Summary

Chapter 6, “Carnage Under Fire: How do Combat Medics Cope?” In this chapter, the author discusses the training that military medics (corpsmen) undergo in order to help them neutralize the so-called “flight or fight” response – that is, an instinctive, hormone-defined reaction to external stressors. In essence, the mental and physical components of that response result in, as one of the author’s interview subjects suggests, the person having the response becoming “‘fast, strong, and dumb’” (110). The author comments that the training corpsmen receive is designed to keep them thinking - or, if that fails, reacting to highly and deeply trained muscle memory, in which responses and behavior become automatic. The author describes a pair of combat simulations, scenarios in which circumstances of the job (i.e. medical care of wounded persons, both military and civilian) are recreated in order to test and improve the responses...