At long last, I attended the Hostile Environments and Emergency First Aid Training provided by Centurion Safety. I was granted a bursary that covered the majority of the costs, courtesy of The Rory Peck Trust, a charity dedicated to supporting freelance journalists.
The five-day course run by Centurion, which seems to be mostly staffed by ex-Royal Marines and ex-SAS soldiers is an intense and enriching experience. It was designed for journalists who work in warzones, disaster areas and dangerous parts of the world.
The training consisted of many parts, roughly divided into classroom teaching and outdoors training. The list of things we were told and shown extends from ballistics to grenades and explosives, IEDs and tripwires, minefields and kidnapping scenarios to aspects of personal safety and the essential skills of providing first aid to various forms of casualties. I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but those were the ones sticking out for me.
Psychology is an important aspect of the whole course, as most actions are based on common sense and sets of rules that exist everywhere, including warzones. It is only that those rules may be different from those we know from our routine daily lives. Hence the awareness training that is an essential part of the course will probably be the part saving most lives. And the thing I personally need to remember the best because I am not a very self-aware person. The First Aid – something I always wanted to be able to do better – may come in useful just about anywhere (I’m thinking of the amounts of cyclists and couriers with a death wish that I see daily on London’s streets).
On the subject of encountering mines, a friend of mine working in Kabul simplified it for me: ‘If the Afghans don’t go there – you don’t go there.’ Although the course was designed around a set of generic situations you may encounter in any part of the world, I chose to attend in preparation for a future assignment in Afghanistan. What surprised me the most was how unprepared I felt. I had imagined that after two years living all over Bangladesh, trips to Kurdistan, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and some of the dodgiest ghettos in Britain I'd be kindof streetwise and smart about danger situations. Far from it, I would probably get myself killed at the first hostile roadblock simply by virtue of my extrovert nature and being my confrontative self. Thus knowing about dangers is one thing, being aware of them quite another.
Let me tell you, the course was worth every penny, even those I could not afford myself...
In my mind, I am still replaying the scenarios of being kidnapped, ambushed, stuck in tricky vehicle checkpoints, minefields and multiple-casualty situations. After you have been challenged in such scenarios, adrenaline pumping and trying to stick to what you've been told in a classroom, you never come away feeling that you've done it right. At least I didn't, but I doubt that my coursemates felt any different. As one of the instructors bluntly put it, 'You can't win here'. And why should you?
After all, you're not there to score points, but to learn from your mistakes. It is a good and realistic test of your abilities to react under extreme stress, whether that means suppressing your ego when challenged by hostile soldiers asking for money or administering the correct first aid to somebody with a severed limb, nasty fracture or large-scale burn. You never quite forget that it is only role play and props (I particularly disliked the fake blood being squirted in my face from a mortar casualty with a missing hand), but it is realistic enough to make your heart pound faster, and if you don't watch it, panic.
And panicking seems to be the worst... ...because that's when you make mistakes. And mistakes in a hostile environment, particularly combat situations or minefields can easily be lethal or in the least, very unhealthy.
That's me after a particularly gruelling first aid exercise.
Photo © Maya Alleruzzo/AP
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