“8/10/2009, 4:10pm EST”
Marine doctors maim and kill, in the name of training
Two enlisted Marines are kneeling on the ground, quickly stuffing gauze into a gaping wound in a pig’s belly to stop the bleeding. Another is doing a “blood sweep” to find other wounds.
An officer, just inches from its snout, monitors its breathing and keeps the pig’s thick tongue from blocking the airway. At the other end of the 150-pound swine, a Marine corporal has inserted a thermometer into its anus.
“Come on, buddy, stay with us,” Capt. Doug Verblaauw whispers to the heavily sedated pig, dubbed Gen. Dude.
Gen. Dude will not survive the day. Nor will the other 19 pigs used in last week’s “live-tissue” training for 28 Marines and a dozen Navy doctors. The carcasses were sent to a rendering plant.
But the Marines had the experience of pushing intestines back into living bodies, applying tourniquets and heat packs to gushing wounds, clearing tongues and other obstructions from airways, and working under pressure when time is blood and indecision is death…
Before the training begins, they are sedated. Veterinary technicians monitor the pigs to make sure they remain asleep. Instructors insist the animals feel no pain.
How about the pain of DEATH, assholes?
Using scalpels, instructors inflict increasingly serious wounds on the pigs and watch as the Marines scramble to keep their pigs from dying. In the final exercise, the pigs are shot in ways that approximate the injuries that a Marine might suffer, some of the shots severing limbs.
The article states these soldiers are trained to consider these pigs as injured comrades, to add an emotionally realistic element to their training. Yeah, I bet these guys are crying their eyes out as they “inflict increasingly serious wounds,” such that intestines need to be stuffed back in, and limbs get severed.
As if the baseline collateral damage of stupid wars wasn’t bad enough.
Never leave home without it.
