Camp Bullis first aid for military medics
SAN ANTONIO — The medics competing at Camp Bullis had endured a 3.5-mile road march, carrying a patient on a stretcher. They went through a dry creek bed, used a rope to get up a hill, came under simulated rifle fire and performed lifesaving medical care.
They navigated an obstacle course. They cut through a fake helicopter’s metal skin to rescue a wounded crewman. The tests mimicked what they might do in a war zone, much of it taught at Bullis, a hilly 28,000-acre training range in northwest Bexar County that has long contributed to military readiness.
The Army’s Jack L. Clark Memorial Best Medic Competition, an annual event, went well on a recent night for Staff Sgt. Lionel Semon and Sgt. Matthew Dougherty despite nearby high-end suburban development. Light from those new neighborhoods might have interfered with their night-vision goggles, rendering the training useless.
“Bad things happen. You end up going (without the goggles) and you run around in the dark,” said Dougherty, 31, of Tallahassee, Fla. “And the enemy could be sitting there waiting for you and you can’t even see them, and
you just get lit up.” Lit up, as in killed. As medics have honed their craft here, a less visible battle has been fought to preserve Camp Bullis’ mission. Helped by the City of San Antonio and Bexar County, the Army and Joint Base San Antonio mostly have prevailed against the assertion of property rights by builders and homeowners.
The camp is now protected by a 5-mile lighting overlay district created in 2009, with input from developers and real estate professionals, to limit light pollution east of the range. The county and city also have spent nearly $30 million to buy land so the Army can expand training.
Camp is unique
Still, homes are within walking distance of the camp’s perimeter fence, and if a developer-friendly Texas Legislature ever tinkers with the city’s ability to control light from businesses dotting the area, it would complicate the simplest training tasks for a military that does much of its fighting in the dark.
“If you’re trying to see something and somebody’s shining a light into your eyes, it makes it difficult to see, and you have to move and adjust,” said Sgt. Rolando Fender, 25, of Jamaica.
Growth and light pollution have worried commanders at JBSA-Randolph and JBSA-Lackland as well, but the issues first came to public attention at Camp Bullis. More efforts are in the works, among them a city annexation election, possibly next year, for unincorporated areas around Camp Bullis and JBSA-Lackland, where field training is done on the Medina Annex.
“There is not another asset like Joint Base San Antonio in terms of having a major urban medical complex within 15 minutes of a large natural training area with air and ground assets,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg said Thursday. “Camp Bullis, in that respect, is unique in the world and we need to protect it as a national priority.”
The stakes are high. The Pentagon spends more than $5.9 billion a year in San Antonio, employing 87,384 military and civilian personnel at three bases and Camp Bullis. Only the counties surrounding San Diego and Honolulu have more active-duty personnel than Bexar County’s 60,076.
Combat medics from every service branch study at the Medical Education & Training Campus on JBSA-Fort Sam Houston, which uses Camp Bullis. The program typically graduates 16,500 medics a year from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard.
29 teams compete
The Army Medical Command’s 72-hour Best Medic Competition honors the most technically competent — and physically and mentally tough — medic team in the service. GIs like Semon and Fender, who are assigned to the 6th Ranger Training Battalion at Eglin AFB in Florida, went up against 28 other two-soldier teams.
They competed in helicopter medical evacuations, tactical combat casualty care, firing range and physical fitness challenges and chemical, biological or radiological attacks — all routine for GIs preparing to deploy overseas.
The 2005 base-closure round created the joint medical training mission at Fort Sam, but without Camp Bullis the field training would have to go elsewhere. Just where, no one knows.
“Some of the alternatives that have been looked at are places like Fort Hood, Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, places that are extremely friendly and have plenty of range space,” said retired Army Master Sgt. Mike Eldred, who designs and builds big events like the medic competition. “The whole school would have to move.”
The city’s 2009 “dark sky” zoning ordinance “largely stabilized the situation or prevented it from getting worse,” Army military environmental attorney Jim Cannizzo said. Outdoor lights have to be shielded downward and some, including those at businesses, must be off after 11 p.m.
Tree-cutting rules
A sound attenuation ordinance required thicker windows and doors in newly-built structures near the camp, where noise from helicopters, planes and firing ranges have drawn occasional complaints.
Development in the area years ago drove an endangered migratory songbird known as the golden cheeked warbler into the heavily wooded range, making it harder to utilize the camp. The city in 2010 strengthened its tree ordinance in response. State lawmakers failed this year in attempts to strip the city of its ability to regulate tree cutting in its extraterritorial jurisdiction, but Cannizzo is worried that they’ll try again.
‘Pretty priceless’
“There is not another asset like Joint Base San Antonio in terms of having a major urban medical complex within 15 minutes of a large natural training area with air and ground assets. Camp Bullis, in that respect, is unique and we need to protect it as a national priority.” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg
Soldiers say there’s no place quite like Camp Bullis.
“It’s an outstanding place to train,” said Maj. Manuel Menendez, 44, of San Juan, Puerto Rico, a 20-year Army veteran with eight combat deployments. “It’s a big city, it’s easy to fly to, we have a lot of brain power in this place and the ability to execute that stuff in the field nearby. It’s pretty priceless.”
Sgt. 1st Class Ilker Irmak and his partner, Capt. Andrew Fulton, thought the Best Medic contest was a realistic test.
“We are able to replicate, in a sense, battlefield conditions,” said Irmak, 37, a native of Germany whose family comes from Turkey.
Menendez, who is preparing for a fifth tour of Afghanistan, said he found the terrain and roleplaying stressful, “enough to honestly give me a little flashback.”
Realistic training helps medics find their weak spots well before entering combat, and it prepares them to save lives in the worst conditions, said Dougherty, a veteran of Afghanistan based in South Korea.
“It becomes muscle memory at that point,” Dougherty said. “So even if you’re tired you can still do all the steps and provide the care.”