CHENNAI: How to use an assault rifle to save a soldier with a broken leg? The average person may never get to know, but very soon, elite sections of the military and paramilitary agencies will learn exactly how to do all that. City-based emergency preparedness and combat aid specialists Survival Instincts will soon conduct a series of training sessions on tactical combat safety doctrines within various clandestine and covert Indian military agencies, to help them provide med aid in the war zone. “A lot of the time, when soldiers are injured on the battlefield they bleed out and die because they don’t get some simple forms of first aid in time. This was one of the reasons why combat casualties were so high in Vietnam,” explained Anoop Madhavan, founder of Survival Instincts. As a first step towards creating those skill-sets for our armed forces, they did a training programme with NSG commandos, Army, Navy, IAF, Underwater Naval Warfare teams, Marine Commandos, SWAT and counter-terrorism teams - at INS Adyar last week.
Most of the men, while skilled with combat operations, did not have simple skills like stopping a blood wound, dragging an injured comrade to a evacuation zone or even CPR, “These are skills that will greatly increase the number of lives saved. When in combat or even undercover, it can take more than 30 minutes for a medivac helicopter to get to the zone. People can die in less than 5 minutes, without the right kind of stabilisation,” he added. Madhavan was pleasantly surprised by the willingness displayed by members of the covert forces - as they threw themselves into the exercises and came up trumps on the other side.