In Many Ways the Military Resembles an Elementary School Playground

[jeriendhal]

At my workplace, our latest hire is an ex-Navy corpsman. She's been here a few months and is extremely likable and picked up her job here (okaying pharmaceutical claims for pharmacies and prescribers) pretty fast. She's also got a lot of stories from her time serving aboard the Coral Sea and the George Washington. Such as when the ships would be involved in training exercises, especially with other vessels.

Now when engaging in simulated combat, the carriers of course would take hits and have to deal with simulated damage and simulated casualties. Which meant sick bay would have to simulate treating injuries. Unless of course they were fatal in which case the poor fellows would just have to stand around until the exercise ended.

The extremely technical term for the state of existence is apparently "Pretend Dead."

Sometimes of course the entire sickbay would be declared Pretend Dead, and they couldn't treat the Pretend Casualties. Fortunately the Navy is sensible enough that if an actually injured person shows up, the medical personnel were allow to drop out of character and treat their patients (usually people on fire duty who got overheated in their protective gear).

I can just imagine them trying to stay Pretend Dead though, and declaring all the medics and corpsmen are actually zombies... ;p

Comments

[lilfluff.livejournal.com]

That reminds me of one of my working-at-a-hospital stories. In which we wondered why we never got called to take part in the disaster drill, only to discover afterwards that the scenario was, "What if that 20' tall LOX tank located right next to your room explodes due to an accident during refilling and incinerates your whole department."