Photo By Gino Mattorano | Soldiers prepare an exercise patient for transport during the the rigorous Special...... read more read more
Three Evans Army Community Hospital Soldiers successfully completed the rigorous Special Operations Forces Arctic Medic course Jan. 10-27, 2026, at Fort Wainwright, Alaska.
The elite training, hosted by Special Operations Command North, challenged participants to provide prolonged combat casualty care in the unforgiving sub-zero conditions of the Arctic. The course forces participants to master critical skills in austere environments.
The course focused on how to treat casualties at the point of injury and medically evacuate them in Arctic conditions, according to Sgt. 1st Class, Eric Smith, a 68W Army Medic and the NCO in charge of the EACH Department of Primary Care.
Smith, along with Spec. John Trevino, also a 68W, and Sgt. Jacob Bradshaw, a 68B Orthopedic Specialist, completed the course, along with approximately 42 other participants.
Course participants quickly learned that performing their wartime mission in sub-zero conditions creates unique challenges.
“When we arrived at the training area it was negative 38 degrees,” Smith said. “As combat medics, we are trained to prioritize treatment based on the casualty care mnemonic M.A.R.C.H., which stands for Massive Hemorrhage, Airway, Respiration, Circulation, Head Injury/Hypothermia. But what we quickly learned was that in the arctic environment, we had to focus on keeping our patients from getting hypothermia at the same time we were focusing on stopping severe bleeding.”
Smith said that the human body requires a certain temperature in order for blood to coagulate, so keeping the patient warm was crucial to be able to control bleeding.
“We were taught that in this environment we needed to have both a primary and a secondary medic for each casualty,” Smith said. “One would start the hemorrhage control, and then the second would be starting the hypothermia mitigation.”
Smith said that being in that environment was crucial to understanding how much of an impact the cold has on combat casualty care.
“Classroom training is very important, but you really have to experience that environment firsthand to truly understand its impact,” Smith said. “For example, the type of snow that you have in those extreme temperatures is very granular, so when you're moving around next to the patient, it's very easy to accidentally kick a bunch of snow on them. Most of us have a lot of experience in a hot environment. If you accidentally kick sand on someone, you apologize, you brush it off, you're good. It’s not making them colder. It's not inhibiting the clotting factors that are vital for treating them on a cellular level.”
In order to help students understand the impact of the extreme cold, instructors put students into a simulated casualty environment, just to see how quickly the cold can begin to impact your health.
“Even without a traumatic injury, it was truly eye opening to see just how quickly the cold affected your core body temperature and the importance of keeping a patient warm in those conditions,” Smith said. “Being able to experience that firsthand was invaluable in helping to understand what to do if you become the primary person taking care of the patient.”
Keeping the patient warm in sub-zero temperatures and preparing to move them from the point of injury requires specialized equipment.
“During the training we used a specialized four-layer hypothermia prevention system that includes two thermal blankets similar to the hand warmers you can buy that emit their own heat when exposed to air,” Smith said. “And all of that goes into the vapor-barrier layer of a standard military sleep system. All together we create a bubble of warmth for the patient and we only expose the body parts that we are actively working on.”
Once the patient is stabilized and ready for transport, the medical teams load the patient into a specialized sled for transporting patients. Medic teams then learned how to use snowmobiles to transport them to the next level of care. And for the times when a snowmobile wasn’t available, teams strapped on snowshoes or cross-country skis and pulled patients through the snow on foot.
“During the final phase of the training, we would make our way to the patient, stabilize them, and prepare them to evacuate,” Smith said. “We evacuated them using a bounding method, where you send someone forward to set up a warming tent, and then you transport the patient to that area, and then continue to leapfrog to the next level of care. The cold and snow definitely made the whole process extremely challenging.”
Knowing how to use the right cold weather gear was crucial to ensuring the safety of the teams and their patients.
“One of the first things we did was take a class on the different levels of the Army cold weather system,” Smith said. “We had a full class on the seven different layers of the system and how to wear them properly.”
Despite having the best equipment, participants still had to be on guard for cold-weather injuries like frostbite. “We were constantly checking each other for frostbite - eyes, ears, nose, face, and exposed body parts,” Smith said. “Plus, each of us was required to do a daily check for frostbite. You could easily lose fingers or toes to the extreme cold, so we had to not only take care of the patients - but we also had to make sure our battle buddies were okay, too.”
Smith said that thankfully he doesn’t need to use the skills he learned in the training in his everyday work, but he is glad to add that knowledge and experience to his toolbelt.
“As a medic, I’m passionate about saving lives,” Smith said. “This training gives me an advantage if I ever have to practice my wartime mission in that environment. And as a senior enlisted member, I can now teach my Soldiers and NCOs how to prepare themselves better to operate in that environment, and what type of things to expect.”
| Date Taken: | 02.09.2026 |
| Date Posted: | 02.13.2026 14:34 |
| Story ID: | 558143 |
| Location: | FORT WAINWRIGHT, ALASKA, US |
| Web Views: | 50 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Arctic training prepares medics for extreme-weather combat, by Gino Mattorano, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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