CIRCUIT MAGAZINE ISSUE 53 By: Oliver Carter
From Oil Fields to Field Medic and Beyond It had been a long and gruelling day moving from site to site. I had only recently left the military and now found myself in Basra, Iraq as part of a team that was assigned to protect engineers or staff working within the oil and gas sectors across Rumalaih oil fields. It was my first close protection assignment and came only three months after completing my Medicine In Remote Areas (MIRA) course with ExMed, the industry standard at the time. Then a call came in requesting a “medic� on site. Since most people were asleep and I was still up finalising things before bed, I was the clear choice, so I went to the office for a brief. Finally, the time had
come to put all of the theory of my training courses into real-world practice. I told myself I was ready to deal with whatever I encountered on the field because I had been trained on most life-saving skills and interventions explicitly designed for remote or austere environments. And I was confident and prepared especially since the course was amazingly realistic and authentic with ex-military medics from special forces units.
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