North Florida Ranger School 12-15 Jan 2007

floridacyclist · January 16, 2007, 06:58:09 PM

So Others May Live

Sunday, residents of Woodville or Ft Braden might have been surprised to see what looked like a skirmish line of figures in military uniforms, but they weren't being invaded by a foreign army; they were observing search and rescue workers honing their skills.

The Florida Wing of the Civil Air Patrol, the official United States Air Force Auxiliary held the North Florida Ranger School in the Tallahassee area over this long Martin Luther King Jr Weekend. The school is an advanced group of Civil Air Patrol Search and Rescue workers who train at very high levels of motivation in order to develop their skills beyond the minimum requirements. In 3 days of living in conditions that are best described as "austere", the Civil Air Patrol members from FL, GA, and AL (including several from Tallahassee) studied, practiced, and were evaluated on various topics ranging from Wilderness First Aid and Land Navigation to Survival Skills and Radio Communications. The more experienced cadets and officers received additional instruction and practice on leading, teaching, and evaluating students. While several adults provided oversight and mentoring, much of the school was operated by senior cadets: teenagers who have reached an advanced level of leadership and training.

The students started off Saturday morning with a pre-dawn van ride from the staging area to the actual training area that they called home for the next three days. As the vans unexpectedly pulled to the side of the road, everyone was quickly hustled off and into formation in order to run the last mile into camp. Physical Training, similar to what military recruits go through was next and the rest of their day only got tougher as their instructors and cadre moved them quickly from class to class, all of them outdoors in the elements. If it was hot, they shed outer layers and drank even more water; if they were cold they added layers and they had ponchos in case it rained. The slowest part of the day was the evening church service they were allowed to attend if they chose followed by a NIMS IS700 class. The entire school was meant to mimic the mental, physical, and environmental stress of real-world Wilderness Search and Rescue where lives are at stake and you don't have the luxury of waiting for the weather to be sunny and bright.

They were told to sleep in the next morning since it was Sunday morning and their instructors were feeling warm, fuzzy, and sensitive. The illusion of a peaceful morning snuggled inside sleeping bags was shattered as they were jolted awake at 6:00 AM and told to fall in with all their gear. Stumbling into formation while rubbing the sleep from their eyes, they were briefed that a single-engined airplane was missing just West of Tallahassee and that as the closest team to the location, they were in the hot seat. Dawn broke as they dismounted their vehicles several miles out in the National Forest and began their 5-mile hike to where the Air Force Search and Rescue Satellites had picked up a faint distress signal. Rumored reports of garbled calls for help on the radio only added to the urgency.

After breaking trail for 4 or 5 miles through dense underbrush and crossing several creeks swollen by the past week's rains, the Search and Rescue Team Members were finally rewarded with a faint warbling sound in their radio direction-finding gear. Following the distress signal, they found the small Cessna nose-down in a gulley with the critically-injured pilot entrapped in the airplane and the passenger nearby. The searchers performed first aid to keep them alive until firefighters, guided in by a second CAP ground team responded to the scene with more advanced medical training and equipment. Together, they began preparing to transport the injured victims to the EMTs and paramedics, who themselves were responding to a helicopter landing zone almost a mile away. Strapping them securely onto backboards, they began the backbreaking trek back through the deep gulley and over many downed trees to the landing zone with their loaded backboards. At the medical staging area, the awaiting EMS personnel took over and directed the loading of the lesser-injured patient into the waiting ambulance for the trip to the nearby hospital as other cadets ensured a safe landing zone for the helicopter and guided the pilot down with hand signals. Firefighters, CAP team members, and the flight paramedic quickly loaded the patient into the back of the helicopter, which rapidly took off as soon as the flight paramedic was onboard. It then circled once, landed and shut it's engines down completely. The exercise was halted and the cadets were given a tour of the ambulance and helicopter.

Exercise? Yes...the Cessna airplane was from the junkyard and the "victims" were made up with moulage to resemble injured crash victims. The students were told this after they departed camp for the crash site itself, but they still reacted as if it were real, diagnosing and treating each simulated injury as if the patient's life depended on it. The local TV station and newspaper also had reporters on-scene with a write-up and photo gallery at http://www.tdo.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070115/NEWS01/701150324/1010

That night back at Ft McGee the aircraft was parked in a stand of trees and crash site security was re-established after having been simulated for the duration of the patient evacuation and hotwash. Using only what they had brought with them in their 24hr gear, the students made themselves as comfortable as possible for the night. Any griping about being made to sleep under the stars with only a poncho for shelter ended as it was realized that the loudly-snoring lump near the aircraft perimeter was the school commander, similarly wrapped in his poncho.

The last day of the school was a high-speed blur of evaluating and documenting the training that had occurred. As the cadets prepared for the Monday afternoon graduation ceremony, they realized that they had not been on any ordinary "camping trip". As they marched by their parents in the graduation parade, and later on the ride home their parents realized the same thing. Their parents probably might have also noticed that to some extent, their "children" were at least a little less child-like and had maybe even grown up some with this taste of adult-style leadership and responsibility. The students also knew that they were expected to return to their home units and take some of this new knowledge, insight, and perhaps most importantly, motivation back with them; that is how Ranger School works.

Civil Air Patrol, the official auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force, is a nonprofit organization with almost 60,000 volunteer members nationwide. It performs 95% of continental U.S. inland search and rescue missions as tasked by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center. Volunteers also perform homeland security, disaster relief and counterdrug missions at the request of federal, state and local agencies. The members take a leading role in aerospace education and serve as mentors to the almost 25,000 young people currently participating in CAP cadet programs. CAP has been performing missions for America for more than 60 years. For more information please see www.flwg.us or www.cap.gov.

Two CAP ground teams.
Two fire departments.
Two critically injured victims.

One mission

THESE THINGS WE DO THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE.

Team members open the door to the airplane and make an unexpected discovery
(note: They didn't even know that we had a real airplane and were expecting to find a hidden ELT)