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Globall War of Terror - Stretcher Bearer
Apr. 1st, 2018 08:34 amGloball War of Terror - Stretcher Bearer
(between "Forever Young" and "Montage"
stretcher bearer (n) a person who helps to carry the sick or injured on stretchers, especially in time of war or at the scene of an accident
I owed my life to stretcher bearers.
In terms of embarrassment, this is somewhere between slipping on a banana peel and drowning in the bathtub.
Before the Firecracker, the campus fire protection was covered by a facilities manager who wore a fire marshal hat, some contracts with various vendors, and a four minute response time from the nearest San Jose FIre Department station. The most fun we'd had was a high angle rescue when a cable snapped and trapped the window washers between 3 and 4 with a stiffening breeze and sunset in three hours.
After the Firecracker, San Jose Fire was busy as a one legged man in a hopscotch contest keeping desperate people's attempts at building shelters from becoming urban wildfires. Not only did they not have anything to spare for us, they had utterly abandoned the concept of Emergency Medical Services. If you brought your sick or wounded to a staffed fire station, they would give first aid. That's about it. And they appreciated any donations of medical supplies, or clean cloth, you could give.
In fact, we had arranged with our nearest station to refill medical oxygen bottles and fire extinguishers (nitrogen) for them. They were grateful enough to lose a little fire hose, but not enough to spot us some of the tools we really needed, like Halligan tools and a hydraulic rescue ram (the famous "Jaws of Life").
Not surprisingly, our fire protection vendors were also out of service. So between one thing and another and some stubborn insistence, the Fire Brigade was born and a particularly brave contract IT tech was volunteered to be its first Fire Captain.
Janine remained short, stout, terminally pretty and covered with tattoos. But given responsibility for fourteen buildings and her own fire department, which she could staff with a strictly limited number of employee volunteers ("Less than thirty and that's the last time you ask!"), she rose immediately to the challenge.
The Fire Brigade had four pieces of apparatus: an actual municipal fire engine (Uvas Volunteers) that an employee had stumbled across on the way to work one morning; a 4x4 pickup truck converted to a brush engine by adding a gasoline pump, PTO and water tank; a beat up gasoline van stripped out and converted into an ambulance; and a golf cart with a pump bolted down in the back. All four had a limited selection of forcible entry tools, ladders and first aid supplies.
The stretcher bearers were from that part of the Response Team (corporate militia) who had either an innate or an induced allergy to firearms. They were strictly unarmed and their only uniform was a brassard - an arm band - with a green cross on a white background. We didn't have enough reflective vests to go around, so only stretcher bearer team leaders got those.
On each four person team, there was a leader, a first aider, and two bearers. The leader carried a radio and flashlight. The first aider carried a backpack with limited medical supplies of the "stop bleeding to death NOW!" type. The two bearers between them carried a single stretcher. In a perfect world it would be an Army folding stretcher, but we did not have very many of those. What we did have a lot of was wooden laminated backboards, made in our wood shop using a plastic one as a template. And lots of nylon straps.
The very best of our volunteer employees went to critical functions such as managing the motor pool, Logistics, space allocation, etc. Anyone with special skills, especially mechanics, was tasked accordingly. The next best folks were on the Fire Brigade if they had some aptitude for running into burning buildings, or the Reaction Team if they were willing to run towards gunfire. The leftovers ... well ... ended up stretcher bearers.
The only answer was intense training. The leaders got trained in using the radio, seeing and reporting things, range estimation (which is important when shot at), and battlefield survival. The first aiders were trained over and over again in bleeding control. The bearers learned each of the patient move techniques over and over again. Then all four cross trained so that anyone could do any one else's job. In theory.
All the guards also were trained as stretcher bearers; not so that we could fill in, but so that we could command them and respect their abilities and limitations.
Their job was to move patients. They could do other things, like carry water or ammo, but the primary purpose was to take wounded from the place where they fall to the place where their lives can be saved.
This also has two intended side effects. 1) Armed personnel keep shooting back instead of stopping to help wounded and thereby weakening our defense. 2) Everyone knows that if they are hurt that we will help them. Both effects increase our morale and our combat power.
Typically we would assign stretcher bearers as teams to support our defenses, additional teams to accompany Fire Brigade personnel engaged in damage control, and a third set of teams between the triage area(s) and the infirmary.
However, stretcher bearer teams were also picked to be co-workers in the same work area, with their equipment kept by their cubes so that they could react immediately to a disaster without needing to go far or draw on a central gear storage.
This detail made it possible for a team to save my life.
As I stupidly watched the incoming mortar rounds and radioed in a range and bearing instead of diving for cover, the stretcher bearer team that saved my life had already run for the sandbagged bunker in the center of the building. Facilities had reinforced each building core, both to serve as shelter and to hopefully prevent a collapse.
The last truck bomb had reinforced our need for such things. (You know you're in the deep end of the septic tank when you talk about truck bombs in multiples.)
When there was a pause in the explosions, the stretcher team ran back out - as a team of three, with their stretcher. The fourth member had to stay in the bunker while other employees controlled the bleeding from his fragmentation injuries.
They saw my unconscious body. They ran to it. They flopped me on the stretcher and hearing another CRUMP in the distance, ran right back to the bunker. They didn't bother with straps, but held my limbs as they ran.
That shell landed where my body had been.
I owed them not only my own life, but every life I saved from now on.
I saved an evidence copy of the camera footage. File retention policy would delete it from the main server.
I checked the access log.
"Footage has been accessed 37 times by 14 authorized users."
Oh Goddamn it.
Even through my piercing headache, I knew I was never going to live this down.
But I was alive to try.
(between "Forever Young" and "Montage"
stretcher bearer (n) a person who helps to carry the sick or injured on stretchers, especially in time of war or at the scene of an accident
I owed my life to stretcher bearers.
In terms of embarrassment, this is somewhere between slipping on a banana peel and drowning in the bathtub.
Before the Firecracker, the campus fire protection was covered by a facilities manager who wore a fire marshal hat, some contracts with various vendors, and a four minute response time from the nearest San Jose FIre Department station. The most fun we'd had was a high angle rescue when a cable snapped and trapped the window washers between 3 and 4 with a stiffening breeze and sunset in three hours.
After the Firecracker, San Jose Fire was busy as a one legged man in a hopscotch contest keeping desperate people's attempts at building shelters from becoming urban wildfires. Not only did they not have anything to spare for us, they had utterly abandoned the concept of Emergency Medical Services. If you brought your sick or wounded to a staffed fire station, they would give first aid. That's about it. And they appreciated any donations of medical supplies, or clean cloth, you could give.
In fact, we had arranged with our nearest station to refill medical oxygen bottles and fire extinguishers (nitrogen) for them. They were grateful enough to lose a little fire hose, but not enough to spot us some of the tools we really needed, like Halligan tools and a hydraulic rescue ram (the famous "Jaws of Life").
Not surprisingly, our fire protection vendors were also out of service. So between one thing and another and some stubborn insistence, the Fire Brigade was born and a particularly brave contract IT tech was volunteered to be its first Fire Captain.
Janine remained short, stout, terminally pretty and covered with tattoos. But given responsibility for fourteen buildings and her own fire department, which she could staff with a strictly limited number of employee volunteers ("Less than thirty and that's the last time you ask!"), she rose immediately to the challenge.
The Fire Brigade had four pieces of apparatus: an actual municipal fire engine (Uvas Volunteers) that an employee had stumbled across on the way to work one morning; a 4x4 pickup truck converted to a brush engine by adding a gasoline pump, PTO and water tank; a beat up gasoline van stripped out and converted into an ambulance; and a golf cart with a pump bolted down in the back. All four had a limited selection of forcible entry tools, ladders and first aid supplies.
The stretcher bearers were from that part of the Response Team (corporate militia) who had either an innate or an induced allergy to firearms. They were strictly unarmed and their only uniform was a brassard - an arm band - with a green cross on a white background. We didn't have enough reflective vests to go around, so only stretcher bearer team leaders got those.
On each four person team, there was a leader, a first aider, and two bearers. The leader carried a radio and flashlight. The first aider carried a backpack with limited medical supplies of the "stop bleeding to death NOW!" type. The two bearers between them carried a single stretcher. In a perfect world it would be an Army folding stretcher, but we did not have very many of those. What we did have a lot of was wooden laminated backboards, made in our wood shop using a plastic one as a template. And lots of nylon straps.
The very best of our volunteer employees went to critical functions such as managing the motor pool, Logistics, space allocation, etc. Anyone with special skills, especially mechanics, was tasked accordingly. The next best folks were on the Fire Brigade if they had some aptitude for running into burning buildings, or the Reaction Team if they were willing to run towards gunfire. The leftovers ... well ... ended up stretcher bearers.
The only answer was intense training. The leaders got trained in using the radio, seeing and reporting things, range estimation (which is important when shot at), and battlefield survival. The first aiders were trained over and over again in bleeding control. The bearers learned each of the patient move techniques over and over again. Then all four cross trained so that anyone could do any one else's job. In theory.
All the guards also were trained as stretcher bearers; not so that we could fill in, but so that we could command them and respect their abilities and limitations.
Their job was to move patients. They could do other things, like carry water or ammo, but the primary purpose was to take wounded from the place where they fall to the place where their lives can be saved.
This also has two intended side effects. 1) Armed personnel keep shooting back instead of stopping to help wounded and thereby weakening our defense. 2) Everyone knows that if they are hurt that we will help them. Both effects increase our morale and our combat power.
Typically we would assign stretcher bearers as teams to support our defenses, additional teams to accompany Fire Brigade personnel engaged in damage control, and a third set of teams between the triage area(s) and the infirmary.
However, stretcher bearer teams were also picked to be co-workers in the same work area, with their equipment kept by their cubes so that they could react immediately to a disaster without needing to go far or draw on a central gear storage.
This detail made it possible for a team to save my life.
As I stupidly watched the incoming mortar rounds and radioed in a range and bearing instead of diving for cover, the stretcher bearer team that saved my life had already run for the sandbagged bunker in the center of the building. Facilities had reinforced each building core, both to serve as shelter and to hopefully prevent a collapse.
The last truck bomb had reinforced our need for such things. (You know you're in the deep end of the septic tank when you talk about truck bombs in multiples.)
When there was a pause in the explosions, the stretcher team ran back out - as a team of three, with their stretcher. The fourth member had to stay in the bunker while other employees controlled the bleeding from his fragmentation injuries.
They saw my unconscious body. They ran to it. They flopped me on the stretcher and hearing another CRUMP in the distance, ran right back to the bunker. They didn't bother with straps, but held my limbs as they ran.
That shell landed where my body had been.
I owed them not only my own life, but every life I saved from now on.
I saved an evidence copy of the camera footage. File retention policy would delete it from the main server.
I checked the access log.
"Footage has been accessed 37 times by 14 authorized users."
Oh Goddamn it.
Even through my piercing headache, I knew I was never going to live this down.
But I was alive to try.
