RS³ 400 — Thirty Minutes: Street, Vehicle, and Sustainment

RS³ 400 — The First Thirty Minutes (Level 3)

Two days. Open to students who have completed RS³ 301.

Level 1 taught you the first minute. Level 2 taught you the first five. Level 3 covers what almost nobody trains for: the twenty-five minutes after that, when the initial response is over, help has not arrived yet, and the problem has moved outdoors, onto the road, and around vehicles.

Day 1 — Dynamic Battlespace and Vehicles

The close-quarters work moves out of the sim house. You are in a parking lot, at a curb, or stopped in traffic when it starts. We cover:

• Reading and moving through a dynamic battlespace on foot and in a vehicle

• What a vehicle actually stops and what it does not — the difference between cover and concealment on a car, and where the real cover is

• Fighting from in and around a vehicle: working from the seat, getting out under threat, and shooting around the structure of the car

• Moving between vehicles and to hard cover without becoming the easiest target on the street

• Defending from a vehicle-based position while you wait, and deciding when to hold and when to move

• Using the vehicle as an extraction platform: getting yourself, your family, or a casualty out, including loading a wounded person and driving out under stress

• Managing bystanders, passengers, and arriving law enforcement during a prolonged incident

Day 2 — Life Sustainment Through Thirty Minutes

Level 2 got the bleeding stopped and the casualty moved. Day 2 continues the sMARCH protocol into sustainment, which is where casualties are won or lost when EMS is delayed:

• Reassessment: interventions that worked at minute two and start failing at minute twenty

• Airway management and positioning over time

• Respiratory monitoring and recognizing a casualty who is getting worse

• Circulation checks, shock recognition, and keeping perfusion

• Hypothermia prevention and the rest of the sustainment picture, including what the environment is doing to your patient

• Moving casualties over distance and rough ground, alone and with a partner

• Ongoing triage as conditions change, and re-sorting when a second casualty deteriorates

• A clean handoff to EMS: what responders need from you and how to give it in thirty seconds

Scenario exercises run the full thirty-minute clock and combine both days. You will be making tactical and medical decisions at the same time, tired, hot, and short on hands — which is the point.

What you leave with: a realistic sense of how long thirty minutes is, a working understanding of vehicles as fighting and extraction platforms, and the ability to keep a casualty alive well past the first intervention.

Prerequisite: RS³ 301 (Level 2). Location: DoubleTap Training Grounds, Calera, AL. [Dates, times, tuition, gear list.]