Special Operations.Com

Medical Director, Casualty Care Research Center, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences

Casualty Care Research Center, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences

7 December 1998

Special thanks to Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down. To present an accurate and balanced account of events that occur in combat is an exceedingly difficult task, but Mr. Bowden's reporting of the casualties in this battle was indispensable to the conduct of this workshop. If we are successful in our efforts to use the results of this workshop to improve the care provided to US forces in future conflicts, part of the credit must go to him.

The opinions and assertions of both the participants in this workshop and the editors of the workshop proceedings are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of their respective services or the Department of Defense.

This workshop was supported by a grant from the U.S. Special operations Command Medical Technology Development program (Biomedical R+D Task 11-97.)

Panelists

Lt Col Rob Allen

Lt Col Allen is an emergency physician currently serving as the Senior Medical Officer for the 24th Special Tactics Squadron at the Air Force Special Operations Command. He is a Flight Surgeon and one of only two Diving Medical Officers in the Air Force. He is the head medical officer for Special Operations Pararescue and has extensive field experience in this area.

CAPT Butler is a Navy ophthalmologist and diving medical officer. For the past 10 years, he has been the Director of Biomedical Research for the Naval Special Warfare Command. CAPT Butler has served previously as a platoon commander in the Navy Underwater Demolition and SEAL (Sea/Air/Land commando) teams. He also spent 5 years as a Diving Medical Research officer at the Navy Experimental Diving Unit. CAPT Butler was the Chief of Ophthalmology at the Naval Hospital Pensacola before assuming his current duties at the Naval Special Warfare Command. He also serves as an ophthalmic consultant to the Divers Alert Network.

Dr. Howard Champion is the Director of the Research Program in Trauma at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. He is also Professor of Surgery, Senior Advisor in Trauma, and Professor of Military and Emergency Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Champion is an internationally recognized trauma surgeon, critical care specialist, educator, and author. Dr. Champion has written over 200 reviewed articles and book chapters and serves on the editorial board and as a consultant reviewer for numerous medical publications. Dr. Champion was one of the first Trauma Fellows at the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems (MIEMSS) in 1972 and subsequently became the Assistant Clinical Director of MIEMSS. He directed and developed the Surgical Critical Care and Trauma Services at the Washington Hospital Center, the MEDSTAR Trauma Unit, and the MEDSTAR Helicopter Program, as well as the Trauma Surgical Training Program for military residents and fellows. Dr. Champion is a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the American College of Surgeons, and the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma. He has served on the Board of Managers of the American Association for Surgery and the Executive Committee of the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma.

Dr. Cloonan is a former Special Forces 18 Delta medic. He is also a registered nurse and an emergency medicine physician. LTC Cloonan is currently the Dean of the Joint Special Operations Medical Training Center

Lt Col Hagmann is an emergency physician who is currently the Medical Director of the Casualty Care Research Center at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. He has extensive experience in providing medical support and training to various Special Operations and federal law enforcement organizations.

LTC John Holcomb is an Army general surgeon with a special interest in trauma. He has deployed numerous times with Special Operations forces as a trauma surgeon. He was formerly the Chief of Military Trauma Research at the Army Institute for Surgical Research in San Antonio and is now the Military Director of the Tri-Service Trauma Training Program at Ben Taub in Houston. LTC Holcomb was one of two trauma surgeons in Mogadishu during the time of the Battle of the Black Sea and performed life-saving surgical procedures for 36 consecutive hours after the engagement.

Dr. Llewellyn is a preventive medicine specialist with vast experience in Special Operations medicine. He is the immediate Past President of the Special Operations Medical Association. During his 24 years of active duty in the Army he served as the Group Surgeon with the 5th Special Forces Group in Vietnam. COL Llewellyn was also the Manager of the Combat Casualty Care Research Program for the Army Surgeon General, the Commander of the U.S. Army Biomedical Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, and the Commandant of Students at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. He is currently Professor and Chairman of the Department of Military and Emergency Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

CPT Bob Mabry enlisted in the United States Army after graduating from high school in 1984. His first three years of service were spent as a machine gunner and infantry team leader in the 3rd Ranger Battalion. In 1987, he attended the Special Forces Qualification Course and spent the next 8 years at Fort Bragg, North Carolina as a Special Forces medic. In 1995, he completed his medical school pre-requisites and was accepted into the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences School of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. CPT Mabry graduated from medical school in May of 1999 and is currently an intern at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. Cpt Mabry was a participant in the Battle of Mogadishu.

Dr. Norman McSwain is a Professor of Surgery at Tulane University and a retired U.S. Navy Captain. He served for 2 years in Vietnam with the U.S. Air Force and deployed on the hospital ship Comfort during Operation Desert Storm. Dr. McSwain was the first Chairman of the Advanced Trauma Life Support subcommittee of the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma. He was the founding physician of the Prehospital Trauma Life Support (PHTLS) Committee and still serves as the Editor of the PHTLS Manual. Dr. McSwain is internationally known for his expertise and research accomplishments in the field of trauma management and is the author of 20 books, over 300 peer-reviewed articles and 90 book chapters in that field.

RADM (sel) Eric Olson graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1973. He graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training as the Honor Man in Class 76 and has been a qualified SEAL operator since 1974. He has served as both the Executive Officer and the Commanding Officer of SEAL Delivery Team One. He has also commanded Special Boat Squadron Two and the Naval Special Warfare Development Group. RADM (sel) Olson saw combat action in Desert Storm and was decorated by the President for his action as a participant in the Battle of Mogadishu. He was the Chief of Staff of the Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the workshop, but has since been selected for promotion to Rear Admiral and to serve as the Commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command.

Dr. Otten is a Professor of Emergency Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Director of the Division of Toxicology. He is the current President of the Wilderness Medical Society. Dr. Otten served as a medic with the US Army in Vietnam and is now a Captain in the Naval Reserve. He has extensive experience serving with Marine Corps and Special Operations units, including: Naval Special Warfare Group Two in Little Creek, Virginia; the second Special Operations Training Group in Okinawa, Japan; the 10th Special Forces Group in Fort Devens, Massachusetts; and the Second Force Recon in Camp Lejeune, California.

Dr. Timby is triple-boarded in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Medicine and Critical Care Medicine. He is currently Chief of the Department of Internal Medicine and Director of the Intensive Care Unit at the Naval Hospital, Pensacola. Dr. Timby spent 4 years as a Critical Care Consultant at the Intensive Care Unit at Memorial Medical Center, a Level One Trauma Center in Savannah, Georgia.

Dr. Zafren is an emergency medicine physician in Anchorage, Alaska. He was the Co-Chairman of the Tactical Management of Wilderness Casualties in Special Operations Workshop conducted in 1997 by the Wilderness Medical Society. He is a past member of the Wilderness Medical Society Board of Directors. He is the Medical Director for the Denali National Park Mountaineering Rangers and is the Associate Medical Director (North America) for the Himalayan Rescue Association. Dr. Zafren is also the U.S. representative on the International Commission for Alpine Emergency Medicine.

Editor’s Summary of Key Points and Research Issues. Error! Bookmark not defined.

Editor’s Summary of Key Points and Research Issues

1. An operation that is planned and initiated as humanitarian/civic mission may rapidly evolve into a combat action.

2. Many of the decisions regarding the management of casualties in Mogadishu had important tactical implications. Instruction in tactical medicine should be added to training courses for small-unit mission commanders and their senior enlisted leadership.

3. Helicopter evacuation of casualties in Mogadishu was not feasible because of the threat of RPG fire and a lack of adequate landing zones due to the narrow streets. Vehicle evacuation was difficult because of roadblocks, ambushes, and RPG fire. A specialized vehicle is needed to evacuate casualties from urban environments. This vehicle must:

The Israeli Merkava vehicle was suggested as being possibly suitable for this task, but other armored vehicles might suffice as well.

4. The number of hostile combatants can increase very quickly in the urban environment as a result of recruitment from the urban population. In addition, fire and maneuver is difficult for ground forces with casualties. These two factors may result in overrun situations for friendly units sustaining casualties, with the entire unit being killed or captured as a result. Fixed-wing air gunfire support is essential if successful evacuation of casualties is to be reliably accomplished in the urban environment.

5. There was a prolonged (15 hour) delay to evacuation for most of the casualties injured in Mogadishu. Plans for managing combat trauma on the battlefield should take the probability of such delays into account.

6. The Ben Taub study found that aggressive prehospital fluid resuscitation of hemorrhagic shock resulting from penetrating trauma to the chest or abdomen produced a greater mortality than KVO fluids only. There was, however, a clear consensus in the panel that should a casualty with uncontrolled hemorrhage have mental status changes or become unconscious (blood pressure of 50 systolic or less), he should be given enough fluid to resuscitate him to the point where his mentation improves (systolic blood pressure of 70 or above.) Additional animal research is needed to optimize fluid resuscitation strategy in this circumstance. Panel members stressed the importance of not trying to aggressively administer IV fluids with the goal of achieving "normal" blood pressure in casualties with penetrating truncal injuries.

7. Optimum care of casualties may be in direct conflict with maximum prosecution of the mission in the urban warfare environment. The impact of delays to evacuation on the expected outcome of specific injuries is a critical element of information for small-unit commanders responsible for making tactical decisions after casualties have been sustained by his unit. This should be addressed as a high-priority research effort.

8. Several casualties died as a result of hemorrhage from superficial but non-extremity bleeding sites where tourniquets could not be used. Attempts to maintain direct pressure on a hemorrhage site may be complicated by multiple bleeding sites and/or the need to return fire. A hemostatic dressing such as that now being developed by the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command would be an invaluable asset in such cases and is the best chance that such casualties have for survival. This project should be a top priority for research and procurement funding.

9. The prolonged (15 hour) delay to evacuation for most of the casualties in Mogadishu serves to emphasize that the results of civilian prehospital fluid resuscitation studies (in which the delay to arrival at the hospital is usually 15 minutes or less) may not be applicable to the combat environment.

10. Treatment of casualties on SOF missions involves a combination of good medicine and good tactics. Controlled, prospective human studies that address the entire spectrum of issues peculiar to battlefield trauma care are not likely to ever be accomplished. Optimum guidance for combat medical personnel on these issues will require a combination of combat-appropriate animal studies and consensus opinion from focused expert consideration of these issues. In general, interventions of questionable value should not be undertaken when they entail significant additional risk to mission personnel or the mission itself.

11. The femoral artery bleeding described in Scenario 7 was stopped with an improvised tourniquet. Many SOF operators are unhappy with the U.S. military standard issue tourniquets and stressed the need for improvements which can be put on one-handed and which can reliably stop arterial bleeding. This should be a top priority for research funding.

12. Hespan has the potential advantage of being retained in the intravascular space longer than Lactated Ringer's. A majority of the panel felt that Hespan is a better choice than Lactated Ringers for the treatment of hypovolemic shock resulting from controlled hemorrhage in combat casualties who may experience delays to surgery beyond those seen in civilian trauma studies.

13. The participants in the Mogadishu action were in the field for up to 15 hours in almost 100 degree heat with only two canteens (2 quarts) of water, adding dehydration as a significant stressor in this operation. The impact of this level of dehydration on the management of hypovolemic shock has not been not well studied. Additional research is needed in this area.

14. Although Hespan has the potential advantage of being better retained in the intravascular space, Lactated Ringer's wider distribution might make it a better choice than or a necessary addition to Hespan in patients who are both dehydrated and suffering from hemorrhagic shock. Additional animal research is needed in this area.

15. The best bet for improvement in prehospital fluid alternatives for combat casualties was felt to be a hypertonic saline/colloid combination. Continued efforts to obtain FDA approval for this type of fluid should be undertaken. Additional animal research is needed to evaluate the efficacy of these solutions as compared to Lactated Ringers, normal saline, hypertonic saline and Hespan. These studies should address the delayed surgery and dehydration that will often be present in combat and should use both controlled and uncontrolled hemorrhage models.

16. Casualties who are unconscious from falls may have both a closed-head injury and bleeding from intrathoracic or intra-abdominal injuries. The optimum fluid resuscitation strategy for these patients has not been determined. Hespan offers a theoretical advantage in these patients in that it is retained in the intravascular space and may contribute less to cerebral edema than crystalloids. The importance of maintaining cerebral perfusion pressure (avoiding hypotension) in casualties with closed-head injuries was emphasized.

17. Not all individuals injured in combat need IV fluid resuscitation. Combat medical personnel should not generally initiate fluid resuscitation in individuals who are not in shock in order to: (1) minimize interference with combatants who can continue to participate in the engagement; (2) conserve limited IV fluid supplies; and (3) attend to casualties with more severe wounds. All significantly injured patients should, however, have a saline lock started when tactically feasible in anticipation of the possible need for subsequent IV fluids, analgesia, or antibiotics.

18. Even with optimal care in civilian trauma centers, trauma patients who present with systolic blood pressures below 90 mmHg as a result of trauma have a survival rate of only approximately 50%. The presence of hemorrhagic shock on the battlefield is a grave prognostic sign.

19. The prolonged delay to surgery in Mogadishu and the reported high incidence of subsequent infectious complications emphasizes the need for antibiotics to be administered to casualties as soon as possible. Cefoxitin was felt to be a good choice by the panel, although ceftriaxone was suggested as an alternative. Ceftriaxone was noted to be more expensive and to have a narrower range of antibiotic coverage than cefoxitin, but it does offer the advantage of once-a-day dosing in prolonged evacuation situations.

20. The antibiotic coverage and absorption after oral dosing of the fluoroquinolones is excellent. Use of a fluoroquinolone taken by mouth with a small amount of water in a combat setting may be helpful in reducing combat medical equipment weight and treatment complexity. Animal research is needed in this area.

21. Preliminary research data in a pig model from the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research has shown that needle thoracostomy with a 14-gauge needle is as successful as a chest tube in relieving a tension pneumothorax and that the therapeutic benefit persists for at least four hours.

22. If a casualty has a chest wound, but is having no severe or increasing difficulty with his breathing, there is no need to do either a needle thoracostomy or to insert a chest tube emergently. The theoretical advantage of expediting hemostasis in lung parenchymal wounds will not be realized unless suction is applied to the chest tube. This type of suction is not available on the battlefield. Use of a chest tube without suction has been shown in animal studies at the Army Institute of Surgical Research to be unsuccessful in re-expanding lungs with a pneumothorax following penetrating chest trauma.

23. If a casualty has a chest wound, and develops increasingly severe respiratory difficulty, needle thoracostomy should be performed. If this is not successful in relieving the respiratory distress, there are additional measures that may be considered: (1) inserting a second needle at the 5th intercostal space at the anterior axillary line on the wounded side of the chest; (2) inserting a chest tube in the injured side of the chest; (3) simply making a chest-tube sized hole in the chest if the corpsman, PJ, or medic is not carrying a chest tube; or (4) inserting a needle on the other side of the chest if the clinical findings suggest a contralateral tension pneumothorax.

24. The patency of a needle or catheter inserted to relieve a tension pneumothorax can be checked by observing the attached Heimlich valve for the passage of air. If air is seen to be moving through the valve, then it may be assumed to be functioning.

25. Multiple panel members noted that they routinely give up to 20 mg of morphine IV to myocardial infarction patients in the Emergency Department without producing respiratory depression or marked mental status changes.

26. The fire provided by casualties whose wounds are relatively minor may be very important in maintaining fire superiority, but there are a number of reasons that combat casualties might have an altered mental status. Among these are stress or panic reactions to the wound, a head injury, hemorrhagic shock, and analgesic medications. Casualties who have an altered state of consciousness from any cause should be disarmed immediately. The decision regarding disarming casualties must be individualized for each casualty and situation. Training in this aspect of tactical decision making should be added to combat medical training programs for both combat medical personnel and small-unit leaders.

27. SOF combat medical personnel who carry morphine should also carry naloxone and be trained in its use.

28. The armored floor mats from the helicopter at the first crash site were removed from the aircraft and used to provide cover for the crew and the CSAR team. This is an excellent innovation and should be incorporated into training for all individuals who might be rendering assistance at helicopter crash sites in a combat environment in the future.

29. Where transportation for evacuation or maneuvering is not readily available, the urban environment may provide many vehicles of opportunity that can be commandeered. Training and appropriate technology to take advantage of these opportunities should be provided.

30. At the two helicopter crash sites, there were large numbers of hostiles who converged on the crash sites, knowing that the crew was injured and vulnerable. Improved area denial techniques need to be identified or developed for this type of situation in the future. These area denial techniques must be designed to keep hostile forces out but allow access to friendly rescuing forces.

31. Non-lethal technologies designed to incapacitate an enemy but not result in fatalities are often suggested as being useful in urban warfare environments. Given the cost and the complexity of employing such weapons rapidly when needed in urban warfare, forces may be better served by increased carriage and application of conventional ordnance.

32. Currently only Combat Search and Rescue Teams carry equipment designed to free casualties trapped in airframes after crashes. This equipment may need to be used by other groups in the absence of the CSAR team. Positioning this equipment in aircraft or vehicles or making it available through other means is necessary if future casualty scenarios that entail trapped crash or wreck victims are to be managed effectively.

33. When a rescuer is approaching a helicopter crash site, he should take the following steps: (1) immediately assess for the possibility of fire or explosion; (2) be aware of the possibility of ambush or booby traps if the crash site may have been under hostile control; (3) attempt to establish verbal communications with survivors before approaching the crash so that they will not mistake rescuers for hostile forces; and (4) establish crash site security before beginning rescue attempts.

34. There were two dead pilots trapped inside the first helicopter crash. It was extremely difficult to remove them from the wreckage, causing a delay in tactical maneuvering. Current Special Operations doctrine dictates that neither the wounded nor the dead are to be left behind. How do we deal with the next fatalities trapped in a crashed helicopter? If immediate evacuation had been available, should everyone have been evacuated, everyone have stayed, or something in between?

35. Providing adequate gunfire support in Mogadishu was problematic because of the presence of buildings that provided cover adequate to protect hostile forces from 7.62 caliber fire. Future urban warfare gunfire support plans should incorporate provision for weapons capable of building penetration.

36. Traditional triage considerations may need to be rethought for in-flight aircraft casualty scenarios. Scenario 7 contained an aircraft with two severely injured individuals, a runaway minigun, and a dazed pilot. The panel member discussing this scenario pointed out that the primary consideration in managing in-flight aviation casualties should be to ensure that the aircraft remains in the air, even though this might entail treating even relatively lesser injuries in the pilot before attending to other crew or passenger injuries.

37. Tactical medicine should be taught to all pilots and aircrew members so that they can deal most effectively with injuries sustained while in flight.

38. If an aircraft is disabled, has casualties aboard, and must make an emergency landing, the immediate action should be to arrange for the CSAR aircraft or any other aircraft that might be available to land in a nearby location. After an emergent transfer of personnel, the second helicopter should destroy the disabled aircraft, if possible, before departing.

39. If an aircraft is disabled, has casualties aboard, and is about to make an emergency landing, it is generally more important to ensure that all personnel, including the casualties, are prepared for a crash landing than to render medical care.

40. If a pilot is injured and in significant pain, the potential detrimental effects of narcotic analgesic medications must be weighed against those resulting from the pain. Intravenous or intramuscular ketorolac might be a good alternative in this scenario despite its potential adverse affects on platelet function. Another possibility is simply to withhold analgesic medications until after the aircraft has landed.

41. Urban warfare casualties should generally be moved to the best tactical location as quickly as possible before treatment for their injuries is undertaken.

42. Urban warfare may result in blunt trauma casualties from fast-rope injuries, falls, and motor vehicle accidents. Casualties with possible spinal cord injuries from these mechanisms may need to be moved to cover before long spine boards and C-collars are available. Improvised spine boards may be fashioned from doors or other available materials. If these substitutes are not readily available, and the risk of hostile fire injury to the casualty requires immediate movement, the casualty may be grabbed by the shoulders of his uniform, the head stabilized by the forearms, and the casualty dragged along the ground to cover. Avoid maneuvers like the shoulder carry in these casualties if possible.

43. Retrieval of casualties from open areas was often complicated by intense small arms fire in Mogadishu. Improved casualty retrieval and area denial methods to include smoke, diversions, custom-made or field-expedient casualty retrieval devices (such a length of line with a snap link), pursuit deterrent munitions, use of vehicles for cover, and improved gunfire support plans for the urban environment need to be developed and employed.

44. There were no advocates on the panel for attempting CPR in the tactical setting for individuals in cardiac arrest as a result of penetrating or blast trauma.

45. Imposition of casualties at various points in the mission should be a routine part of rehearsals and training for SOF missions. It is important to consider not only how the casualty's injuries should be treated, but also the tactical implications of the casualty upon the ongoing mission.

46. The presence of hearing loss (tympanic membrane rupture) as a result of blast injury should alert the treating medic or corpsman to the possibility of blast injury to the gastrointestinal tract or lungs.

47. Because of potential prolonged delays prior to evacuation in the urban environment, consideration should be given to preparing prepackaged replenishment medical supplies, water, and ammunition that could be air-dropped to trapped units in future engagements.

48. Urban warfare with combatants riding in motor vehicles may result in significant numbers of individuals with blast trauma. The pathophysiology and management of blast trauma (to include blast lung, arterial gas embolism, and late sepsis from gastrointestinal rupture) should be included in combat medical training courses.

49. For casualties with penetrating head trauma, there is little data to show that care rendered in the prehospital environment (beyond stopping any significant external bleeding that may be present) is reliably effective in improving outcome.

50. Unconscious casualties should be transported in a lateral decubitus position if possible. This position offers more protection to the airway than the supine position.

51. Pneumatic splints can be used to construct a field-expedient cervical spine collar.

52. A number of the panelists suggested that MAST trousers, although not routinely carried in the combat medical pack, have a place in SOF. They may be carried in mobility or evacuation assets and used to help manage exsanguinating hemorrhage in the pelvis and groin area. Hemorrhage in these areas may be of increasing concern in the future, since they are outside of the area protected by body armor.

54. Body armor is heavy to carry and hot to wear, but panel members identified at least three individuals whose lives were saved in Mogadishu by wearing it. It's continued use was strongly endorsed by panel members.

55. Some panel members advocated ketamine as a possible alternative to morphine, while others voiced concerns about the hallucinations and hypersalivation that this medication may induce. Ketamine was thought by some to be very useful in the event that it becomes necessary to perform an emergency amputation to remove a victim from a crash or building rubble.

56. Intraosseous infusion devices were felt to be good alternatives to IVs for fluid resuscitation in patients where IV access is difficult to obtain.

57. The medic should give consideration to what will be done with both his weapon and that of the casualty when presented with a wounded individual who is still under effective hostile fire and who requires emergent movement to cover.

58. The time required to perform interventions on combat casualties may result in additional injuries to the casualty, the combat medic or corpsman, or the other members of their unit. This underscores the need to do only those things that have been shown to be beneficial. Despite this pressing need for outcome-based management protocols, the Department of Defense is prohibited by law from performing or funding any human research in which full, informed consent is not obtained before entry into the study. This effectively prohibits the DOD from doing any human research in the area of prehospital trauma. The FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services are not similarly constrained. This prohibition should be removed. Without this change, the ability of the DOD to improve care for combat casualties will be unnecessarily compromised.

Introduction

It is a pleasure to welcome you to our Workshop on the Tactical Management of Urban Warfare Casualties in Special Operations. This workshop is brought to you courtesy of the U.S. Special Operations Command Biomedical R&D Program.

Before we start, I would like to thank some of the people who have helped to organize our program today. The first is April Porter of the Casualty Care Research Center who is our workshop coordinator. The second is LTC Dale Hamilton from the Special Operations Medical Association (SOMA) who has been gracious enough to allow us to incorporate this workshop as part of the annual SOMA meeting this year. I would also like to thank Colonel Steve Yevich, the U.S. Special Operations Command Surgeon, and my fellow members of the USSOCOM Biomedical Initiatives Steering Committee for their continued support of this series of workshops.

I would like to give you a little insight into the origin of these workshops. In the Special Operations world, if we need a new weapon, we don't go down to the local department store and look in the sporting goods section for a rifle. When we need a new boat for maritime operations, we don't go down to the marina and buy a fishing boat. For many years, however, we were using trauma management guidelines taken directly from the civilian sector without evaluating their suitability for the SOF tactical combat environment.

In 1993, we began a research project to re-evaluate our prehospital combat trauma management strategies. This effort resulted in the paper "Tactical Combat Casualty Care in Special Operations" that was published in Military Medicine in 1996. This project was very much a SOF community effort; many of the physicians, corpsmen, medics and pararescuemen in the audience today contributed to the development of the combat trauma protocol that was published.

The paper presented a new approach for managing combat trauma and proposed a step-by-step protocol for dealing with such casualties. The protocol divides prehospital trauma care into three phases: Care Under Fire, Tactical Field Care and Casualty Evacuation (CASEVAC) Care. This phased approach is necessary because combat medical personnel have to decide not only what care to provide, but when to provide it.

It would be fair to say that a number of the recommendations that came out in the proposed new protocol were a bit controversial. One of these was the use of tourniquets. Tourniquets are in disfavor in civilian trauma protocols, but combat trauma authorities like Colonel Ron Bellamy emphasize that the number one cause of preventable death on the battlefield is exsanguination from extremity hemorrhage. These are letters to mothers, fathers, and wives that should not have to be written. In the paper, then, there is a recommendation that all SOF operators on combat missions have a suitable tourniquet readily available in a standard location on their battle gear and be trained in its use.

Civil War history buffs will recall that General Albert Sidney Johnston was one of the leading Confederate generals. He was killed in action at Shiloh on 7 April 1862. Before the battle, his surgeon, Dr. David Yandell, directed that everyone in the Confederate force have a tourniquet and be trained in its use. During the battle, General Johnston sustained a gunshot wound to the knee during the battle with an injury to his popliteal artery. He went on to bleed to death despite having a tourniquet in his pocket.

For those of you in the audience who are combat medics, do the soldiers or sailors in your units carry tourniquets in a designated location? Are they trained in their use? Could this same type of needless fatality happen to someone in your unit during their next battle?

There were other things in the paper that were quite different from civilian protocols: Hespan instead of Lactated Ringer's (LR) for fluid resuscitation; IV fluids only for those trauma patients who really need them; delayed fluid resuscitation for uncontrolled hemorrhage; IV instead of intramuscular analgesia; and no CPR for casualties who are in cardiac arrest on the battlefield from penetrating or blast trauma.

Having these concepts published in the peer-reviewed literature was an important step, but no one ever had their life saved on the battlefield by a paper published in a medical journal unless somebody acts on the recommendations it contains. That means that one has to take the time and effort to transition them into use - not necessarily an easy thing to do. I want to take a minute to describe where we are with this transition effort at present.

In January of 1997, CAPT Steve Giebner, Master Chief Andy Knoch, and I briefed Admiral Richards on this issue. In April 1997, at the Admiral's direction, the Tactical Combat Casualty Care guidelines contained in the paper became the standard of care in Naval Special Warfare. The British military and the Israeli Defense Force now also use many of these same concepts. The US Air Force Pararescue Medications and Procedures Manual incorporates some, although not all, of them. In August 1998, the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC) convened an advisory panel to look at the issue of trauma training for Navy corpsmen serving with the Marines. The panel recommended that the TCCC guidelines be added to the combat trauma curriculum at the Field Medical Services School. That recommendation has gone to the commanding general at MCCDC and is currently being implemented.

In addition, thanks to Colonel Yevich, CAPT Greg Adkisson at the Defense Medical Readiness Training Institute, and Dr. Norman McSwain of Tulane University, there was an opportunity to provide input on this topic to the Pre-Hospital Trauma Life Support (PHTLS) Manual. The latest edition includes, for the first time, a military medicine chapter. This chapter contains the same Tactical Combat Casualty Care guidelines proposed in the paper. The back cover of the PHTLS Manual states that the contents of the Manual are endorsed by Committee on Trauma of the American College of Surgeons and the National Association of EMTs. As far as I know, the TCCC concepts are the only set of combat trauma guidelines that have ever received this dual endorsement.

This is progress. Unfortunately, however, casualty scenarios in Special Operations usually entail both a medical problem and a tactical problem. If your generic trauma management plan does not work for the specific tactical context in which the injury occurs, then for a SEAL corpsman or an Army Special Forces 18-Delta medic or an Air Force pararescueman ( PJ), it just doesn't work. What is required is a scenario-based approach. We need to take a particular casualty, put it into a tactical context, and then figure out how to solve the problems such that we get the best possible outcome for both the man and the mission. This is what we are here to do today.

Since no one individual can adequately address all of the issues that the tactical management of these casualties entails, we have developed the concept of TCCC workshops. We convene SOF combat medical personnel, SOF physicians, SOF mission commanders, and invited medical subject matter experts to address a number of specific casualty scenarios. This is the sixth workshop in our series. The first was on the Tactical Management of Diving Casualties in Special Operations, held in Anchorage in 1996 in collaboration with the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS). We covered 15 difficult diving casualties. The workshop report has now been published by the UHMS and is included in the 1998 Special Operations Computer-Assisted Medical Reference System (SOCAMRS). This is a set of 3 CD-ROM disks produced by USSOCOM and distributed annually to SOF physicians and combat medical personnel.

The second workshop was on the Tactical Management of Wilderness Casualties in Special Operations. This was held in 1997 in collaboration with the Wilderness Medical Society, who devoted an entire issue of their journal "Wilderness and Environmental Medicine" to the workshop proceedings.

The other three workshops have been on the management of radiation casualties, chemical weapons casualties and biological weapons casualties. The proceedings from these workshops are in the process of being edited.

There are several points that I would like to emphasize. Much of the material that you see covered in these workshops is not taught in medical school, ATLS, or EMT courses. The best options for treating casualties in SOF tactical scenarios have to be developed by the people in this room. We have to realize that no one group of medical providers has all of the answers. We need a team effort come up with good plans for these scenarios.

It is also very important that we consider scenario-based management plans advisory rather than directive in nature because it is unlikely that anyone will encounter a casualty scenario in future combat that exactly reproduces one of our workshop scenarios. Our combat medical people are going to have to improvise and think on their feet, and that is exactly what we want them to do. We need to get away from the JCAHO mentality. JCAHO (the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals) is a process whereby a hospital is inspected to ensure that it is in compliance with a long list of inspection criteria. These criteria must be met in the most minute detail. That approach may suffice to get your hospital through a JCAHO inspection, but it is a recipe for disaster on the battlefield. There are many people who might disagree with this approach to things. Fortunately, I know one individual who does agree with it, and most of the people in this room work for him. In his vision statement. General Schoomaker, the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command, emphasizes that we have to "train people how to think, not just what to think." Ladies and gentlemen, that is what we plan to do here today.

We have to train people how to think, not just what to think.

General Peter Schoomaker

Commander-in-Chief

U.S. Special Operations Command

This workshop on the Tactical Management of Urban Warfare Casualties in Special Operations differs slightly from previous workshops in which we used mostly hypothetical scenarios. Every casualty that is going to be discussed today is an actual casualty scenario from the battle of Mogadishu in Somalia in 1993. Before we begin, I want to establish three major ground rules. First, our security personnel have screened all of these scenarios to ensure that they contain no classified information. They have emphasized that we should not mention the names of specific SOF units engaged in the battle and we will observe that recommendation. Second, we will not mention the names of the casualties, even though they may be known to some of you. Third, we will not discuss the care that was actually rendered. We are not here to second-guess the combat medics who were out there in the field. What we want to do have our panel and audience look at the scenario, discuss the management options, and try to decide which ones are the most appropriate for the situation described.

In addition to our distinguished panel, we have an incredibly experienced and capable audience. We are counting on a lot of participation from you today. We will ask each panelist to present his scenario and tell us how he would approach it. Then we are going to open the floor for comments from the rest of the panel followed by questions and comments from the audience.

I would like to acknowledge the presence of two members of our panel who were actual participants in the Battle of the Black Sea in Mogadishu, CAPT Eric Olson and 2LT Bob Mabry. These individuals would probably prefer that I not go into detail regarding their actions during the engagement in this forum. Suffice it to say that we are all honored by their presence. Now, before we start considering the nine scenarios, we are going to be given an overview of the tactical situation in Mogadishu by 2LT Mabry.

Overview

Good morning. I am Second Lieutenant Bob Mabry, a 4th year medical student at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. Five years ago, on the 3^rd of October 1993, I was SFC Bob Mabry, a Special Forces medic, assigned to Task Force Ranger as a part of the Combat Search and Rescue Team. I am going to speak for a few minutes about the Battle of the Black Sea. With this in mind, I wish to say up front that many aspects of the operation remain classified, so I have prepared my comments directly from several open sources in the media, including: the Philadelphia Inquirer’s "Blackhawk Down" series; a Time magazine article, “Anatomy of a Firefight”; and the PBS special, “Ambush in Mogadishu”. If any of you participated in the operation or are privy to its details, you may recognize some inconsistencies. I am also going to refrain from mentioning specific units and individual's names. No classified information was used to prepare this presentation.

What I hope to do over the next twenty minutes is to give you a sense of what the tactical situation on the battlefield was like on 3 October. I also want to “put you on the ground in Mogadishu”. At the risk of being overly melodramatic, over the next few minutes, I want you to be able to close your eyes and smell the aviation fuel mixed with the third-world stench of human waste, charcoal, and rotten fruit. I want you to smell the stink of sweat and blood mixed with gunpowder and burning tires. I want you to be able to hear the roar of helicopters overhead, mixed with the distinctive sound of AK-47 rounds and the whoosh of rocket-propelled grenades (RPG’s) as they go past. I want you to hear the deafening echo of continuous gunfire along narrow, confined streets mixed with the screams of “Medic” and “I’m hit” from the dying and wounded. I want you to see buddies to your left and right being hit and to feel the bullets passing by, sometimes through your clothing and equipment, and I want you to understand the effect that that has on your concentration and psyche.

I want you to be able to close your eyes and smell the aviation fuel mixed with the third-world stench of human waste, charcoal, and rotten fruit. I want you to smell the stink of sweat and blood mixed with gunpowder and burning tires. I want you to be able to hear the roar of helicopters overhead, mixed with the distinctive sound of AK-47 rounds and the whoosh of rocket-propelled grenades as they go past. I want you to hear the deafening echo of continuous gunfire along narrow, confined streets mixed with the screams of “Medic” and “I’m hit” from the dying and wounded.

2LT Bob Mabry

Sunday, 3 October, 1993 was another day in the hangar. Task Force Ranger (TFR) had been in country for about 5 weeks. People were reading, writing letters, doing PT or at the beach catching some rays. At about one o’clock in the afternoon, TFR began receiving intelligence reports that two of Aidid’s top lieutenants would be meeting later that afternoon at the Olympic Hotel close to the notorious Bakara Market, in the heart of an Aidid-controlled area known as the Black Sea. Over the next hour, this intelligence was confirmed and “GET IT ON” echoed throughout the hanger. Everyone dressed out and loaded the aircraft and vehicles in just a few minutes, as this ritual was repeated with daily profile flights and with 6 previous missions, all of which had gone smoothly.

The mission was to follow a standard template that was simple and well rehearsed. An assault force of about 90 soldiers, riding on more than a dozen Special Operations helicopters, would swoop down on the target, air landing or fast roping if needed. One group would assault the target building and the other would establish blocking positions around the perimeter. Meanwhile, a 50-man ground convoy of trucks and armored Humvees, with 50-caliber machine guns and Mark 19 grenade launchers, would make its way through the city and arrive shortly after the air assault. The air-assault force and any prisoners or wounded would then be loaded onto the ground convoy vehicles for extraction. A command and control helicopter and a Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) bird would orbit overhead. The CSAR package, with 2 Air Force pararescuemen (PJ’s), a Ranger medic, and a squad of Rangers with litters and cutting tools were on call to respond as needed. All together about 170 men would take part in the operation.

At 3:30 in the afternoon, the pilot of the lead Blackhawk helicopter gave the code word and the assault force lifted off, out over the ocean and along the Somali coast. Meanwhile, the ground convoy departed from the airfield. Ten minutes later, the assaulters are inserted by helicopter and begin to storm the target building. Moments afterward, the Blackhawks inserted the perimeter security team into their blocking positions. In the brownout of flying dust and debris created by the rotor wash, a Ranger falls forty feet from a Blackhawk, sustaining a closed head injury, a femur fracture and a broken arm. Unconscious, one eye swollen shut, and bleeding from the nose and mouth, he is the first casualty.

Twenty minutes later, the assault force has secured the target building and has captured more than twenty prisoners, flex-tied them, and is waiting to load them onto the trucks. By now, the convoy and blocking positions are receiving sporadic fire. The Ranger Commander is informed about the soldier who fell. The medic tells him the casualty's injuries are critical, and the decision is made to evacuate him. Three of the Humvees are sent back to the airfield with the injured Ranger. As they make their way back through the city, they encounter gunfire from every direction; from rooftops, doorways and alleys. The 50- cal gunner in one of the vehicles is hit in the head. Blood and gray matter are splattered over his fellow Rangers and the interior of the Humvee. He is the dead by the time they reach the hanger.

Back at the objective, as the prisoners are being loaded, the volume of fire increases, armed and hostile crowds are beginning to gather. In the sky above, the helicopters are under steady fire from RPG’s. The Aviation commander would comment later that “the fire never stopped “ and that in 10 minutes one Blackhawk was fired upon 10-15 times. At 4:10 in the afternoon, 40 minutes after the operation began, an RPG finds its mark and Super 61, one of the Blackhawks, is hit. The RPG hit the tail boom and Super 61 begins to spin in a slow, wide arc until it crashes, nose first and on its left side, in a narrow Mogadishu alley with a loud "crumping" sound. The two pilots are killed on impact. Amazingly, the 6 soldiers riding in back survive. Four of them quickly pour out of the right side door and begin to secure the area. They were under fire moments later. One of the survivors engages the Somalis rapidly, taking well-aimed shots, and killing perhaps 10 of them before he goes down, mortally wounded, hit in the pelvis and abdomen. One of his comrades comes to his aid and is shot through the shoulder. Then, amazingly, a helicopter lands in the middle of the road next to the crash site, its rotor blades just a few feet from the Somali houses. The ranger shot in the shoulder, with the help of the co-pilot, loads his dying comrade into the back while the pilot fires with his sidearm at the advancing gunmen. The other Rangers stay with the downed helo and wave the bird off.

Moments after the helo lifts off, the 15-man CSAR team fast-ropes into the crash site. As the last two men are on the rope, the CSAR bird is hit in the tail with an RPG. It lurches slightly, but holds its position until the ropes are clear and then limps back to the airfield, spewing smoke and fluid, to land safely.

Back at the objective, everyone who saw and heard the crash knew that things had just changed dramatically. One of the Ranger platoon leaders within sight of the crash began to move his men forward on foot to the site. The Ranger commander, now with 3 vehicles lost to CASEVAC and one five-ton truck disabled from a direct hit with an RPG, began to move his convoy to the crash site. As soon as they rounded the corner from the objective, they were met with a hail of fire. Gunfire and RPGs were coming from all directions. The Command and Control helicopter spotted Somalis setting up roadblocks to slow the convoy. Groups of armed Somalis would run on foot a block over and parallel to the convoy in what was in effect a moving ambush. The Command and Control bird tried to vector the convoy away from the crowds and the gathering gunmen and toward the downed Blackhawk, but this only resulted in the convoy wandering for about an hour under intense fire in a maze of unfamiliar streets and alleys. Ten minutes after Super 61 went down, while the convoy searches for the first crash site, yet another Blackhawk is hit by an RPG and crashes about a mile from the first crash site. The convoy is then instructed to recover the personnel from the first crash and then move to the second crash site. Crowds of angry Somalis gather and advance on the convoy when it stops to pick up wounded or to turn around. Medics run alongside at stops to provide what treatment they can for the injured. Gunmen use women and children as shields. Some are armed and are fired on. Bullets hit the vehicles constantly. Rangers are hit, many more than once. Bullets graze equipment and clothing; many are stopped by helmets and body armor. Several more RPG’s find the convoy. One five-ton truck driver is hit in the chest. The RPG does not explode, but will later be discovered by a doctor who takes off the Ranger's body armor and sees the fins from the unexploded round sticking out of his chest. Another RPG hits the side of a Humvee. The blast tears one of the Rangers almost in half at the pelvis. He is mortally wounded, yet will live for another 12 hours. After an hour of intense fire, the decision is made to return to the airfield. At this point, there are more dead and wounded in the convoy than at the crash sites.

At the second crash site, the bird went in hard but remained upright. It had crashed in a rabbit warren of Somali huts and shanties. There is no place to set a helo down close to the downed aircraft, so one of the Blackhawks orbits overhead providing support with its minigun. Another RPG finds its mark and hits the bird, the blast taking the leg of the gunner. Since the CSAR team is committed to the first crash site, a pair of Rangers jumps from a hovering Blackhawk and moves through the shanties to assist the crew. They pull the pilot from the wreckage and hold the Somalis at bay for almost an hour. Then, low on ammo and under deafening barrage of Somali fire, the two Rangers and the co-pilot are killed, and the pilot captured.

Back at the first crash site, the CSAR team works to secure the crash and to extricate the dead and wounded. They have been under constant fire since they fast-roped in. The PJ’s move forward to remove the bodies and a Ranger medic sets up a casualty collection point (CCP) behind the protection of the downed helo. Anticipating quick evacuation, the casualties were not moved into the protection of a nearby Somali house. A short while after infiltration, the body of the first pilot is freed. He is obviously dead. Moments later, the senior PJ limps back to the CCP cursing. “Rat bastards shot me”. He then assumes control of the CCP and the Ranger medic moves forward to assist in the aircraft. While moving up to the nose of the aircraft, a grenade flies over the wall and lands in the narrow alley where he and some of the Ranger security element are clustered. There was no place to go. They ducked, turned away, closed their eyes, and gritted their teeth. Nothing happens; it is a dud. Before they could breath a sigh of relief another grenade flies over the wall and lands only several feet from them. It is not a dud; it explodes up and out and misses everyone. “Get some grenades over that wall” someone yells. Seconds later, 3 or 4 grenades fly over the wall and explode in rapid succession. Rounds continuously hit the aircraft, the walls of the narrow alley, and the ground around the security team. At the nose of the aircraft, one Ranger is hit in the chest and falls backward. He looks down, sees that the bullet has been stopped by his Kevlar body armor, and then continues to return fire.

Meanwhile, the second PJ has discovered a crew chief buried under the debris in the cargo area of the downed helo. He calls to the other medic for help. The army medic tries to dig under to nose of the aircraft but cannot get in, so he takes a deep breath, scrambles up the nose of the Blackhawk and jumps in from the top. Seeing him enter the aircraft, silhouetted against the sky, the Somalis respond with an intense volley at the downed aircraft. Inside, there is a hail of bullets that lasts a few seconds. One of the medics is grazed in the face, the other on the hand and the crew chief has his some of fingers shot off. Otherwise they are unhurt. The three of them look at each other in amazement. “Wait a minute” one medic says, and takes up the Blackhawk’s armored floorboards and places them in the fore and aft section of aircraft. Now, somewhat protected, they place the wounded crew chief on a litter and dig a hole under the aircraft to get him out. While they work, the armored floorboards take hits, are knocked over, and then put up again.

Back out in the street, the wounded are stacking up. The floorboards from the aircraft and blocks of rubble from the wall smashed by the helicopter are quickly stacked up for cover. The medics work quickly to assess and stabilize the casualties. By now, members of the SAR team are getting hit. The fire has not let up. A radio call comes from across the intersection; “We have wounded across the street,” says the CSAR Team Commander. The PJ and the Army medic look at each other. “I’ll go,” the PJ volunteers and jumps up and runs across the street. Moments later he is back saying, “I need some IV fluids; I have a casualty who is bleeding a lot.” He then makes his way back through the fire across the street for a third time.

During this time, some of the blocking force and assaulters from the target building have made their way to the crash site, taking wounded and dead of their own on the way there. The perimeter is slowly expanded, but the narrow streets and alleys are still a funnel for bullets. By the time the CSAR team realizes they are going to be there for a while, they cannot move. Two attempts are made to move casualties inside but each time the CSAR team takes more wounded. A Ranger platoon leader tells a CSAR medic “We have got to get these wounded inside.” The medic agrees but tells him, “We just got two people shot trying it. It will get dark soon; we'll try it then.” As darkness falls, the volume of fire decreases and the wounded are moved inside with no further casualties taken.

As night falls, about 100 men are spread out around the crash site; medics work through the night on the wounded. In the building next to the helo there are 12 wounded. These include a crew chief with a suspected pelvic fracture and amputated fingers, a Ranger with a gunshot wound and severe leg fracture, and another Ranger with multiple facial fractures who had been injured in the crash. There are also half a dozen or so with assorted gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds and fractures of the extremities. Across the street, the other PJ has four wounded. One is shot in the pelvis and testicle and is bleeding heavily. A short distance away, another medic works tirelessly to save a Ranger shot in the groin, but the bleeding cannot be stopped and he will die during the night. Medical supplies run low. IV fluids and morphine are used up in a few hours. Some supplies are recovered from the crash. In the middle of the night, a helo hovers over the site and drops a re-supply bundle. Soldiers on the helo are shot, but the supplies make it in.

While the medics work, the men at the first crash site listen to the radio and hear that a relief column is being put together. Earlier that day, shortly after the gravity of the situation was realized, the 10^th Mountain’s Quick Reaction Force (QRF) was summoned to the airfield and briefed on the situation. At 1830, a company of the QRF in Humvees and 5-ton trucks moves toward the first crash site. They encounter a vicious ambush at the K-4 circle and are forced back to the airfield. At the crash site they hear the QRF is enroute, then, moments later, they hear several minutes of intense fire to the south, followed by a report of the QRF being ambushed and turning back. The mission commanders realize that more firepower is needed, so they work feverishly to assemble a second convoy of four Pakistani tanks, two companies of QRF, 32 Malaysian Armored Personnel Carriers (APC’s) and about a dozen each Humvees and trucks. All available personnel were rounded up; cooks, the lightly wounded, support personnel, and staff from the task force would all go out with the second convoy.

At about 2330 hours, the second convoy departs the airfield. It splits off into two elements at the Pakistani checkpoint. One element moves to the first crash site and the other to the second. Shortly thereafter, the lead APC in the second crash site element takes a wrong turn and is hit by an RPG. The rocket decapitates the Malaysian driver and disables the APC. Several soldiers from the 10^th Mountain are shot recovering the wounded. They then continue on to the second crash site where no Americans are found.

The other element advances to the first crash site and links up with the members of Task Force Ranger at about 0200. It takes several hours to load all of the wounded into the vehicles. Meanwhile, the CSAR team continues to work on extricating the last pilot’s body from the wreckage of the Blackhawk. At dawn, the pilot is finally freed and to the surprise and chagrin of many at the first crash site, they find out the APC’s are so full of wounded that they will have to run alongside them on foot for exfiltration.

So, shortly after dawn on the 4^th of October, two long columns of men are stretched along each side of the street near the downed helo. Many of the men had no idea that there were that many of them there. Most have spent the night right next to each other without ever realizing that their buddies were so close. These two columns run, house to house, street to street, using the APC’s for cover. This run is later to be called the "Mogadishu Marathon." While they move, they encounter sporadic fire. Helicopters provide fire support directly overhead, just as they have done all night. Expended brass and links rain down on them as they move. Walls and buildings crumble close by as the tanks and helos suppress the Somali fire, which increased after dawn broke. After about 2 miles, the force links up with elements of the QRF and loads onto vehicles. Many drink water for the first time in many hours.

The QRF then moves out in two groups, one to the Pakistani Stadium, the other to the New Port. They encounter sporadic fire from snipers along the way, but nothing like the day before. As one group arrives at the New Port, two medics prepare to take care of the wounded, although one of them could not hear. During the Marathon he ran by a wall, just as an RPG round exploded and his eardrums were ruptured. No casualties arrive at the New Port, however, and the TFR members are ferried back to the hanger by Blackhawk.

The second group arrives at the Pakistani Stadium with the wounded. The scene is surreal. Vehicles are splattered with blood and gore. Body parts and the dead are stacked in the back of the Humvees. The dead are covered with ponchos. Here medics and Task Force doctors began to treat and triage the flood of wounded, sending patients to the 46^th Combat Support Hospital close by, where three surgeons, working without rest for more than 36 hours, would stabilize them for evacuation to Germany. At the Pakistani Stadium, Rangers learn for the first time about buddies who are dead or wounded. They learn that the crew of Super 61 and the two sergeants who went in after them are still missing.

By the time everyone returns to the Hanger, they meet the first wave going out on MEDEVAC at the nearby Air Force MEDEVAC staging area. Everyone reloads ammo. The medics repack their nearly empty aid bags. People eat and try to sleep knowing that at any moment they may have to go back out for the missing crew. Many task force members, although exhausted from almost 15 hours of continuous fighting, cannot sleep. The sound of gunfire and the whoosh of RPG’s still rings in their ears. Then, by that afternoon, CNN shows films of American bodies being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The anger in the hanger is palpable. But a follow-on mission never comes. Over the next few days they learn that the pilot of Super 61 is still alive, to be released seventeen days later, but that his crew and the brave sergeants who went to their rescue did not make it.

This would bring the total killed on 3/4 October to 19. The total wounded requiring medical evacuation from Somalia was 59 and the total lightly wounded and returned to duty was 49. The estimates of Somali dead ranged from 350 to 500, with up to 1000 wounded. This action represents the largest, most intense firefight for U.S forces since Vietnam and has had a lasting effect on US foreign policy in the conduct of operations other than war.

A few days later, a memorial service was held at the hangar for the Task Force Ranger members who fell in combat. The Task Force commander read a passage from Shakespeare's King Henry V, where the king addressed his men the day before going into battle. I will share those words with you now.

"Whosoever does not have the stomach for this fight, let him depart. Give him money to speed his departure, since we do not wish to die in that man's company. For whosoever lives past this day and comes home safely will rouse himself every year on this day, show his neighbors his scars, and tell embellished stories of all the great feats of battle. These stories he will teach to his sons and from this day until the end of the world, we shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For whosoever shall shed his blood with me today shall be my brother, and those men afraid to go will think themselves as lesser men to hear how we fought and died together."

That concludes my comments. I hope I have succeeded in putting you there, and I hope what I have said will set the stage for the scenarios to follow. Hopefully, by the end of the day, you will have learned something from this battle that will help improve the care that we give to the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Special Operations community in the future battles that are sure to come. Thank you.

Scenario 1

Fast-Rope Casualty

· Hostile and well-armed (AK-47s, RPGs) urban environment

· Building assault to capture members of a hostile clan

· 16-man Ranger element designated as perimeter security team

· Assault team, perimeter security team, and prisoners to be picked up by a 12-vehicle ground convoy

· 70 foot fast-rope insertion from helicopter

· Ranger misses rope and falls

· Unconscious on the ground

· Bleeding from the mouth and ears

· Several hundred hostile Somalis in disorganized crowds

· Sporadic fire from numerous gunmen in crowds

In falls from height, the height of a fall is the most important predictor of the extent of injury that a person will sustain. The surface of impact is also important. Hard surfaces such as macadam or cement produce more severe injuries than soft surfaces such as mud, swamps, or water. The angle of impact is another important factor. In a fall from 20 feet or less, the angle of impact is largely dependent upon the angle from which the casualty began descent. From a greater height, the center of mass for the body is a better predictor of the attitude at impact. Since the center of mass for the human body is the upper thorax, the position at impact will likely be a swan dive-type approach. Back packs, parachutes, weapons, and other carried gear will affect the center of mass and body angle during prolonged descent. Consideration must also be given to such factors as wind drag and whether the fall is free or broken. The age and fitness of the casualty may are also important considerations.

The height of the fall affects the velocity at impact. Human free-fall acceleration is approximately 20 miles per hour for every second of descent. An individual who falls from 70 feet will descend for approximately 2-1/2 seconds and impact at a speed of approximately 50 miles per hour. If the fall were from a much greater height, the terminal velocity would be approximately 130 miles per hour.

Pertinent to the care of a fall victim from a given height is the type of injuries anticipated as a result of falls from that height. Steadman (1989) described a high proportion of visceral injuries when patients fell 6.1 meters or more. Lau (1988) reported that Injury Severity Scores (ISS) can be correlated with the height of a fall. This can be used to corroborate the reported mechanism of the fall with the type and severity of injuries encountered.

Kragh (1995) reported on 170 injuries to Army Rangers sustained during fast-roping over a 55-month period. Most of the injuries were from controlled descents. A controlled descent is defined as one with a descent rate of 10 to 15 feet per second, whereas an uncontrolled descent is defined as one with a descent rate of greater than 15 feet per second. One percent of the 170 injured Rangers had closed head injuries, 2% had thoracolumbar spine fractures, 3% had chest or abdominal contusions, 2% had pelvic fractures and 2% had femur fractures.

Richter (1996) described 101 patients who fell from an average of 7.2 meters. In this study, 83% had thoracic or thoracolumbar spine fractures, 21% had chest contusions, 30% had pelvic fractures, and 27% had closed head injuries.

Velhamos (1997) reported on 187 patients with falls ranging from 5 to 70 feet. Only three patients in this study experienced falls greater than 40 feet. Despite the relatively low heights, 20% of the patients suffered spinal fractures, with 4% having neurologic deficits. Although 6% of the patients had significant abdominal trauma, vascular injuries were infrequent with less than 1% having a ruptured thoracic aorta or retroperitoneal bleed.

Warner (1986) examined the pathophysiology of injuries related to falls. He states "mortality from a six-story fall onto a hard surface such as concrete is almost 100% for adults." Risser (1996) also found that death usually results when the fall is more than five stories. The average story height for a standard high-rise building ranges from 10 to 12 feet. The scenario here has a 70-foot (6 to 7 story) fall onto a hard-packed urban street. The studies mentioned therefore predict a critical, if not moribund, physical condition for this Ranger as his care is initiated.

The critical issues in this scenario are whether or not the Ranger fell the entire 70-foot distance to the road surface, whether the fall was unbroken, and how hard the surface on which he impacted was. In the worst case responses for these questions, the likelihood of survival is poor, even if the casualty were being treated immediately in a modern urban medical center. In a combat scenario, the probability of survival is reduced even further.

Prior to outlining a combat casualty care plan, several assumptions will be made about this casualty. Given the height of the fall, it has to be assumed that the casualty has multiple injuries that individually or collectively equate to a high probability of death. Since he is unconscious at the time of evaluation, it is assumed that he has a severe closed head injury. Coma is defined as the inability to obey commands, utter words, and open the eyes. A Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score of 8 or less is a generally accepted quantitative definition of coma. The bleeding from the ears likely represents a basilar skull fracture. Blood in the mouth suggests either maxillofacial fractures or pharyngeal trauma that will complicate airway control. Whenever there is a closed head injury, consider cervical spine fractures. Based on the height of the fall and the likely body angle at impact, the thoracolumbar region from T11 to L1 is also at high risk for fracture. Occult hemorrhage from a hemothorax, hemoperitoneum, and pelvic or long bone fractures is also likely and may contribute to morbidity and mortality.

MANAGEMENT PLAN

Care Under Fire

1. Return fire as required. The principle objective in this situation is to keep your casualty from sustaining further injuries and to keep yourself from becoming a casualty.

Is he alive? Resuscitation of trauma-related cardiopulmonary arrest is not indicated.

Is there an associated spine injury? If so, try to limit further injury during transport to cover. Use of a poncho or pack with head stabilization should be considered to drag the Ranger to cover.

Tactical Field Care

1. The history offers little conclusive data regarding the extent of the injuries sustained. The known facts include:

The Ranger is bleeding from his mouth and ears, suggesting maxillofacial fracture, pharyngeal injury, and/or basilar skull fracture.

2. Airway control is of paramount importance in closed-head injury patients, particularly if the GCS is less than 8. Blood in the oropharynx interferes with airflow and a definitive airway is warranted. The best airway that can be placed quickly and securely, still enabling the provider to render care to other individuals or return fire as necessary, is a cricothyroidotomy using either a #6.0 cuffed tracheostomy or a standard endotracheal tube cut to appropriate length. Nasotracheal tubes are contraindicated with suspected maxillofacial or basilar skull fractures. Orotracheal tubes can be safely placed in patients with suspected cervical spine fractures in a controlled setting, but performing this procedure in a tactical urban warfare setting may be too hazardous. I do not feel that orotracheal intubation is the best way to secure the airway in this casualty. I also do not believe that a laryngeal mask airway or esophageal-laryngeal combitube has any utility in tactical field care.

3. Casualties with a severe closed-head injury are at high risk for transient respiratory arrest. However, in this environment, it is not possible to provide prolonged respiratory support or supplemental oxygen. Hypoxemia adversely affects outcome in severe closed-head injury and hypercapnea will exacerbate elevated intracranial pressure (ICP). Inability to maintain oxygenation and spontaneous ventilation portends poor outcome.

4. Other factors that may compromise oxygenation and ventilation in this casualty include chest contusion, tension pneumothorax, massive hemothorax, and diaphragmatic rupture. Of those, the most important and most reversible is a tension pneumothorax. Needle thoracostomy is indicated if tension pneumothorax is suspected clinically.

5. Recognize that, after a 70-foot fall, this casualty may be in shock from uncontrolled bleeding in the chest, abdomen, or pelvis. Support of the intravascular volume with Hespan or other IV fluids should be performed. With a severe head injury, cerebral perfusion pressure is critically important. In a controlled setting, the target cerebral perfusion pressure is greater than 70mmHg. In a tactical field care environment, the cerebral perfusion pressure is unknown. Maintenance of a pressure of 100mmHg by palpation or using a readily palpable pulse in combination a heart rate of 100 beats per minute or less are two possibly helpful clinical parameters to monitor. Normalization of blood pressure may exacerbate uncontrolled hemorrhage from abdominal, chest, or pelvic sources. Allocation of resuscitation fluids to a casualty with limited survivability should be carefully considered.

6. Assess for spinal cord injuries and secure on a litter or other solid support if possible.

7. Maintain core body temperature. Remove outer garments only as necessary to facilitate care.

CASEVAC Care.

2. Re-evaluate the neurologic status frequently. During air or ground transportation, mechanical hyperventilation and mannitol should be given if signs of elevated ICP are present.

3. If a needle thoracostomy was performed to decompress a tension pneumothorax, then conversion to a tube thoracostomy is necessary at some point.

4. Maintain cerebral perfusion pressure by fluid resuscitating with Hespan or Lactated Ringers to a mean arterial pressure greater than 70mmHg despite the possible presence of uncontrolled hemorrhage. Cerebral perfusion pressures less than 70mmHg are associated with a poor outcome.

Additional Considerations

1. In the future, we need to consider other resuscitation fluids such as hypertonic saline, hypertonic saline/colloid combinations, or other blood substitutes as a means of improving the survival of patients with closed-head injury and shock.

DISCUSSION

CAPT Butler: One of the things that makes these scenarios difficult is that your unit cannot move if you have to stop and care for this individual. It would be interesting to hear Captain Olson's thoughts about better ways to carry out evacuations in urban environments.

CAPT Olson: First, I would add a bullet to the first slide that talked about factors affecting the injury. Include how the Ranger is dressed, what he is carrying, and how his load is configured on his body. These could act as significant factors that affect the injuries sustained and I think there are many ways to dress for success in how the Ranger configures himself, knowing that fast roping is part of the mission.

In every scenario, there is a larger mission that the Commander has to execute and I think one of the primary responsibilities of anybody providing medical care is to not hinder the execution of the larger mission. In this case, an intersection of two hard-packed dirt roads was carefully selected as a blocking position and the Rangers, after inserting by fast rope, were to move to a specific corner of that intersection and establish a blocking position. The corner was closer to the target than the rest of the intersection, and therefore the treatment of this particular patient would have been in the middle of the field of fire that the blocking force was supposed to set up. There was absolutely no time to render care at the location of the fall, even though the entire scene was obscured by a dust brown-out from the helicopter rotor wash for a period of several seconds after the injury. The first guy on the scene had a primary responsibility to grab the casualty by the collar, web gear, or hair and to get him to the corner of the intersection where the Rangers had established their defensive position before giving any real care. Whatever seconds are lost in doing that is the price that everyone has to pay in order to contribute to the execution of the larger mission.

CAPT Butler: Considering the difficulties that the convoys and helicopters had, should we be planning to use different evacuation assets in the next urban conflict?

CAPT Olson: This was a carefully planned evacuation given the assets that were available at the time. You can fast-rope in, but you cannot fast-rope out. It is easy to put people into an urban environment by helicopter but very difficult to remove them. The Little Birds that were able to land in selected intersections were really the exception. In this case, there was a convoy of Rangers at the ready as part of the mission plan to evacuate the hostile forces who were being captured, and everybody who went in by helicopter was coming out as part of that convoy. The responsibility, then, was to move this particular Ranger who was injured to the collection point for pick-up by vehicle. There was a lot of argument about whether or not the correct vehicles were used and whether or not they were positioned in the correct place as they waited for evacuation. In this particular case, a ground movement out of the target area was required and was planned for, and it was simply a matter of getting this Ranger to the collection point a block away.

LTC Holcomb: I am a general surgeon and take care of a number of trauma patients. There has been a lot of discussion about hypotensive resuscitation, levels of resuscitation, and resuscitation end points. The bottom line is, for the type of resuscitation combat medics will be doing in the field, there are lots of guesses and hunches but there is no definitive information available. I think it is pretty clear that you cannot apply hypotensive resuscitation to head injury patients with what we know right now, and I would like to re-emphasize that. If you leave him hypotensive, you are going to make whatever head injury he has a lot worse. I would like to invite discussion about that.

Dr. Champion: In fact, the mortality rate goes up from about 20 to 50 percent if you add hypotension to a head injury.

LTC Holcomb: There is information on hypotensive resuscitation for penetrating injuries, and I would practice that to some extent, but not for head injuries. We are constantly having to think about what can we do better next time or what device could we put in the hands of a medic to enable him to do a better job. I think that it would be very useful to develop something that would enable the medic to determine the urgency for evacuation. Prototype devices that do this exist in research environments, but they are not out in the field yet. These devices may assist in making diagnoses for disorders that occur in parts of the body that the corpsmen or medic cannot see, such as within the brain, chest, abdomen and pelvis.

CDR Lowe: When I was a civilian ER doctor, I always thought about witnessed cardiac arrest, but I never thought much about witnessed exsanguination. If someone goes into witnessed shock, and it is due to internal injuries, they are not going to do very well. Most of the people we see in shock have been delayed for the minutes to hours it took to get them to us. We should emphasize to our combat medical personnel that, if a casualty has suffered this type of a fall and quickly goes into profound shock, that casualty is probably not going to do very well, no matter what we do for him.

Dr. Champion: If you define shock as a blood pressure of less than 90, then the mortality of shock patients arriving in trauma centers in the United States is 50 percent, (1) and about 60 percent of those die within the first half hour.

LTC Anderson: My sense from looking at the literature is that there is a dearth of solid, outcome-based evidence on a lot of these points being discussed. Houswald produced an article that showed that there is no difference in spinal outcomes if you compare Malaysia, where they grab people and throw them in the back of a pickup truck to take them to the hospital, and places where they use a backboard with a Philadelphia collar. Rather than expose our medics to hostile fire to accomplish treatments of uncertain value, we should perform outcome-based research. I do not think that this can necessarily be done in a randomized, controlled study, but I think we can compare populations where things are done differently.

You should also pay attention to critical incident stress debriefing. If you have a medic who grabs a guy by the web gear, hauls him back to cover, and then the patient turns out to be quadraplegic afterwards, you have to make sure that the medic knows that he may not have caused that quadriplegia. In fact, the patient was likely to have been quadriplegic before he was hauled back, and the medic probably saved his life.

CAPT Butler: I think that your comment about outcome-based treatment is very important and I would like to add several additional points.

First, if we are going to ask one of our combat medics to undertake a medical treatment in the middle of a firefight, then we need to be as sure as possible that the benefit resulting from this treatment is going to be worth the risk to the medic and the other members of the team.

Second, the DOD is prohibited from performing or funding any human research that entails the use of people who have not signed an informed consent. So, as a result, the DOD cannot fund any studies on prehospital trauma. The FDA is not so constrained. Health and Human Services is not so constrained. Why is the DOD not able to fund the type of research that will provide the possibility of outcome-based decisions for our medics and corpsmen and PJs?

The third point concerns the question of using Hespan instead of Lactated Ringers. One bad thing about resuscitating somebody with a closed head injury who may also have concurrent hypovolemic shock with Lactated Ringer's, is that 80% of the Lactated Ringer's is not going to be in the intravascular space after an hour. It is going to be in the interstitial space, where it might possibly contribute to increased intracranial pressure. This provides at least a theoretical advantage for using Hespan in patients with concurrent closed head injuries and hypovolemia.

LTC Cloonan: The point was made that it may be appropriate to do a surgical airway on this particular patient, and I would like to address that. The American College of Surgeons took that approach for a long time in their ATLS course. You will recall that it was felt that, if there was a C-spine injury, then orotracheal intubation would put that patient at risk and their initial recommendation had been to go with the surgical airway. That changed based on a number of studies that showed that orotracheal intubation done with due concern for the potential for C-spine injury had a relatively low risk of converting an unstable injury into a cord injury. This, coupled with recognition of the risks inherent in doing an emergent surgical airway, was why the ACS went to their recommendation to go with orotracheal intubation. For the prehospital care scenario that we are talking about, it would be my recommendation that an attempt at orotracheal intubation, with due regard for the potential for C-spine injury, should be made.

MAJ White: We have the benefit of hindsight here, but I think that this casualty drove the train for a lot of what happened later in the conflict. I do not remember from reading the scenario whether the casualty was hypotensive or not. I submit that, if he was hypotensive from a fall with a closed-head injury of that severity, we need to give the medic permission to do nothing. The combination of an exsanguinating hypovolemia from a fall plus a significant head injury is going to be fatal. If he was not hypotensive, you still have to win the firefight first, get yourself to safety and move expeditiously. I would say to just use an ET tube and, if the guy continues to breathe on his own, great. Hespan can be used to support his blood pressure if it falls later, but if he is hypotensive and has massive head injury, we need do nothing at first.

LTC Hagmann: This issue of expectant patients has been brought up several times and although I certainly cannot disagree with Dr. White on any factual statistical basis, you have to remember that this is the first casualty. There is no way for the medic to know when treating this casualty that there are 15 hours of hell coming. He is the only US casualty in the entire group at this point. Here we have a mission where the Force Commander has prisoners and he is being asked to decide which is more important, the prisoners or a casualty who is very severely wounded and is probably not going to make it. The rule is that you should concentrate on force protection first. What actually happened in the scenario seems to be more in keeping with what we would all advocate if this were the only casualty without knowing that there are other casualties coming.

MAJ White: I think the line officers want us to make that call for them. If there were no neurosurgical support at the Combat Support Hospital that the casualty was going back to, then there is not much that can be done for him there. If there is any doubt, establish communications and say, "Hey, this is what I have" and ask the surgeons what they think.

CAPT Butler: Thanks for the comment and, just to re-emphasize the point, the primary information that the Commander needs from the medic in this scenario is reasonably accurate information about the casualty's chances of survival and how those chances will be affected by evacuation delays.

1. Heckbert SR, Vedder NB, Hoffman W, et al: Outcome after hemorrhagic shock in trauma patients. J Trauma 1998; 45: 545-549

Scenario 2

First Helicopter Crash

· Hostile and well-armed (AK-47s, RPGs) urban environment

· Building assault to capture members of a hostile clan

· Location 600 yards northeast of target building

· Helicopter laying on its side in an alley with cockpit jammed into a wall

· Rotor separated from wreckage

· No fire (flames) in the crashed helicopter

· Wingman providing fire support

· Two wounded crew members previously evacuated

· 15 man Combat Search and Rescue team fast-ropes in for rescue

· Taking fire from several directions

· Hole in nearby wall from the crash

· Pilot - Dead, crushed on impact, trapped in helicopter

· Co-pilot - Dead, 3 rounds in back, 1 in neck

· Ranger One - Facial fractures from crash

· Ranger Two - Blunt trauma to back from crash

· Crew Chief - Dazed and disoriented from crash, two fingers shot off during evacuation from helicopter

· CSAR Team Pararescueman One - Grazing GSW to face and arm

· CSAR Team Medic - Grazing GSW to hand

· CSAR Team Pararescueman Two - GSW to calf, unable to do patient care

The overview that we heard earlier is almost identical to an incident described in a book by Bernard Fall called "Street Without Joy" that took place about 40 years ago in a jungle in South Vietnam. A group was sent into the jungle and was ambushed. A relief column was sent but it too was ambushed and bogged down in a killing zone for a couple of days. The incident resulted in a lot of casualties and led to the eventual collapse of the French in Indochina. Unfortunately one thing that this and other incidents have shown us is that we learn very little from history. We keep making the same mistakes, not just in tactics, but also in the way that we respond to trauma and to medical emergencies.

As 2LT Mabry mentioned, the battle of Mogadishu resulted in the largest number of U.S. casualties in any fire fight since Vietnam. By the year 2025, 80 percent of the people in the world are going to be living in cities and there are going to be 60 cities in the world that have over 8 million people in them. The Marine Corps is spending a lot of time working on tactics in urban terrain, and I have a feeling that, in the future, we are going to spend a lot more time fighting in cities than over hedgerows and rice paddies. We have an enormous amount of combat experience gathered here today, but we need to make this experience available to others so that we do not keep making the same mistakes.

When I went to Vietnam in 1967, I was given a book called "Lessons Learned" to read, and it was supposed to teach me what to do. Unfortunately, it was not much use because it raised more questions than it answered and, of course, there was no one who could answer them for me. Here today, you have a great opportunity to ask questions, so that you can come away with a lot more information and knowledge about what to do in these kinds of medical situations.

I think a problem that we often run into is that, although we have the best technology in the world, as we saw during Desert Storm, technology is not always the answer to everything. Good tactics can often overcome inferior technology. We saw this in Vietnam where the most technologically advanced country in the world came up short against one of the least technologically advanced countries.

MANAGEMENT PLAN

1. Do not go to medical priorities until the tactical priorities are taken care of. If possible, return fire and get out of the killing zone. Get to cover and triage if the intensity of the fire decreases. If the intensity of the hostile fire is sustained, the primary responsibility is for everyone, including medical personnel, to return fire.

2. Casualties should administer self-aid or buddy care if the fire does not diminish. A casualty can put a tourniquet on his own leg if he has to.

4. The first triage priority is Ranger One, who was shot in the face. Make sure his airway is not compromised. If it is, it has to be cleared.

5. PJ One is shot in the face and hand with grazing wounds. If a grazing wound means he has an abrasion or a laceration or something like that, that should not be a problem as long as the airway is not compromised. Sometimes, however, a grazing wound from a high-velocity round can cause significant damage and lead to death, so the wounds have to be assessed. If the mandible has been blown away and there are airway problems, we have to get that under control. If the entire lower face or mandible is gone, you can pull the tongue forward. You can get an ET tube in the trachea pretty easily, but then someone is going to have to manage it, and that is very labor intensive.

6. The crew chief is disoriented and has to be led to cover. Take his weapon away if he is confused to the point that he cannot identify friend from foe. He has some fingers blown away, so the bleeding from his hand should be controlled.

7. The medic who has been injured needs to get to cover. If his hand is okay, he needs to return fire and then re-evaluate the patients.

8. Ranger Two has a back injury. Find out if he can move or not. Is he paralyzed from the waist down because he has a spinal fracture? Can he walk, crawl or be dragged?

Tactical Field Care

1. Constantly re-evaluate the casualties as their condition will change. I remember a soldier in Vietnam who was shot in the chest. I went over, put on a plastic bag and a field dressing, wrapped his poncho around him, laid him on his side and did everything by the book. However he started getting tachycardic, started sweating, and his respiratory rate increased. I did not know what was going on. One of the more senior medics ran over and ripped the bandage off and I heard a big gush of air. I had taken a sucking chest wound and converted it into a tension pneumothorax through my stupidity. I had never heard of a tension pneumothorax before. All I knew was how to treat a sucking chest wound, and that is what I did. The advice I got from the senior medic was "Keep an eye on the patient. If you see him getting worse, re-evaluate him. Start over from "ABC." That is what we all have to learn to do in combat.

2. We do not know if PJ No. 2 has a through-and-through injury or if bone is involved. Look at the wound. If you see only one wound, then it is usually not through and through. However, you can get a grazing wound that looks just like a single wound, but it is usually a lot larger than a single bullet wound. If he has fat globules coming out of the wound, then the bone has been involved. That's an easy way to identify a fracture without x-rays. You then have to make sure that the extremity is splinted. If he puts stress on the fracture fragments by trying to walk, he is going to cause more damage and probably more bleeding. Bleeding can usually be controlled with direct pressure, but if a larger vessel was hit by the round, he is going to need a proximal tourniquet.

3. Treat the back pain in Ranger Two. If this is a blunt injury, he may have a transverse process fracture and may be in severe pain, so give him some morphine and diazepam. Diazepam works much better than morphine for relieving muscle spasm and it does not cause as much respiratory depression. I probably would not give this guy morphine. We do not want him unconscious; we just want to stop his back spasms so he can walk and fire his weapon and do his job.

4. If the crew chief is disoriented from the head injury, you may need to observe him carefully so that he does not wander away or injure his own troops.

CASEVAC Care.

1. Helicopters are a great way to get people out, but the landing area has to be safe and there is not much treatment you can provide on a helicopter.

2. Attempting to contact and join the nearby ground units should be considered, although communication is difficult in urban terrain.

3. If you cannot call in your own vehicles, try to commandeer vehicles off the streets to transport your wounded.

Equipment Considerations

1. Before any mission, you should have an idea of what kind of supplies you might need in case you cannot get back out in a hurry. Ammo, water and fuel obviously are the three most important things. Other resupply items include batteries for your radios, medical supplies, and rations.

4. In an urban environment, there should be all kinds of material around that can be commandeered, such as vehicles or even weapons and ammo.

Additional Considerations

1. Getting to cover is extremely important. These guys were smart to pull out the floor plates from the helicopter and build themselves a bunker. The cover available in an urban environment is usually much better than in open terrain. You can build up rubble and make yourself a place to fight from..

2. One of the important things that must be learned is that medical people are also combatants and they have to be able to fight. When I was a Commanding Officer of a Marine support unit I made my nurses, corpsmen and doctors all qualify with all their weapons and take hand-to-hand combat even though they said, "What do we need this for?" I said, "You have to learn how to fight because you have to be able to defend yourself and your patient. In an emergency, you are all combatants."

3. It is difficult sometimes to remember that this is not a hospital and it is not civilian life. This is combat, where you have to conserve the fighting strength of the unit. The mission comes first. It is hard for medical people to do that, because the serious things always attract your eye. This is where training comes in. Instinct tells you to go to the worst guy and take care of him. Training tells you what your mission is. In a combat situation, you are going to have minimal personnel, equipment, and supplies with which to care for the casualties. The goal of triage is to do the most good for the most casualties. There are essentially three categories in triage. Those who are going to die no matter what you do; those who are going to live no matter what you do; and those who are going to live only if you do something and do it right now. The first two groups you can leave alone at first, even though it is a hard thing to do. If you have a guy with his legs blown off, and a head injury, and he is gurgling in his own vomit, you may think "I have got to take care of this guy right now or he is going to die". Well, you are absolutely right, he is going to die. If you have somebody else with a gunshot wound to the upper arm, and who is bleeding out, if you do not stop that bleeding, that soldier is going to die. If you do stop the bleeding, he might not die. He is the person who has to get priority care, since he is the one who is going to live only if you do something, and do it now.

4. Combat medic rules. On my first day in Vietnam, a sergeant took me aside and said, "Forget what you learned in medic school. I am going to tell you what you need to survive over here. The first rule is never to go into a zeroed-in position." The corollary to this obviously is to get out of the zeroed-in position and to get your casualty out also. If somebody just got shot by a sniper, and you go over there and try to grab him and drag him to cover, you are going to get shot by the sniper, too. If the casualty is conscious, get him to crawl to cover.

5. Rule two is: "Always disarm the patient if there is any doubt about his ability to use his weapon effectively." Disarm patients who are in shock, who are hypoxic, who have a head injury or who have just gotten morphine. If someone has been shot in the leg and has a tourniquet on it and the bleeding is controlled, then he can still be an asset to his unit and help to return fire or operate a radio.

6. Attempting to resuscitate a patient in cardiac arrest from blunt trauma is futile even in the best of circumstances. Do not even think about doing CPR. This may be difficult to face, since this is your buddy that you were talking to 2 minutes ago. That is the worst thing about combat. You cannot train for that. You can train to keep going in the face of adversity, but you cannot train to see your buddies get hurt or killed.

7. Everyone in the military should learn First Aid to be able to care for their buddy or themselves, since the medic may be the first one to get shot. When I was a medic, they used to give us little aid bags to carry around. It did not take long for the Viet Cong to figure out who the medic was. Put the medical equipment in something that is not so conspicuous.

8. People who have traumatic amputations from explosions, mines or booby traps often have bleeding. However, as a result of retraction and contraction of blood vessels, the bleeding is usually minimal and endorphins kick in. I have had casualties with one or both feet blown off who did not even realize they were injured. They kept trying to walk and could not understand why they could not. In the heat of battle, a casualty may not even realize he has been shot.

9. There are lots of ways to move people, including on a poncho, on a poncho liner, or by grabbing them by their web gear, but these techniques need to be practiced.

10. It is very difficult to carry casualties over rough terrain. You need six people to carry someone any distance and they wear down fairly rapidly, which then reduces their ability to fight. So, if you can get any form of mechanized transport, use it.

11. Fire support in urban terrain. Direct fire weapons are much more reliable for putting rounds on target than indirect fire weapons and you waste less ammo. The new Predator and Javelin shoulder-fired high-explosive rockets can be used against air targets, bunkers, armor, and buildings. The way to clear an objective is to fire one of these weapons in there and the objective will be cleared without a lot of collateral damage. We always have to consider collateral damage in an urban area. Artillery can help to clear a city, but there is usually not much left of it when you get there. What is left are the bad guys in bunkered-in positions that the artillery did not touch, and you still have to fight from room to room and street to street.

12. Be aware of a problem with backblast inside buildings, especially with the older LAWs (Light Anti-tank Weapon) and other shoulder-fired rockets. The new Predators and Javelins are supposed to have less backblast so that you can use them in a building. The last thing you want to do is fire your LAW inside a building at a vehicle going down the street and end up bringing the whole building down on top of your head.

DISCUSSION

CAPT BUTLER: Thank you, Doctor Otten. Let's move on to our next scenario since it also involves a helicopter crash and then we can discuss both scenarios together.

Scenario 3

Second Helicopter Crash

· Hostile and well-armed (AK-47s, RPGs) urban environment

· Building assault to capture members of a hostile clan

· Assault team, perimeter security team, and prisoners to be picked up by a 12-vehicle ground convoy

· Blackhawk flying air cover for raid shot down by RPG round

· Second Blackhawk flying support over crash site

· Hit in tail rotor by RPG round

· Rotor comes apart - rapid spin to right - flat crash

· Crash site one mile away from the first crash

· No search and rescue team available

· Somali crowd moving into site

· Two additional Rangers inserted to help

· Pilot - Open right femur fracture, transient loss of consciousness, back pain

· Co-pilot - Left tibia fracture, back pain, pinned in his seat

· Crew Member One - Blood all over trousers, talking but confused

· Crew Member Two - "Severely injured"

This conference today is a logical outgrowth of a movement to focus on scenario-based care that has now been going on for about 10 years. When Captain Butler first talked to me about the project that led to the paper that he and Dr. Hagmann and Ensign George Butler published, I emphasized that a tactical scenario has to be stated in such a way that it forces people to speak about a specific set of circumstances. Otherwise you are going to have people saying, "In my ER" or "In my trauma center, we do this."

Now, this is not the end of the process. The process has to continue with input from the audience. There may, however, be difficulty in doing that because of the expectations that people bring with them. What I mean by that is that you may come to this forum expecting that the panel is going to tell you how it is and how it should be for the future. Those of you in the room who are combat medics, however, are viewed by the National Registry of EMTs, and by a variety of other groups, as the best-trained medics in the country, and perhaps in the world. That puts an enormous responsibility on you for continuous professional growth and means that you have to read things and discuss them in order to try to figure out what you think the data mean. Do not just let us pontificate to you about it. Your input has been missing from many arenas, and I hope we can extend and expand what LTC Cloonan has begun at JSOMTC where the Mogadishu raid is now a part of the curriculum.

We ran a similar exercise to this during the conference on Military Medicine at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center entitled "Surgery for Victims of Conflict". We benefited enormously from interaction with our colleagues in the UK who described their Special Forces Trauma Course. I hope that some of them are going to raise issues and ask questions today, because not everything they will hear today fits in with the way they do business at the present time.

One thing to remember is that, in this kind of scenario, there is no point carping about whether or not you know enough about the patients because, if you are the medic on the ground, this is the kind of situation you have to deal with. You often do not have all the information you think you need. It is not a bad way to exercise, so that you do not expect that you are going to have access to full information.

What I am going to try to do is paint a picture of what it might have looked like to the two rescuers in this scenario. As far as I know, I do not have a medic on the ground there to think about. I have two Rangers who came in after a helicopter crashed. The other thing that might be of some interest to the guys who are being inserted is that this helicopter crashed a mile from where all the rest of the action is going down. So, there is no intelligence about what is happening on the ground. Are there armed people in the area? We know that there is a crowd moving into the site. We know that there is no search and rescue team available, but other than that, we do not know anything.

The next thing we are presented with is that it would be very difficult for the people arriving on the ground to determine in a short period of time who is alive and who is not and what, in fact, has happened to them. Now, what I would like to do is comment briefly on one approach to this, which might be called the ATLS approach.

You would immediately think in terms of A, B, C, D and E (airway, breathing, circulation, disability, and exposure). The casualty with the open femur fracture would probably get some attention early on, particularly if I was told that there is also life-threatening hemorrhage associated with that open fracture. The other individual that would probably get a fair amount of attention is Crew Member Two, the "severely injured" casualty. What do you see when you approach this severely injured person? Multiple holes in a vest and an unconscious person and no gross hemorrhage observable? So, you do not know if the holes have gone all the way through and, of course, you are not going to take the vest off at this point to check that out. You do not know if he is unconscious because of the penetrating wound or because of the helicopter crash, and it is irrelevant at this point. If we were doing this from an ATLS standpoint, then we would be thinking about bleeding control and getting the traction splint on for the first casualty. In the secondary survey, we would try to determine what his mental status was, including a Glasgow coma score, which would be inappropriate in this kind of setting at this time.

A comment on the guy pinned in his seat. I do not know how many of you are also EMTs and practice extractions from vehicles. In civilian trauma extractions, you can usually count on people showing up who have the Jaws of Life or something to haul, move or tear vehicles apart. That is probably not going to happen in this kind of setting, and what would be extraordinarily important is for you to have some idea of what the crew compartment looks like, so that you might have some idea of what could hang this guy up. Now, clearly, if the whole roof has collapsed on him, and that is why he is pinned in his seat, that is a little bit different than the more common reasons that people are trapped in their seats, such as when they get hung up on harnesses. Their feet could also get tangled in pedals and a number of things of that type. Try to draw some parallels between what you might be thinking of if you were trying to apply EMS, ATLS and PHTLS in the streets of the US, as opposed to the setting in this scenario.

My point here is that before Care Under Fire begins, remember that you have a two-person rescue unit that came in. Even if there is a medic with them, the first thing is to assess the tactical situation. Is there hostile fire or a potential source of it? Is cover available near where the helicopter went down? You have to assume that since it rotated in, that there is at least a cleared space that was large enough for the helicopter to settle down into. Is there any kind of fire or explosion hazard? From what I have been able to learn, the principal explosion hazard would probably be the self-sealing fuel cells, but there may also be munitions and explosives on board. The helicopter would be unlikely to blow up like you see in the movies unless ammunition or other explosives that were inside happened to be hit, but those are all things to consider. You need to consider them even more strongly if there is fire and smoke coming out of the helicopter.

Another thing about the tactical situation is that you should approach the helicopter with care because a smart enemy would leave somebody alive inside who could make noise and call for help in the hope of luring more rescuers into the area. The quick thing to do while you are still outside this helicopter and before any care is rendered would be to see who can respond verbally and whether or not their verbal response is appropriate. Somebody in there might be able to tell you how many people were on the helicopter and where they are at the present time. You know that when you have a large casualty situation, you first ask all those people who are ambulatory to "come to me" so that you can sort out quickly who the people are that need immediate care. Casualties who can walk may be able help themselves or other casualties. Your main concerns at this point have to be surveillance of the area, being prepared to return fire and then finding out if anybody has appropriate arms to help with defense of the area while you try to do more for the casualties. Another important consideration in the two-man Ranger team that came in is which of the two is in charge and will be making the decisions about where you go.

All of the above factors have to be considered and dealt with before you get to Care Under Fire.

MANAGEMENT PLAN

Care Under Fire

1. The priority is to return fire and to ensure personnel are as safe as possible. ATLS "ABC's" are inappropriate when you are under fire.

Tactical Field Care

1. For Tactical Field Care, keep in mind that you do not want to get involved in providing extensive medical care because you may revert back to the Care Under Fire stage in a very short period of time.

2. If there were no incoming fire or imminent danger, then I would consider checking the airway, breathing, and circulation early on.

3. There is no mention in the scenario of how much the Pilot is bleeding from his open femur fracture. I will assume that he has a life-threatening hemorrhage. A tourniquet or direct pressure should be applied immediately, but here the bleeding point is not one where you can get a tourniquet on. The question, then, is how effective would direct pressure be while you are trying to move this casualty? Unfortunately the answer is - not very effective, so do not agonize over that. Do not think about splinting or traction or anything like that until you are extricated and under cover.

4. The main thing with the Co-pilot is to try to figure out a way to extricate him in a relatively short period of time. Maybe one person could crawl underneath to see if he has a foot or leg caught. Check his harnesses to see if he could be freed by just cutting those. At this point he is just saying that his leg hurts, so you have to figure that he might be ambulatory. He probably is not going to run, but unless he has a severe malrotation or something of that sort, he can probably move himself.

5. The Crew Member One has bloody pants. You don't know where the blood came from. It could have come from the Pilot who had the hemorrhage. It could have come from the other crew member who is unconscious and who has multiple penetrating wounds. What about his chest and abdomen? You cannot tell yet because you haven't taken his vest off.

6. The first crew member is confused. Anyone who has an altered mental status should be disarmed, and that may not be an easy thing to do. It does not matter if the mental status is altered because of stress in the aftermath of surviving the accident, because of having blood all over him, because of a head injury or because of something that you do for him such as giving him morphine. You cannot trust this individual to behave in a responsible way with a firearm even if you have known him for a long period of time. What criteria should be used in deciding which of the wounded should be allowed to continue to return fire and which should be disarmed? Disarm anyone that you are uncertain about until you can assess their ability to help you defend your position

7. Someone has to make a tactical decision at this point about whether to leave the helicopter for other cover or to remain near it and try to utilize its armor for defensive purposes.

8. At this point, you can probably assume that the airways of the Pilot, Co-pilot and Crew Member Number One, are all okay since they are able to talk.

9. If there is a casualty who is not responsive to verbal stimuli, see if he responds to pain.

10. Crew Member Number Two is described as "severely injured." I will assume that he is unconscious and has snoring respirations. Position him appropriately and consider placing at least a nasopharyngeal airway because of the sonorous respirations. Assume further that respirations are 32, shallow and irregular. Since this casualty is unconscious, consider the possibility that he has a closed-head injury. We should try to make sure that whatever oxygen he is able to move is being distributed to his brain. I would consider the possibility of a tension pneumothorax in light of the respiratory distress and do a needle thoracostomy on the appropriate side in the second intercostal space anteriorly if his clinical state indicates.

11. Circulation. The pilot has hemorrhage from his thigh wound. It can be now controlled by direct pressure. Assume that his heart rate is 138 and the radial pulse is weak. At this point, he is still alert and oriented, but he has had transient loss of consciousness. We do not know for how long. We do not know if he is now in a lucid interval with a subdural hematoma developing. Hespan might do some good if this were the case. It might increase perfusion pressure to the brain and, at the same time, pull some fluid back in from the interstitial space, although this is debatable. Also, with an open femur fracture, you have to do something for this soldier's pain.

12. Crew Member Number Two has no visible bleeding. He does have a rapid pulse, but his radial pulse is palpable bilaterally. At the moment, it is probably okay not to do anything other than perhaps establish IV access, because if he wakes up and becomes combative, you may need to be able to give him something to control him again.

13. Next consider things like "Does the pilot need a traction splint for his femoral fracture?" I have never been taught how to improvise a traction splint. I have heard people describe doing it under a variety of conditions, and I do not doubt that it can be done. My guess is that, without a lot of practice, it is unreasonable to expect that medics or rescuers are going to be able to do this very well in this scenario. Consequently, the fact that you are in an urban environment, where there may be pieces of board and so forth around, does not necessarily mean that you are any better off. I am not proposing that traction splints should be issued or carried. The chances are very good that the best you are going to be able to do under these conditions is to use the other leg to stabilize the broken one and to try to get some traction on it by pulling to provide a certain amount of relief.

14. For the Co-pilot, there are a variety of ways that you can improvise a splint for a tibial fracture. You could even use the flight manuals from the cabin. The reasons to splint the tibial fracture are that you may increase his mobility and probably also decrease his pain. Be sure, if you ever have to straighten a tibial fracture, that you turn the leg back the way it broke and not all the rest of the way around.

15. Crew Member Number One has blood all over the front of his pants and we still do not know where it came from. He needs to be calmed down and his mental status assessed to make sure that he did not also have a transient loss of consciousness due to a closed head injury.

16. Try to get oral fluids into the people who can take them. Assume that they were dehydrated when this event occurred. Assume, also, that fluids mean you are doing something for them, and they think that you are doing something for them.

17. With respect to freeing the trapped casualty, you could try to use an improvised lever, but you are probably not going to be carrying shears or saws.

18. Should care be rendered prior to moving casualties who are trapped in the aircraft to whatever cover is available? The only thing to do, if it could be done without reducing your ability to move them and with covering fire, is to apply direct pressure on a potentially life-threatening hemorrhage. If you use direct pressure, however, how are you going to maintain it when you move them? If the bleeding site is not amenable to a tourniquet, move the casualty to cover as quickly as possible and then use direct pressure.

CASEVAC Care.

1. Helicopter CASEVAC may not be feasible in this kind of urban warfare scenario.

2. Based on the Israeli experience, the only way that you are going to extricate a force that is pinned down in this type of urban environment is with armor. There are tanks that have been specially designed for casualty evacuation, like the Israeli Merkava, where the back opens up so you can load the wounded soldiers, and they need to be available for future urban engagements.

Equipment Considerations

1. An event such as this crash does suggest that every helicopter ought to be equipped with gear that would allow you to extricate the crew if they become trapped in the wreckage.

2. There are lots of good ways to move casualties using field-expedient devices. I'll bet that none of the Rangers had a poncho with them. You don't have to have ponchos; you could have something smaller. We used to cut the tops off of jungle hammocks. They roll up rather small and can be used for a variety of purposes, such as wrapping around a casualty and hoisting him up to a helicopter. Some people might say that if the casualty is really badly injured, such as the casualty who had his pelvis crushed, that you should not do that. One of the advantages to doing this, however, is that you would get him off the mind of the Ground Commander. The helicopter does not have to be there for very long to accomplish this.

3. Another thing that was done in Vietnam was to hook people into an extraction rope that was then pulled slowly up into the helicopter, or alternatively, allowed them to be extracted just hanging on the rope.

Additional Considerations

1. Never, never underestimate what the "bad guys" can do to you. I would suggest that the mere fact that at least seven operations had been successfully conducted using the same tactics before this incident occurred had to make people somewhat sanguine about their ability to do this without great risk. Since this incident, it has been established that the events in Mogadishu were not being made up as they went along. The militia had, in fact, been coached over a period of months by people that Osama bin Laden's group had brought in from Afghanistan.

2. This is asymmetrical conflict. You have to be a fool to fight fair in any situation like this, and you have to be a fool to expect that the other guys are going to fight fair.

3. In the planning process for this mission, some consideration might have been given to what to do in the event of the force became pinned down. You should be aware of rallying points that you can head for. That is what the Israelis used in Southern Lebanon during urban combat back in 1982. They had small surgical teams that were attached to battalions and actually were moved down to the company level in a number of places. Their forward surgical teams were pushed to rallying points within the operating area, since they realized how difficult it is to evacuate people any distance in an urban terrain.

4. Remember that not all urban environments are the same in the same way that not all jungles are the same and not all deserts are the same. You have to be prepared to adapt to the environment you find yourself in.

5. Are there defensive techniques that could be used when extracting injured people? Of course, but is this a medical question? No, it is not. This is a tactical call, but it should be practiced in such a way that combat medical personnel are going to be comfortable and knowledgeable about what might be done. In Vietnam, even the surgeon had grenades, and part of his job was, when directed, to pull pins and drop them behind as they were running like hell and being chased. The point is that you cannot separate what you are going to do medically under these conditions from what tactical doctrine, standard operating procedures and battle drills dictate. One of the hardest things, in my experience, is to get Special Ops or civilian SWAT teams to practice disengagement and man-down drills and things of that type in a realistic way. In Vietnam, because of the kinds of operations we were running, it was standard operating procedure for people to carry a 30-foot length of static line with snap links on either end hooked into your gear. It could be thrown out to another person in the team who was down for whatever reason and who was being covered by fire in such a way that the best chance you had for extricating him was to get some cord out and haul him back in. These are the types of things that you have to be thinking about in advance.

6. If you are going to be doing air operations, you also need to familiarize yourself with what breaks the easiest in the aircraft, and also with things like how to release and unpin seats in case you have to extract people.

DISCUSSION

Dr. Hull: With reference to femoral fractures, I think you made a number of very valid points. With blunt injuries, it is exceedingly rare to have significant damage to the femoral artery. If you do, and you have an open fracture with the femoral artery spurting out of the wound, then I think the chances of survival in that situation are very low. Direct pressure there is probably not going to be effective, but the vast majority of femoral fractures are associated with muscle injury and bleeding from the bone ends. In that situation, the ideal is to get them out to length and get traction on. If this is not possible, just strapping the legs together will be effective in many cases, and it will certainly slow the bleeding down to the point where you can replace fluid rapidly enough to keep up with blood loss. UK forces happen to deploy with traction splints, but it is not always possible to do that, and if you cannot, I think simply strapping the legs together is very reasonable and effective in the majority of cases.

Cpt Mosley: I want to talk about CASEVAC and the urban environment, because one of the things we have been working on in the 160th is using the MH-6 Little Bird aircraft as a CASEVAC platform. We strap collapsible Stokes litters in the back of the helicopter and they are taken out by the pilot in a CASEVAC scenario.

CAPT Butler: We said that we were not going to talk about the care that was actually rendered in the scenarios, but we should talk about the outcome of Scenario Three, which was that the crash site was overrun and everyone was killed, except the pilot, who was taken captive. In the urban environment, the medical plan has to address how you buy yourself enough time to deal with casualties in potential overrun situations. I would be interested to hear Captain Olson's comments about area denial techniques so that we may be able to find ways to help prevent repeats of this scenario in the future.

CAPT Olson: This situation was extremely desperate. What has been described as the 15-man CSAR team for this operation had already been inserted at the first helicopter crash site. There was no way to put assistance directly onto this crash site. After the insertion, the fast-ropes were released to the ground and there were no other fast-ropes in this helicopter that could be used by anyone else. Therefore, the helicopter with the two Rangers who requested to be inserted at the crash site had to find a location where they could come close enough to the ground so that the Rangers could jump out to render assistance.

The environment there was a shanty town. This was a central part of Mogadishu that over time had been invaded by squatters and built up with temporary shelters. Consequently, rotor wash was blowing the roofs off buildings. There were no streets, alleyways or sidewalks - just a jumbled maze of temporary structures. The helicopter crashed into the middle of this maze. The two Rangers were inserted between 100 and 150 meters away. The fire fight was already in progress, and they had to fight their way into the crash site. There was no good way to put other people in on top of them and there was no good way to get people out because of the environment. The only realistic way to CASEVAC in this situation would have been to move back to the same area into which the Rangers had been inserted 100 to 150 meters away and to try to bring a helicopter in skids down or close enough to throw the guys into it - the old Vietnam kind of MEDEVAC concept.

In the meantime, they were surrounded by all sorts of fire. It was coming from every direction. There was no place to move to. The best place to be was in the protection of the armored helicopter, using the helicopter-mounted weapons and the armor that was available for protection.

In terms of rendering assistance - it was tough. The first rescue convoy that was briefed earlier was designated to go to that location, but it got turned around at K4 Circle and had its own casualties. Other convoys that were sent out were stopped at every intersection and received fire and finally had to turn back to the airfield. There was probably an hour where there was no good knowledge of what was happening at this site. The RPG threat was real. In fact, this was now the fourth helicopter that had been hit by an RPG. One had been hit the day before and then three this day. So, the helicopters could not go hovering low over a site to try to find out what was going on. This was also not an environment in which you would bring a Little Bird in to insert troops, because then you would have two helicopters down at that site, not one. The only real means of rendering assistance would have been to fast rope in large numbers of people, who were not available, or to render some sort of ground support, which was attempted but failed.

There were more non-ambulatory than ambulatory wounded, and they just could not get the numbers in to get those people out to the safe site. So, I do not have a good answer for you about what should have been done. I think that there was a lot of controversy and a lot of discussion later about the value of AC-130 gun ships across this whole scenario. My own opinion is that, at the first crash site, an AC-130 would have been ineffective because of the density of helicopters at the site and the inability to fire through helicopters at ground targets. At the second crash site, however, an AC-130 may have been useful in defining a perimeter around that crash site and keeping the Somalis out of it.

In terms of other area denial methods, I think that smoke would have been useful, and it would have reduced the precision of the Somali fire. I am not sure that it was all that precise to begin with, but there were certainly large volumes of it, and some of that would have been misdirected had the site been obscured by smoke. That would have been a holding tactic while waiting for nightfall and the massing of the larger rescue force to get to the scene. In that case, it would have required denial for a period of 6 or 7 hours in order to protect a very small force on the scene. So, I do not have an answer. I would like to know what one is.

Let me say something about the development of an armored ambulance for urban warfare and whether or not that is useful. Ultimately, it was the tanks and the Malaysian APCs that got out and brought most of the casualties back. At the second crash site, a rapidly responsive armored ambulance force with good protective cover and escort might have been useful, but I think the situation there was really resolved in the first 20 minutes, and that was probably not enough time to get a ground force to the scene.

Scenario 4

RPG Explosion in Vehicle

· Hostile and well-armed (AK-47s, RPGs) urban environment

· Building assault to capture members of a hostile clan

· Assault team, perimeter security team, and prisoners to be picked up by 12-vehicle ground convoy

· Blackhawk flying air cover for raid shot down by RPG round

· Ground convoy searching for first crash site to assist

· Prisoners loaded and under guard

· Not enough room on trucks - troops running alongside

· Rangers sitting in crowded Humvee

· “Raining RPGs” - one hits Humvee - dense black smoke

· 3 Rangers blown out of back of vehicle

· Ranger One - GSW to thighs of both legs previously/ RPG blew off the back half of his left thigh/Tumbled about 10 yards/Legs were a "mass of blood and gore"/Stood up and tried to walk/Run over by “friendly” 5-ton truck

· Ranger Two - Shrapnel to left forearm/Fractured bone/Severed tendon/Fractured hand/ Wasn’t bleeding much/Could still shoot

· Ranger Three - Left arm bloody/Boots on fire

· Ranger Four - Blood rapidly staining his trousers/Kept shooting/Difficulty breathing

· Ranger Five - “Practically torn in half”/Grenade passed through his lower body/Pelvis largely missing/Alert and "very much alive"

At the outset, let me say that this is not a simple scenario. I hope that the complete lack of controversy emanating from the audience will not persist because some of these issues we are discussing are quite controversial. In this scenario, there are five casualties but there is a big disparity between the least injured and the most severely injured.

In preparing this scenario, I was asked to consider certain questions. Did everybody need an IV? The answer is no. Which casualties need emergent IV fluid resuscitation? And if you undertake fluid resuscitation with Lactated Ringer's, how much should be administered? The relevance of Ringer's Lactate to the treatment of severe exsanguinating hemorrhagic shock certainly needs to be restudied.

What is the maximum amount of IV morphine that we can give these casualties? I noticed that COL Llewellyn mentioned that he was going to disarm everybody in his scenario and that he did not like people to be handling their weapons after receiving morphine. I am going to disagree with him on that, particularly in this sort of environment. I would like to hear some debate about that and about how much morphine we should give these casualties.

Considering the absence of penetrating trauma in the casualty who is short of breath, we want to consider the possibility of barotrauma. Is this likely in this environment, and if yes, so what? Assuming a delay of 12 hours prior to surgical care of these casualties, how would IV antibiotics be expected to affect the outcome? You heard earlier from Norman McSwain that they should get antibiotics. We do not know quite how that is going to affect the outcome, but certainly under these circumstances, if you can get around to giving antibiotics, it is probably a good thing. Whether outcome studies have been done or not to document it in this sort of environment, I do not really know.

Then there is this issue of non-survivable injuries such as the Ranger with half of the body blown away, but still talking. Put yourself in the place of a 20 year-old who is watching someone die while he is talking to him. How do you handle this and how do you prioritize the management of that individual versus the care of the other casualties?

Assume that Ranger One had a potentially life-threatening hemorrhage in his distal thigh and that a tourniquet was applied. How long could the tourniquet be left in place? Are you going to save his life but lose his limb? With respect to the thigh wound, if it is pulsating red blood, then that is arterial bleeding. If the mean arterial pressure is above 70 mmHg, the bleeding is usually going to continue despite a pressure bandage. You therefore need to keep direct pressure on it or use a tourniquet. If it is venous bleeding, a good pressure bandage may well stop it. If you were going to be there for 12 hours, it would be nice to try to salvage the limb. If you have a tourniquet applied constantly to the femoral artery for that amount of time, you are going to lose everything distal to it. It would be nice to be a little bit more surgically precise about the site of bleeding. If you can apply pressure or a clamp (assuming that you can see the point of bleeding), then I would recommend doing those things. If you cannot do that, then you have to put the tourniquet back on. You may have to save the guy's life at the expense of the lower limb, and he will probably thank you for that.

MANAGEMENT PLAN

Care Under Fire

1. Ranger One needs help. He has bilateral gunshot wounds to his thighs. We envision a big chunk of the posterior thigh escalloped out with a raw bleeding wound as a result of his injury.

2. Ranger Two is okay for now. He is the guy with the shrapnel wound to the left forearm. He has a broken bone, but he's not going to die from it. He has some bleeding around the tendon, but he is okay. That can be managed with a dressing.

3. For Ranger Three, with his boots on fire, the question is what is causing the fire. Is it gasoline from the Humvee or is it some phosphorous-based agent? The treatment of those is somewhat different. I imagine that this probably would not be a phosphorous-based agent. You should be able to get a fire extinguisher to cover the flames and put this out. Taking the boots off would be a reasonable thing to do, and you should not end up with burned feet if you did that quickly enough. He could probably do that himself.

4. Ranger Four could be in trouble and needs some assistance. He is short of breath, but with no penetrating injury to the chest. He is still shooting, but he has a rapidly developing blood stain on his trousers, the source of which we do not yet know.

5. Ranger Five was described as being practically torn in half by a grenade that passed through his lower body, although he is alert and very much alive. Now, if that is true, then he probably merits expectant care, and priority attention should be given to the other wounded. However, you need to verify that this casualty has half of his pelvis missing, that he is bleeding, and that he is going to die. If this is so, then the best thing to do is comfort him, give him morphine and get somebody to be with him. It is a very difficult to confront, especially when casualty is still chatting to you, but he is going to die under these circumstances.

6. So the priorities here are to go to Rangers One and Four and to control their hemorrhages.

7. Everybody is talking to you, so everybody has an open airway, although we have some concern about Ranger Four because he is a bit breathless, and we might need to consider that he has a blast overpressure injury to his lungs.

Tactical Field Care

1. Try to exchange Ranger One's tourniquet, if one has been applied, for a pressure dressing. This is where John Holcomb's fibrin impregnated bandage would be wonderful. If we can get that out into the field, this is the place for a fibrin-impregnated bandage, big raw wounds. It would be a significant advance in hemorrhage control, probably the most significant advance in the past 80 years.

2. Morphine for Ranger Five. He is the gentleman we might be treating expectantly and you may have to give up to 25 to 30 milligrams. I know the usual dose is only 5 milligrams. Again, I have been interpreting this a bit; "practically torn in half" needs to be verified. In this tactical environment, if you have a large gaping wound and useless legs, a pulse greater than 150, and feces in the wound, these would be the sorts of things that would make me think that this casualty is not going to survive. He can keep talking until his systolic blood pressure goes down to the region of 50 to 60. Put an IV up on him, so you can give him lots of morphine on a continuous basis. Other people might think differently.

3. Ranger Four needs continued pressure control of the hemorrhage, if you can find out where it is. Presumably, if the blood is on his trousers, it is coming from somewhere underneath them. Lie him down on a stretcher if you have one. Observe for respiratory distress. I am a bit confused about respiratory distress under these circumstances. If he has real respiratory distress, that is not good. If he has a blast injury to his lungs, it is certainly not advisable to give him lots of Ringer's Lactate.

4. Ranger Two, the arm injury, needs dressings and splints, but no IV and no morphine unless he complains of pain. Give him antibiotics if you can get around to it. Let him keep his weapon.

5. Ranger Three - the arm needs dressings and a splint but no IV and no morphine. He may be able to walk if he can move in those boots that were burnt. Let him keep his weapon. Sit Rangers Two and Three in the back of the transport when you are able to move out.

6. Ranger One has the potential to be a catastrophe. There is a little bit of leeway in interpreting this scenario. I do not know exactly what happened to him, but he stood up after getting gunshot wounds in his legs. Although it is quite possible to stand up with fractures, particularly some that are not severely displaced, it is more likely that most of his injuries were in the soft tissue. Then a 5-ton truck comes barreling down and does something to him. If it runs over his head, chest, abdomen or pelvis, he is probably going to die. If it runs over his legs, he probably has fractured femurs. Let us assume that they are compound comminuted, and he may or may not have an associated pelvic fracture. Notwithstanding that, his hemorrhage has gone from being fairly minor and visible to possibly very significant and not visible. His probability of survival beyond the period of 6 hours is decreasing. He needs an IV started and he needs to be monitored closely.

7. Assessment of Ranger Four, the one with bleeding under his trousers: he has a shrapnel wound to his groin, his pulse is rapid, and the location is too high for a tourniquet. He may be able to apply direct pressure himself and stop the bleeding. It is a very good sign that he is not in shock if he can keep pressure on there. If he cannot keep the pressure on, somebody can help him. Perhaps one of the other wounded individuals can keep pressure on with his uninjured arm to make sure that he does not exsanguinate. There is very little you can do to quell the bleeding in this location other than to apply pressure. As the location is too high for a tourniquet, this brings us to the question of the use of MAST trousers. You heard what Norman McSwain said this morning. I happen to agree with him. John Holcomb tells me that they are developing the pelvic component of the shock trousers, so you could wrap those around the pelvis and put a big wad of dressing underneath and put direct pressure on a pelvic or groin wound like that. That might be helpful, but he still needs to be observed.

8. Ranger Four also has labored breathing. That can be brought on by severe shock or is he just scared? I would be. Is it barotrauma? It may be, but so what? What are you going to do about it? Is it a shrapnel embolus? All sorts of things can go through your mind if you have time to think. I am not sure what I would be able to do for barotrauma under these circumstances, given the fact that it takes time to appear and it requires very specific treatment which is probably not available.

CASEVAC Care.

Equipment Considerations

Additional Considerations

1. IV morphine. If you are in this environment I think every bit of firepower is helpful. Three to 5 milligrams of IV morphine takes effect very, very quickly. If the casualty then says, "My pain is better; I feel okay," I would give him his weapon and tell him to point it in the right direction. Craig Llewellyn and I might like to debate that, but there is unlikely to be severe respiratory or CNS depression in a big, healthy guy with pain until 25 to 30 milligrams has been given. So, I would say that under certain circumstances, giving somebody something that is easily titratable, like IV morphine, and enabling them to return fire would be well worth considering.

2. IV fluids. This IV fluid issue is really an irritating one. Most individuals with wounds do not need IV fluids. Only 5 to 7 percent of those injured in Vietnam had abnormal vital signs. In civilian environments as well, probably one of the most overused and useless bits of treatment is an IV. A young person will tolerate substantial blood loss (up to 20 to 30 percent) without any adverse effects. If the pulse is less than 120 and the casualty is still talking to you, then generally speaking, he does not need emergent IV fluids.

3. In terms of what fluid to give in the IV, we have used Ringer's Lactate for 50 years. It is time for a change. There is no doubt about it. Five years from now we will not be giving people Ringer's Lactate. We may be giving people Hespan. We probably will be giving people a hypertonic crystalloid such as hypertonic saline mixed with a small amount of colloid. The advantage of these fluids is that they have been shown to improve the outcome of head injury. They have been shown to improve the outcome of shock states. They vasodilate the patients instead of vasoconstricting them. They use extracellular fluid to expand the intravascular fluid, and they enable us to get medications into the circulation and into target organs such as the brain and heart. My bet is that a hypertonic crystalloid/colloid mixture, which some people are already using in Europe is probably where we are going to be when we have all this unraveled. Certainly Ringer's Lactate is not appropriate and Hespan gets us to a half way point. What we are aiming for is the therapeutic end point of either a systolic blood pressure in the range of 70 or 80mmHg (at least above 50) or a pulse rate of less than 110-120.

4. Just to put the final nail in the coffin for Ringer's Lactate - only one-third of it stays in the circulation. You do not need any transfusion with a hematocrit of 20 to 25%. We take people of 65 and 70 years of age through open heart surgery and do not transfuse them with a hematocrit of 25%. Now, here you are thinking of giving blood or fluids to young people whose hematocrit could comfortably go down to 20 without harm. Five is bad. Twenty-five is just fine. Fifty percent hemodilution is non-damaging.

5. Respiratory difficulty makes you think of pneumothorax. Hemoptysis would be a bad sign. Restrict the IV fluid. Give morphine which is a pulmonary vasodilator, if it gets bad. Treat pneumothorax, if it is diagnosed. I do not know how many of you have actually diagnosed a pneumothorax in the field. I have tremendous difficulty in an emergency department or in a trauma area picking up a pneumothorax that is not a tension pneumothorax and immediately premorbid. Diagnosing the subtle signs of a pneumothorax is not easy. So, if you have possible signs of a tension pneumothorax, I am all in favor of sticking a needle in the chest and relieving anything there. You are not going to kill anybody doing that, but you will kill somebody if you do not relieve a tension pneumothorax. COL Ron Bellamy's data show that 3 to 5 percent of the patients in the Vietnam database had a pneumothorax.

6. A torso wound may be unfixable if it entails a lot of hemorrhage. Basically, anybody who is hit in the bottom half of the torso with an RPG is not going to do well.

7. We need to provide decision rules and these should be very simple for the tactical environment. Here you have to consider both whether or not you can get the casualties out at all and, if so, how long it is going to take to get them to definitive medical care. I have examined some data in various databases that I have access to. I have about half a million injured patients on these databases. I can go in and pull out ten or eleven thousand gunshot wounds between the ages of 15 and 30 and look at those patients in shock. I can tell you that if you get the best of care in trauma centers in the United States after coming in with a blood pressure of 90 or less, you have a one in two chance of dying. So, in a resource-constrained hostile environment, the mortality of severe shock in this patient population is going to be close to 70 or 80 percent. Some of the times to death in these databases just reflect the fact that some physicians are pretty slow at figuring out that the patient is dead. Essentially, as somebody said this morning, if you are in cardiac arrest from trauma, that is it. If you have a blood pressure that is not measurable, if you cannot feel a carotid pulse and so forth, then you have a one in four chance of survival with optimum care. That is in a hospital, not in a field environment. The point is that, even if you have somebody who is in shock, if you can keep the blood pressure above 50, keep him talking, and give him enough fluids without overdoing it so that you restart the bleeding and dislodge the clot, they may be okay. You can probably go 6 or 8 hours tweaking them along if you can maintain a decent blood pressure.

8. Therapeutic end point is quite important. I looked at it just for pulse rate, because not all of you carry your blood pressure cuff and sphygmomanometer into the combat zone. It is reasonable to look at pulse rate as an indicator of time to death. You know if your pulse rate is over 120, you have some chance of dying, but you probably have while to go. This is from civilian data, but decision rules based on some very simple measurements like this might help individuals in the field make some of the tough decisions that have to be made in the tactical environment.

DISCUSSION

Dr. Otten: I just have a comment about blast injuries. They are very difficult to diagnose and even more difficult to treat. Casualties that you think have a pulmonary blast injury do become a priority for triage. From data that comes out of pub bombings in Northern Ireland, it has been noted that people who do not have tympanic membrane injuries do not have associated blast injuries. This is because the overpressure that is needed to rupture the tympanic membrane is about 15 psi, but the amount of overpressure needed to rupture a bleb or the alveoli in your lung is about 30 psi. So, if the casualty can hear normally and his tympanic membraness are okay, he probably does not have pulmonary or intestinal blast injury.

Dr. Champion: That is a very good point. Maybe you could comment on the history here. This is an outside blast. In a building, inside confined walls, I would have expected blast lung to be more of a concern. Outside, however, even in a Humvee, the mechanism of injury makes me put blast lung fairly low as a priority for consideration.

Dr. Otten: Right. The blast wave actually travels fastest through solid objects. People who are on board ships and close to the bulkheads when they have a blast outside are more likely to be injured than if they are a couple of feet away. It is the same inside a building. If you are near a wall, the blast that hits you from the front then bounces off the wall and hits you coming back, too. So, you get hit with the blast twice.

If you are in the water, the amount of blast injury is greater as well, because the blast wave travels faster in water, and you get a spalling effect (changes in the speed of the blast wave when travelling from one density to another that result in a tearing of membranes at the interface) as well as a water hammer effect (movement of a column of water by a blast that strikes an object in it's path). If you are up against the side of the vehicle and there is a blast outside, you are very likely to be hurt by the blast wave. If you are away from the side of the side of the vehicle you are less likely to be hurt.

Dr. Hull: You said that you wanted controversy. My interpretation of the data from Northern Ireland about blast lung and tympanic membrane rupture is slightly different. If you have tympanic membrane rupture, you are certainly at risk of having blast lung. However, if you have no tympanic membrane injury, you cannot rule out blast lung because the position of the head will determine what overpressure gets into the ear whereas the chest is exposed all the way around. You cannot rule out blast lung in people who have intact tympanic membranes, although you can certainly have a high index of suspicion in those who have had them burst.

Dr. Champion: Is there anything useful you can do? If you stretch your brain to make the diagnosis here in this tactical environment, what is the answer to "so what?" Can you do anything useful for it?

CAPT Butler: If, in fact, you make the diagnosis of pulmonary barotrauma with arterial gas embolism, there are a couple of things that you could possibly do. One is to put the casualty in the horizontal position, just as you would for an individual with a gas embolism that results from diving. You would want to put him on 100 percent oxygen when it becomes available. One of the things that we hope to look at in our research program is the use of lidocaine to treat pulmonary barotrauma with secondary arterial gas embolism. Lidocaine does not magically makes the bubbles go away, but it may reduce secondary damage to the endothelium from the bubbles.

Dr. Hull: Could I make comment on that as well? We are not necessarily talking about gas embolism here. What we are talking about is fairly mild breakdown of the pulmonary alveolar membrane with hemoptysis. So, we are basically getting blood in the alveoli rather than gas in the blood. Now, for those patients, the last thing you want to do to is lie them down. You would be much better off sitting them up.

Dr. Champion: With a bit of morphine in their IV. It is probably about the only thing you can do. If you have your stethoscope and it all goes quiet, you can listen for the crepitations.

CAPT Butler: Just to respond to that, I would agree with what you have said if your primary concern is with the patient's pulmonary status, and you are thinking that he has a contused lung. If he were to have hemiplegia or loss of consciousness to suggest neurological injury from a gas embolism, then you would do the other things that I mentioned.

Dr. Champion: Oxygen is a very expensive thing to carry around. We were charged a couple of years ago to do a complete literature research on the value of oxygen in trauma. I know you find it in the back of every ambulance and that it is routinely used in shock patients, but. there is no data that demonstrates a benefit from the routine use of oxygen in trauma patients. You can do it if you feel like it, but it is no more justified than the use of prehospital IV fluid resuscitation in patients who are not in significant shock.

LTC Holcomb: Dr. Champion, do you think it is possible that only one patient out of all the casualties in the Humvee would have a blast overpressure injury? I do not think so. If you have someone in respiratory distress, why would you not put a needle into his chest as a presumptive treatment for a tension pneumothorax?

Dr. Champion: I thought I mentioned that I would put a needle into anybody that I thought might have a tension pneumothorax.

LTC Holcomb: I asked the question because I think it is worth emphasizing, and I wanted you to emphasize it again. The things that you can do on the battlefield for chest injuries are very few, be it blast overpressure, pulmonary embolus, or whatever. The one lifesaving thing that you can do, however, is to put that IV catheter in the chest of a casualty with a tension pneumothorax.

Dr. Champion: I completely agree with you. In fact, I have been having a debate with LTC Cloonan about putting chest tubes in these folks as well, because I think that would be very useful on certain chest injuries. I think he is coming around to my point of view.

Dr. Llewellyn: I have a comment on blast overpressure injury. There is an Israeli report that documents that, of 3 people in a fairly small space, one of them had blast overpressure injury and the other two did not. I think the real issue is the pulmonary contusion one. Not infrequently, this takes some time to develop. If, in fact, you are going to have these casualties on your hands for an extended period of time, the worst thing you could do is give them Ringer's Lactate. That may make the blast lung much worse.

Unfortunately, I cannot sustain a controversy with Howard about the morphine. What I said was that after giving somebody morphine, I want to take his weapon away. I also want to take away grenades and any other ordnance as well. Now, if I have the opportunity to observe this individual and better evaluate his mental status, then I might modify the decision. If I have to have a rule of thumb, however, it is going to be that if I am doing anything that could potentially alter the mental status of an individual, then I have to observe him for a while. Having had to use morphine on myself one night in Vietnam, I am also aware of the fact that, even when you are making a conscious effort to avoid letting it affect your judgement, it can.

CAPT Johnson: I have a question that I would like to pose to the panel. When do you need to convert a needle thoracostomy to a tube thoracostomy in this scenario? These casualties are going to be there for a while. Do you wait for increasing respiratory distress before you put a chest tube in, or do you replace the needle with a tube as soon as feasible?

LTC Cloonan: I think John Holcomb ought to answer that question because he's doing the research .

LTC Holcomb: I have reviewed the needle thoracostomy data back to World War II, and there is not a lot. There are two questions: (1) how well does it work; and (2) how long does it work for? We are in the process of doing an animal protocol right now because these questions are not adequately answered by retrospective human studies. Needle thoracostomy with a 14 gauge needle works very well to relieve a tension pneumothorax initially, and it works for at least 4 hours in animals.

There are a couple of additional questions. What do you hook it up to? How do you hook the Heimlich valve up? Do you need a Heimlich valve or not? Is the needle okay just by itself? That's the long answer to your

7 December 1998

Panelists

Lt Col Rob Allen

Table Of Contents

Editor’s Summary of Key Points and Research Issues

Introduction

Overview

Scenario 1

Fast-Rope Casualty

DISCUSSION

Scenario 2

First Helicopter Crash

DISCUSSION

Scenario 3

Second Helicopter Crash

Equipment Considerations

DISCUSSION

Scenario 4

RPG Explosion in Vehicle

DISCUSSION