BUTLERVILLE, Ind. - The building had collapsed, and victims were trapped and screaming for medical assistance through the smoke and cement dust of a 20-foot-tall rubble pile. Luckily for them, an Illinois Air National Guard medical team was deployed nearby. They had been called out after a 10-kilometer nuclear detonation near Indianapolis.
They responded immediately, and they were set up and providing lifesaving care within 30 minutes.
Airmen from three Indiana Air National Guard medical groups processed hundreds of simulated causalities at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center here in mid-May as part of a response exercise involving the Illinois Guard's Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Enhanced Response Force Package (CERFP).
CERFPs are joint National Guard response elements made up of Army and Air Guard members who search for, extract and decontaminate disaster victims and who assess, treat and help transport causalities to medical centers.
The training exercise, Vigilant Guard, is providing multiple training scenarios for emergency responders including more than 2,000 Guard Soldiers and Airmen from Indiana and surrounding states, active duty military, federal agencies and more than 1,100 local emergency responders. It is one of the National Guard's largest homeland defense, disaster response exercises in history.
The Air Guard medical team was made up of 36 Airmen from the state's 126th Medical Group, 182nd Medical Group and 183rd Medical Group. They arrived in a convoy and slept on cots inside their staging facility: a 50 by 20-foot nylon tent. Their exercises ran throughout the day, and they worked long hours hustling around the staged disaster areas.
"Vigilant Guard gives them an opportunity to watch the Army Guard set up and work their part of the exercise, and it also allows to them to integrate with the full CERFP team in a response," said Lt. Col. Dennis Els, the Illinois Guard's CERFP commander and an optometrist with the 126th Medical Group.
The medical team is a mix of physicians, nurses, medical technicians, truck drivers, firefighters and logistics personnel. When tasked, they deploy from their medical groups to form the Illinois CERFP.
"All of our people, from the three medical groups, have the same training and basically meet the same standards, so they blend seamlessly when they come to an exercise like this," said Els.
The Air Guard medics said they hope to expand their knowledge of mobilization and demobilization, other responders' equipment, transportation convoys and all the other elements that encompass a CERFP team's response to major disaster.
"Our Air Guard medical group handles this mission very well, and we have had excellent support here from the Army National Guard," Els said. He agreed that medical team members stay very active between their primary missions of keeping their Air Guard wings medically fit and deploying for the CERFP missions. The CERFP is a secondary mission for Army and Air Guard units. It supports the governor during state and national emergencies. Twelve CERFPs are situated throughout the U.S. Five more units have been authorized and funded by Congress.
Near the training center's rubble pile, the medical team erected a 50 by 20-foot nylon tent at the end of an Army decontamination line. Stretcher bearers carried role-playing causalities inside and placed them on litter stanchions. The causalities were wet and shivering. They wailed in pain from impalements and broken bones. The team's physicians, nurses and medical technicians hustled in and out of the tent. They comforted the patients and quickly recorded their vital signs and conditions to prioritize them for transportation to more extensive medical care.
Chief Master Sgt. Devra Schoby, the medical team's noncommissioned offer in charge and a fulltime health system specialist at the 183rd Medical Group, said the realistic nature of the exercise was an excellent opportunity for the Airmen. She has been to three smaller exercises, and she hoped those new to the training would return to their medical groups with a broader knowledge of how the CERFPs operate jointly with the Army Guard's extraction and decontamination teams.
"Their advantage here is that they have all been to the same field medical training," she said. "You can put Air Guard medical groups that have never worked together before in a medical mission and they will work together seamlessly."
Thanks to Vigilant Guard, the groups should also work a more seamless operation with the Army Guard.
Whenever the medical groups get notice of a field exercise, they ask for volunteers to participate. The team participated in an exercise last year in Seneca, Ill., and the individual medical groups conduct their own medical training, exercises and inspections every year.
"They have all done a very good job," Schoby said, "and we've now done enough exercises with the Army Guard that we are a well integrated unit."