SITUATION AWARENESS

by David Nuttle

Making people fully aware of situations they encounter requires sensitivity training to help keep them safe. Most instruction is focused on performance in a certain area or subject, so the changing situations where this occurs in not always carefully considered. A lack of total awareness and ignoring consequence of actions creates risks.

As an example of the above, a U. S. Army Captain newly arrived in S. Vietnam, during the Vietnam War, was anxious to make contact with and defeat of communist enemy forces as he had been trained to do. When advised of the probable location of a PAVN (N. Vietnamese Army battalion) he loaded into a small observation aircraft along with his communications officer and radio and directed the pilot to fly to the reported location of the PAVN unit at a remote jungle location. Once at that location, the captain (Terry C.) ordered the pilot, Hank, to circle low to see if the enemy could be observed. He had been warned several days before that most PAVN units had anti-aircraft weapons. This PAVN unit was there and did have such weapons allowing the communist forces to shoot-down and kill all three of these Americans. Awareness sensitivity would have probably saved the lives of these Americans.

U. S. Army units fighting in the jungles, during the Vietnam War, lacked sensitivity training to help them be more aware of traps, trip-wires, and very poisonous green Krait snakes. This training would have needed to focus on making eyes sensitive to certain colors and unusual features like a single leaf upside down. The soldier's brains also needed to be sensitized to such new features observed by the eyes. Area sensitivity is also needed. As an example, any camping in valleys surrounded by high mountains may expose campers to flashfloods when heavy rains occur in the mountains. Even interactions with pests requires some basic sensitivity training. As an example, when bitten by a leech the leech must be gently moved to one side since harsh removal will cause a leech to "barf" and contaminate the bite wound to make it get infected.

Sensitivity training is a needed extra area of instruction, usually overlooked, but it does help to save lives. A major focus of such a course is to cause an analysis of planned actions to determine possible or probable risks in advance of action implementation. Some say this is like teaching "common sense," and perhaps it is.