Inside the Special Operations Combat Medic Course
January 23, 2017 by Special Guest ~ Leave A Comment
by Paul Matthew Kirby (RN, BSN, NREMT-P, ATP)
This article originally appeared in ArmyRanger.com and is reposted here with the permission of the original author. First re-posted in The Havok Journal on 27 March 2014.
_____
I graduated the Special Operations Combat Medic (SOCM) program in June 2013 as part of my pipeline to become a Ranger Medic. This is a condensed evaluation of the course to give any other Rangers an insight into what to expect. Although the program constantly undergoes changes to make it more effective, the core components have remained fairly consistent throughout the course’s history. The biggest change to date is the recent addition of the 6-week Tactical Combat Casualty Care block after Combat Trauma Management. The addition of this block was intended to be a ‘putting it all together’ block of instruction and the feedback most of the cadre gave me is that it is an improvement on the old course.
Prior to attending SOCM, Rangers will have already completed Basic Combat Training (BCT), Advanced Individual Training (AIT) at Fort Sam Houston to obtain their 68-Whiskey Military Occupational Speciality (MOS) and Airborne School at Fort Benning. These blocks of training were not physically demanding or particularly mentally challenging – but I consider them one of the most difficult times of my entire training for those very reasons: the general lack of ‘a sense of purpose’.
http://havokjournal.com/national-security/inside-the-special-operations-combat-medic-course/
