there a medivac helo?

If not, it isn't really realistic.

[thebleakaffinity]

stuffing gauze in someone's crotch wounds sounds like it could be fun in a gameplay setting

[Steeler]

Discussions of TacMod frequently end up in discussions of immersion.

Thinking about it, maybe this should not have gone directly into one of the game forums, but something about the story resonated with me on a level that I associated with this community, so I thought others might like to have a look.

Over the last few years, we have steeped ourselves in these kinds of hard military simulation games, involving greater and greater levels of coordination and complexity. We don't always consider how they effect our perceptions of events around us. For me, this story put BF2 in a certain perspective - not one that I hadn't thought of before, but with a level of intensity I didn't expect.

One one level, reading about Commander Jadick moving through the battlefield, trying to save lives without getting himself killed, brings you closer to these people and events, and helps your understanding of what exactly it means to put yourself on the line like that. But there is also this parallel voyeuristic observer, the one who plays FPS's, thinking about the adrenaline rush, the tension, the coolness factor. And at some level you have to smack that second person down and say, "not cool." These are, after all, real lives and real people we're reading about, and they should not be trivialized.

I don't mean to be down about this - I still like me some Bf2, y'all. It's just important to get some perspective now and then.

[SuperDudeBT]

Originally Posted by Steeler

I don't mean to be down about this - I still like me some Bf2, y'all. It's just important to get some perspective now and then.

I totally agree. +rep.

[TychoCelchuuu]

Originally Posted by icky

Can I be a field surgeon in RO? Can I treat gaping groin wounds? Is there a medivac helo?

If not, it isn't really realistic.

I don't think medivac helos in World War 2 would be exceedingly realistic. In fact, it would be closer to "retarded" than "realism." At least they both start with R?

[Tinker]

Thanks for this post, when I play I try to immerse myself as much as possible (I pretend alot to avoid the game mechanics) so it's great to read something like this which puts war into perspective. After all the closest I've been to war is paintball.