Letter Re: Adapting Traditional Medical Care to the Austere Environment

Mr. Rawles,
I enjoyed the referenced article, and wanted to piggyback a point about triage in combat. Combat medicine is different than a mass casualty incident in a non combat scenario. Good medicine may be bad tactics. In combat, treat those in the yellow category (such as having a finger shot off) first- to get more guns back into the fight. Otherwise you may all die, and that’s bad juju. Don’t waste time on an expectant casualty (i.e. a gunshot wound to the head with brain matter showing). Move instead to the casualty with extremity bleeding where they may be bandaged or tourniqueted and put back into the fight.

In TEOTWAWKI, combat may be a hard fact of life and the subtle differences in emergency medicine could make or break a good group’s survival. – Jeremiah Johnson in Florida