Saturation Training

Saturation training is simply training a task at its most basic level over and over and over and over, then building on the next step or skill and so on. Like the old Bruce Lee quote, “I don’t fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks, I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

Between the time I had enlisted in the Navy and went to boot camp 9/11 happened, I don’t know how much that changed the Navy’s why of training at the time. But I do know it did create a greater sense of urgency as I attended Hospital Corps School amongst the students. I graduated in May of 2002 and was in bootcamp by June, fighting in Afghanistan had already been going on, and sometime in there we knew that we were going into invade Iraq again. There was definitely a feeling of inadequacy throughout the class, regarding our budding medical skills being the thing needed to keep everyone alive. It created a high degree of motivation to learn as much as we could.

The second phase of Hospital Corps School was trauma and skills focused, and we were pretty much scheduled out with class, PT, and meals from 6:30 in the morning until 6:00 at night. Afterwards many of us would go back into the school house, where we practiced whatever skills we were working on even more. I mean tons of repetitions, with someone as the training dummy and another person critiquing.

Not focusing on speed, rather on correct form, doing each task enough times too where we had a smooth system/technique for each one. It was boring some would say, and they were right. But we were making damn sure we kept everyone alive who you could be.

This was the model all the way through training, pre-deployment, arriving in Kuwait, once we got to Iraq, etc., etc. It was basic, for the most part it could be practiced everywhere we went.

Shortly after arriving in Iraq we were actively engaged in combat operations. Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) and mine attacks where becoming the newest and most prevalent threat which caused injuries I treated. I can tell you throughout all the training and preparation, I was still worried about how ready I was to perform my job in combat. I think everyone was, after all combat plays for keeps.

The first combat injuries my platoon took was an IED attack striking one of the four vehicles we took out that night. The call for “CORPSMAN UP” went out almost immediately, I shot out of HUMVEE as the others pushed out security, and yet to work.

I didn’t realize until a after a few minutes or working on the first casualty, but every action I took I delivered smoothly, quickly, and effectively due to the thousands of repetitions practiced before. It actually was both a shocking and created a sense of relieve, realizing just how effective our training actually was. And that is the point, hard work through mundane but effective training in the basics makes a person very good at performing a task.

-Joe