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Airmen train Congolese troops in evac skills

The Democratic Republic of the Congo doesn’t have any aircraft specifically to use for medical evacuations. But if the African nation needs to quickly move patients, its airmen will do it American-style.

About 60 U.S. airmen just wrapped up two weeks of teaching aeromedical evacuation skills — from how to assess patient conditions to how to load the injured onto aircraft — to about 150 of their Congolese counterparts, including about 75 quick-response medical staff.

Lt. Col. June Oldman, the mission director and an Oklahoma Air National Guardsman, admitted she expected mediocrity from the Congolese troops. Instead, the Congolese performed “over and above what we ever expected.”

“When we put them through the paces, they asked a lot of questions,” Oldman said in a telephone interview from Kinshasa on May 5, the final day of the exercise. “They were eager to learn.”

Congo is the third-largest country in Africa and has vast mineral wealth. But decades of war have left it one of the poorest countries on Earth, with a per-capita income of about $300. Its air force has about 2,500 troops, five combat-capable fixed-wing aircraft and 40 helicopters, most of which are out of service, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Exercises such as MEDLITE are an important part of U.S. Africa Command, which the military touts as a new way of approaching foreign relations. AFRICOM, which stood up in 2008, stresses joint military training and soft-power exercises across a continent with weak states and stability issues.

“The time to work together and learn about each other’s strengths and weaknesses is now, not when it is in a time of need or crisis,” Col. Steve Ice, surgeon general for 17th Air Force, said in a news release. “Those partnerships need to be made before that ever happens.”

The final training scenario was a devastating earthquake in Kinshasa. Medical facilities were overwhelmed, and the Congolese military needed to evacuate patients to a hospital about 500 miles away. They were in charge of triaging patients, staging them and loading them into an aircraft. Earlier, the airmen had practiced getting patients into helicopters and a C-130.

Capt. Chris Wolf, a flight nurse with the 109th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron of the Minnesota Air National Guard, left impressed.

“Their physicians are on par with ours,” he said, “and their nurses are as knowledgeable as ours.”

Oldman said she enjoyed the enthusiasm of the Congolese, some of whom lobbied to get another chance at the hands-on training, she said. And she told her Congolese counterpart that his troops had no reason to let the new skills slip.

“Just because they don’t have a dedicated aircraft on the ramp,” she said, “doesn’t mean they can’t do this.”