Day 20

Well today complete our fourth week here! We had another full class schedule today. We started talking about Role III and IV medical centers (CSH's ,read cash, are role III and big medical hospitals which is role IV.) We talked about the medical staffing and supply routes for these and then covered our Role I and II centers again. I won't go into all the information because it is pretty overwhelming and contains a lot of acronyms. For example when setting up a role I you will get your pt's from a CCP and can split your role I or BAS into a FAS and MAS (pronounced fast and mass) teams, from their you can call a nine line for a dust off and evacuate to a CSH (pronounces cash) or take your pt's in an ambulance to a AXP to get your pt's onto another ambulance to get the to a Charlie med. Our next class was on maps and diagraming. We learned the basics of the symbols for friendlies, enemies, neutral and unknown personnel, how you would note what company or group they might be attached to. We also learned about how you would draw your plans out to show how you were going to attack from a certain direction and where your troops might be stationed. Overall, this part was very confusing because there are so many symbols and information to take in. Below I placed a little map of what we talked about with our map and symbols. You can see that it doesn't make a lot of sense unless you have a good understanding of the process and once again the symbols which is what we are trying to learn.


After lunch we talked about writing 5 paragraph op-orders and the breakdown about what is required in each paragraph. For homework we were given a scenario and we have to write up an op-order and then give it in class, which should not be to bad. Overall, it was a good day. Once gain it was a lot of information but that is how it has been since day 1. We have one more week in the classroom before we head out to the field for 3 weeks of our FTX (field training exercise), which everyone is really looking forward to.