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GWOT 1 - Flashback
GWOT 1 - Flashback
Tomorrow we have our second all hands mass casualty exercise.
Now that we have a reasonable division of labor, the plan on paper (actually, electronic, because we print as little as possible now) is basically this:
- Security Control is the eyes and ears
- Security Operations are the first to rush to the scene to assess safety
- increasingly heavily armed client employee Reaction Teams make it safe, if necessary
- unarmed client employee Stretcher Bearers, once it is safe, start triaging and treating and transporting the wounded at the most basic level
- Medical staffs the infirmary and when it is fully staffed, may send forward Triage Officer(s) and or Treatment Teams
- Fire Brigade rescues from mechanical hazards, collapsed buildings, etc. and if necessary decontaminates
Decisions are increasingly made further up the chain. While Security Control or the security supervisors or myself can and will make initial decisions, we pass this off to the Reaction Team Commander as soon as we possibly can. The VPs are looped in as soon as possible after that and any hard decisions (like who lives and who dies) go up to the Site Location Executive, the big boss.
The SLE and the VP of Facilities and I wrote the exercise. I had to tone it down, twice. No, we are not going to combat loss the Infirmary in only our second exercise. We do need to practice for that, but it is a bridge too far. No, we are not ready for a building collapse. Too many working parts, too soon.
The exercise I have set up is rough enough.
I am explicitly tagged out of this one. We already know that I am a qualified IC, or Incident Commander, because I've been the fucking Only One for two months. We need more, because a function that critical needs as many trained brains as we can throw at it, to replace mine when it becomes a lawn decoration or whatever.
So I will be paying attention to the Real World while the exercise is running. We can use cameras for evaluation and I will be monitoring the exercise radio traffic, but someone needs to actually watch the actual gates and perimeter.
My last stop is the Infirmary. The vet tech snarls at my approach, as she always does.
Without speaking, I stick my head into the nurse's station and read the board, artfully concealed from passers by but readily accessible to the staff who know to look for it.
Six patients are in critical but stable condition. The twelve bed ICU ward is not part of this exercise. The other six beds have ordinary stable patients in them, to get them out of the way. The twenty four bed ordinary ward will be emptied an hour prior to the exercise, and the patients will be lurking, eating or resting quietly nearby. Morning sick call will be two hours early and anything that can wait will have to wait for afternoon sick call.
One of our critical patients died in the mid afternoon. Sepsis. The antibiotics we had couldn't keep up with the multiple infections.
I come back out and the vet tech is still standing there.
"Having fun?" she asks sardonically.
"No," I reply mildly.
I go to the infirmary guard. She appreciates the seriousness of all this. I glance at the rolling electronic log. Nothing unusual. The death was properly logged.
I briefly give instructions on how to document the exercise in the real log tomorrow.
Then I leave to get some rest.
Tomorrow is going to be rough.
###
"H5, Emergency Traffic, Fire and Explosion, Motor Pool!"
"Confirm exercise traffic," I snap out crisply as my hand lifts the cover on the Master Alarm push button.
"Uh... Exercise Traffic, Fire and Explosion, Motor Pool!"
Better.
I pan the cameras over just in case.
The scenario is simple. A convoy returning from a rescue just found out the hard way that we picked up an IED along with the wounded we recovered.
The cameras show me the four junked vehicles with 'wounded' and even 'dead' Security personnel mixed with uncleared civilians and previously wounded survivors, some of whom have just been wounded a second time.
I listen as the site sets up our response. Security Control steals the cameras I let them have. I keep one set for real world monitoring and keep checking the perimeter and gates. So does one of the exercise dispatchers, simulating the need to keep the site secure even if there is a critical event.
"Scene not secure, IED event," snaps out. The Fire Brigade is forcing everyone to stage while our bomb tech responds.
Within one minute, Mo has made an assessment.
"Scene is hot, rescue is authorized," he decides, as pre arranged.
If the scene had been cold, we would have simply set up in the middle of it.
If the scene had been warm, we would have evacuated people a short distance.
But a hot scene means more devices could explode at any time.
Strictly speaking, that means stay the hell out.
But can we really ask people to stand still and watch their friends bleed out?
If we insist on risking lives to save lives, we don't have to be stupid about it.
So the Fire Brigade is rigging hoses and fighting the notional fire and ready to protect exposures, decontaminate, and/or disrupt a charge as a last resort.
The Reaction Teams are providing overwatch for everything. They are particularly attentive to two very dangerous issues that are all theirs.
Some Security personnel have been 'killed' and their weapons are no longer controlled. Others have been 'wounded' and if disabled, must be immediately disarmed for their own safety and the safety of others. You don't want the guy with the rifle to decide the rescuers are a threat and hose them down with gunfire.
The other issue is that we have just brought uncleared persons into the site who were about to be processed when the IED went off. They haven't been processed. And one of the uncleared persons is a 'bad guy.'
An hour ago, the Reaction Team commander and I personally verified that his team's firearms were in the authorized condition for this exercise. Unloaded, empty magazines in carriers, one loaded live magazine in the right lower cargo pocket of each authorized team member's pants.
The crow's nest at H5 is monitoring this activity with loaded live sniper rifles, as they monitor all activity on the premises.
H5 is observing and sending radio traffic but is not 'playing.' They are under my control and if they are ordered to fire, it will be by me and for real to really kill a deadly threat.
If someone loads their firearm without authorization, H5 will check with me once, and then kill them. For real.
The roleplayer, one of our instructors, who lurches out of the wreckage and is firing blanks at the stretcher bearers currently in the hot zone to pick up wounded, is why.
The Reaction Team promptly responds, shouting BANG BANG BANG as they bring their rifles up.
Three more wounded: one suspect, two stretcher bearers. The rest of the bearers follow their SOP and either burrow into any available cover or run away broken-field style seeking same.
The Incident Command makes an assignment change. Operations Triage is Fire Brigade Actual. Operations Medical Transport is now one of the security supervisors from the ambushed convoy.
This is a really, really bad pair of decisions.
As I wrote the exercise, I know that the Fire Brigade is needed for rescue and scene safety.
I also know that the security supervisor selected has a simulated head injury and has been ordered to act nonsensically until their status as a casualty is discovered.
I do nothing.
Within minutes, the stretcher bearers are getting their former boss to lie down on a stretcher and be good. But the wounded have meanwhile been sent in all directions.
Janine is duly triaging when she becomes a casualty of the second IED.
Mo orders the scene closed.
Anyone who can't get out on their own, which includes half the prior wounded, is going to be stuck for a while.
This ironically cuts the flow of casualties to the Infirmary, keeping it from becoming too overwhelmed.
The Fire Brigade, deprived of leadership, starts rigging ropes to throw into the scene and calling out on PA and bullhorn for the wounded to loop them around themselves and/or grab them so they can be dragged out.
The Triage Officer dispatched from Medical, one of our two trained nurses, flatly refuses to enter the closed scene. Good for her.
Then I get a phone call on the back line from the infirmary guard.
"Control, Real McCoy, we have a real world casualty."
"Go."
"You need to come down here."
"Unable. Nature of casualty?"
"Psych."
"Follow protocol."
"Unable," the guard replies in the same tone I used a moment prior.
"Why?"
"It's the doctor."
I pull up the infirmary cameras.
The doctor is screaming at everybody. And everybody is shaken.
Protocol calls for a treatment team to take control of the psychological casualty using the minimal force possible. Headed by the most experienced medical professional present.
That won't be possible.
I turn to Wyatt.
"Take over Real McCoy!" I direct and sprint out of Security Control.
The infirmary is one building over and one building down. I teleport across the gap in what cameras later tell me is two minutes forty seven seconds, a new personal best.
The doctor, which is what everyone but me calls the vet tech, is screaming at everyone.
The general refrain is what the hell is wrong with all of us? Why are we playing at all of this when it is really happening here and all over the world? Is there not enough death that we have to jack ourselves off to more?
I have necessarily paraphrased. Some things are too raw, too naked, too obscene to commit to words.
As I cross the gap, I evaluate my options.
Kinetic counseling is tempting. But it has many limitations. It also damages the authority of the person using it and the person so counseled. And that collateral damage is unacceptable.
This is a real incident interrupting a simulated event.
That makes the response obvious.
I address everyone else by getting their attention with a live round fired into an overhead light fixture.
Safety third.
"The infirmary is closed to internal disaster. Clear the room," I order, then turn to the vet tech, not paying attention to whether my command is followed.
I holster and lock down the third retention strap on my holster, preparing for hands on.
"You sad, pathetic worthless piece of shit," I say quietly.
"What did you say to me?" she begins, focusing her rage on a tangible, physical target.
I break radio squelch.
"E18, we have a psychological casualty in Infirmary. All psychiatric staff will respond Code 3. That's right now."
"Are you calling me crazy?"
"As a mad hatter," I reply flatly, and she starts to advance on me in what a report would call a 'menacing' manner while picking up a chair.
I retreat towards the Staff Lounge. Hopefully it is empty. i don't dare take my eyes off the angry woman waving the chair to check.
I back into the Lounge. This is normally bad tactics. But there's reasons.
She follows. The chair hangs up on the door frame so she drops it.
Unnoticed, the infirmary guard follows her smoothly with a Taser in his left hand.
I shake my head slightly and make a small pinching and turning motion with my right hand.
In our hand signal code, that means "lock the door."
She enters the Lounge and gives vent to a truly amazing barrage of violent, obscene, scatalogical, geneological, and last but not least bestial curses. My habits, ancestry, parentage and genitals are outlined.
Once she is far enough from the door, the infirmary guard sneaks in just long enough to grab the door handle and close it behind her.
It is time for me to grovel.
Verbal judo is not just about saying something clever, or devastating, or funny, or disarming. It's about creating the best outcome in the moment, when the alternative is violence.
And I have just gotten a supremely angry woman with great moral and practical authority to follow me into what is now a locked room.
"Doctor, I am so sorry I had to say these things to you," I begin during a breath pause in her rant.
The wedge lets me get in the next sentence. It is the one thing people love hearing.
"You are so right. Everything you said is true."
I continue in this vein for a while.
Then I switch to feeding.
"Doctor, so many people are still alive because of you. Your skill, your integrity, your vision..."
I am buying time.
The door opens and Dr. Betty Rize walks in, in her full suit and skirt.
"Thank you, asshole," she says coldly to me. "Dismissed."
We are on work time. I get up and walk out. But I shiver an eyelid at her, to warn that the next time she is in a counseling session with me, she will pay for that one.
She works best without a safety net.
Talking down our Doctor from a psychotic meltdown definitely qualifies.
I lock the door behind me and tell the guard to holster.
I then go over to the wall, unlock the security phone box, and call Control.
"Echo 18, exercise status."
"Suspended due to infirmary event."
"Continue the exercise. Immediately."
"Sir?"
"Continue. The. Goddamn. Exercise."
I wade out into the scenario area and collar the two umpires.
There is screaming. All mine.
Then I go get Janine.
"Congratulations on your resurrection. Exercise traffic. The infirmary is closed to internal disaster and the Doctor is a casualty. Set up mass casualty treatment in the battle dressing station in C dock. Real McCoy, she's having a moment and Dr. Rize is with her."
And the band plays on.
Apocalypse doesn't pause for casualties.
Neither. Will. We.
Tomorrow we have our second all hands mass casualty exercise.
Now that we have a reasonable division of labor, the plan on paper (actually, electronic, because we print as little as possible now) is basically this:
- Security Control is the eyes and ears
- Security Operations are the first to rush to the scene to assess safety
- increasingly heavily armed client employee Reaction Teams make it safe, if necessary
- unarmed client employee Stretcher Bearers, once it is safe, start triaging and treating and transporting the wounded at the most basic level
- Medical staffs the infirmary and when it is fully staffed, may send forward Triage Officer(s) and or Treatment Teams
- Fire Brigade rescues from mechanical hazards, collapsed buildings, etc. and if necessary decontaminates
Decisions are increasingly made further up the chain. While Security Control or the security supervisors or myself can and will make initial decisions, we pass this off to the Reaction Team Commander as soon as we possibly can. The VPs are looped in as soon as possible after that and any hard decisions (like who lives and who dies) go up to the Site Location Executive, the big boss.
The SLE and the VP of Facilities and I wrote the exercise. I had to tone it down, twice. No, we are not going to combat loss the Infirmary in only our second exercise. We do need to practice for that, but it is a bridge too far. No, we are not ready for a building collapse. Too many working parts, too soon.
The exercise I have set up is rough enough.
I am explicitly tagged out of this one. We already know that I am a qualified IC, or Incident Commander, because I've been the fucking Only One for two months. We need more, because a function that critical needs as many trained brains as we can throw at it, to replace mine when it becomes a lawn decoration or whatever.
So I will be paying attention to the Real World while the exercise is running. We can use cameras for evaluation and I will be monitoring the exercise radio traffic, but someone needs to actually watch the actual gates and perimeter.
My last stop is the Infirmary. The vet tech snarls at my approach, as she always does.
Without speaking, I stick my head into the nurse's station and read the board, artfully concealed from passers by but readily accessible to the staff who know to look for it.
Six patients are in critical but stable condition. The twelve bed ICU ward is not part of this exercise. The other six beds have ordinary stable patients in them, to get them out of the way. The twenty four bed ordinary ward will be emptied an hour prior to the exercise, and the patients will be lurking, eating or resting quietly nearby. Morning sick call will be two hours early and anything that can wait will have to wait for afternoon sick call.
One of our critical patients died in the mid afternoon. Sepsis. The antibiotics we had couldn't keep up with the multiple infections.
I come back out and the vet tech is still standing there.
"Having fun?" she asks sardonically.
"No," I reply mildly.
I go to the infirmary guard. She appreciates the seriousness of all this. I glance at the rolling electronic log. Nothing unusual. The death was properly logged.
I briefly give instructions on how to document the exercise in the real log tomorrow.
Then I leave to get some rest.
Tomorrow is going to be rough.
###
"H5, Emergency Traffic, Fire and Explosion, Motor Pool!"
"Confirm exercise traffic," I snap out crisply as my hand lifts the cover on the Master Alarm push button.
"Uh... Exercise Traffic, Fire and Explosion, Motor Pool!"
Better.
I pan the cameras over just in case.
The scenario is simple. A convoy returning from a rescue just found out the hard way that we picked up an IED along with the wounded we recovered.
The cameras show me the four junked vehicles with 'wounded' and even 'dead' Security personnel mixed with uncleared civilians and previously wounded survivors, some of whom have just been wounded a second time.
I listen as the site sets up our response. Security Control steals the cameras I let them have. I keep one set for real world monitoring and keep checking the perimeter and gates. So does one of the exercise dispatchers, simulating the need to keep the site secure even if there is a critical event.
"Scene not secure, IED event," snaps out. The Fire Brigade is forcing everyone to stage while our bomb tech responds.
Within one minute, Mo has made an assessment.
"Scene is hot, rescue is authorized," he decides, as pre arranged.
If the scene had been cold, we would have simply set up in the middle of it.
If the scene had been warm, we would have evacuated people a short distance.
But a hot scene means more devices could explode at any time.
Strictly speaking, that means stay the hell out.
But can we really ask people to stand still and watch their friends bleed out?
If we insist on risking lives to save lives, we don't have to be stupid about it.
So the Fire Brigade is rigging hoses and fighting the notional fire and ready to protect exposures, decontaminate, and/or disrupt a charge as a last resort.
The Reaction Teams are providing overwatch for everything. They are particularly attentive to two very dangerous issues that are all theirs.
Some Security personnel have been 'killed' and their weapons are no longer controlled. Others have been 'wounded' and if disabled, must be immediately disarmed for their own safety and the safety of others. You don't want the guy with the rifle to decide the rescuers are a threat and hose them down with gunfire.
The other issue is that we have just brought uncleared persons into the site who were about to be processed when the IED went off. They haven't been processed. And one of the uncleared persons is a 'bad guy.'
An hour ago, the Reaction Team commander and I personally verified that his team's firearms were in the authorized condition for this exercise. Unloaded, empty magazines in carriers, one loaded live magazine in the right lower cargo pocket of each authorized team member's pants.
The crow's nest at H5 is monitoring this activity with loaded live sniper rifles, as they monitor all activity on the premises.
H5 is observing and sending radio traffic but is not 'playing.' They are under my control and if they are ordered to fire, it will be by me and for real to really kill a deadly threat.
If someone loads their firearm without authorization, H5 will check with me once, and then kill them. For real.
The roleplayer, one of our instructors, who lurches out of the wreckage and is firing blanks at the stretcher bearers currently in the hot zone to pick up wounded, is why.
The Reaction Team promptly responds, shouting BANG BANG BANG as they bring their rifles up.
Three more wounded: one suspect, two stretcher bearers. The rest of the bearers follow their SOP and either burrow into any available cover or run away broken-field style seeking same.
The Incident Command makes an assignment change. Operations Triage is Fire Brigade Actual. Operations Medical Transport is now one of the security supervisors from the ambushed convoy.
This is a really, really bad pair of decisions.
As I wrote the exercise, I know that the Fire Brigade is needed for rescue and scene safety.
I also know that the security supervisor selected has a simulated head injury and has been ordered to act nonsensically until their status as a casualty is discovered.
I do nothing.
Within minutes, the stretcher bearers are getting their former boss to lie down on a stretcher and be good. But the wounded have meanwhile been sent in all directions.
Janine is duly triaging when she becomes a casualty of the second IED.
Mo orders the scene closed.
Anyone who can't get out on their own, which includes half the prior wounded, is going to be stuck for a while.
This ironically cuts the flow of casualties to the Infirmary, keeping it from becoming too overwhelmed.
The Fire Brigade, deprived of leadership, starts rigging ropes to throw into the scene and calling out on PA and bullhorn for the wounded to loop them around themselves and/or grab them so they can be dragged out.
The Triage Officer dispatched from Medical, one of our two trained nurses, flatly refuses to enter the closed scene. Good for her.
Then I get a phone call on the back line from the infirmary guard.
"Control, Real McCoy, we have a real world casualty."
"Go."
"You need to come down here."
"Unable. Nature of casualty?"
"Psych."
"Follow protocol."
"Unable," the guard replies in the same tone I used a moment prior.
"Why?"
"It's the doctor."
I pull up the infirmary cameras.
The doctor is screaming at everybody. And everybody is shaken.
Protocol calls for a treatment team to take control of the psychological casualty using the minimal force possible. Headed by the most experienced medical professional present.
That won't be possible.
I turn to Wyatt.
"Take over Real McCoy!" I direct and sprint out of Security Control.
The infirmary is one building over and one building down. I teleport across the gap in what cameras later tell me is two minutes forty seven seconds, a new personal best.
The doctor, which is what everyone but me calls the vet tech, is screaming at everyone.
The general refrain is what the hell is wrong with all of us? Why are we playing at all of this when it is really happening here and all over the world? Is there not enough death that we have to jack ourselves off to more?
I have necessarily paraphrased. Some things are too raw, too naked, too obscene to commit to words.
As I cross the gap, I evaluate my options.
Kinetic counseling is tempting. But it has many limitations. It also damages the authority of the person using it and the person so counseled. And that collateral damage is unacceptable.
This is a real incident interrupting a simulated event.
That makes the response obvious.
I address everyone else by getting their attention with a live round fired into an overhead light fixture.
Safety third.
"The infirmary is closed to internal disaster. Clear the room," I order, then turn to the vet tech, not paying attention to whether my command is followed.
I holster and lock down the third retention strap on my holster, preparing for hands on.
"You sad, pathetic worthless piece of shit," I say quietly.
"What did you say to me?" she begins, focusing her rage on a tangible, physical target.
I break radio squelch.
"E18, we have a psychological casualty in Infirmary. All psychiatric staff will respond Code 3. That's right now."
"Are you calling me crazy?"
"As a mad hatter," I reply flatly, and she starts to advance on me in what a report would call a 'menacing' manner while picking up a chair.
I retreat towards the Staff Lounge. Hopefully it is empty. i don't dare take my eyes off the angry woman waving the chair to check.
I back into the Lounge. This is normally bad tactics. But there's reasons.
She follows. The chair hangs up on the door frame so she drops it.
Unnoticed, the infirmary guard follows her smoothly with a Taser in his left hand.
I shake my head slightly and make a small pinching and turning motion with my right hand.
In our hand signal code, that means "lock the door."
She enters the Lounge and gives vent to a truly amazing barrage of violent, obscene, scatalogical, geneological, and last but not least bestial curses. My habits, ancestry, parentage and genitals are outlined.
Once she is far enough from the door, the infirmary guard sneaks in just long enough to grab the door handle and close it behind her.
It is time for me to grovel.
Verbal judo is not just about saying something clever, or devastating, or funny, or disarming. It's about creating the best outcome in the moment, when the alternative is violence.
And I have just gotten a supremely angry woman with great moral and practical authority to follow me into what is now a locked room.
"Doctor, I am so sorry I had to say these things to you," I begin during a breath pause in her rant.
The wedge lets me get in the next sentence. It is the one thing people love hearing.
"You are so right. Everything you said is true."
I continue in this vein for a while.
Then I switch to feeding.
"Doctor, so many people are still alive because of you. Your skill, your integrity, your vision..."
I am buying time.
The door opens and Dr. Betty Rize walks in, in her full suit and skirt.
"Thank you, asshole," she says coldly to me. "Dismissed."
We are on work time. I get up and walk out. But I shiver an eyelid at her, to warn that the next time she is in a counseling session with me, she will pay for that one.
She works best without a safety net.
Talking down our Doctor from a psychotic meltdown definitely qualifies.
I lock the door behind me and tell the guard to holster.
I then go over to the wall, unlock the security phone box, and call Control.
"Echo 18, exercise status."
"Suspended due to infirmary event."
"Continue the exercise. Immediately."
"Sir?"
"Continue. The. Goddamn. Exercise."
I wade out into the scenario area and collar the two umpires.
There is screaming. All mine.
Then I go get Janine.
"Congratulations on your resurrection. Exercise traffic. The infirmary is closed to internal disaster and the Doctor is a casualty. Set up mass casualty treatment in the battle dressing station in C dock. Real McCoy, she's having a moment and Dr. Rize is with her."
And the band plays on.
Apocalypse doesn't pause for casualties.
Neither. Will. We.