Engagement teams aim to build rapport with Afghan women

Dr. David Hamilton offers his class a gruesome hypothetical: “What do you want to do ­— his intestines are coming out? The key is to cover it with something moist. Trust me, peeling dry gauze off, that screws up the bowels.”

The class Hamilton spoke to Tuesday was unusual — the students are all women, all soldiers and they’ll be applying the lessons in Afghanistan, where they’ll likely be very far from the kind of facilities Hamilton has as medical director of trauma services at St. Francis Medical Center in Colorado Springs.

The soldiers getting a crash course in trauma care are part of the Female Engagement Teams being formed at Fort Carson ahead of a scheduled deployment to Afghanistan this spring.

Photos: Female soldiers medics class

Teams of two or three female soldiers will be attached to companies of the 4th Brigade Combat Team and will, as the name suggests, engage with Afghan women, providing them medical and health advice and trying to give their units a better understanding of what’s going on in the local population.

“They have a saying in Afghanistan: ‘Women hold up half the sky,’” said Maj. Christopher Thomas, spokesman for the 4th Brigade, 4th Infantry Division. Because of the culture, all-male units can’t interact with Afghan women, which limits their ability to work with local communities.

“It’s a super powerful tool,” Thomas said of the engagement teams. “I wish that I had this at my disposal when I was a company commander.”

For Spc. Ashlie Totten, it’s a chance to help both the Army and the Afghans.

“I love the idea of the mission,” Totten said. “I want to be able to go over there and help the females, help the children. I joined to make a difference.”

Going out every day with front line troops is also something most women in the Army don’t get a chance to do. The soldiers in the engagement teams have spent months preparing for their new role, including training in languages, fitness and, now, medicine. It’s more challenging and more rewarding than her previous job driving trucks, Totten said.

“It’s a lot more fun than driving a truck,” she said. “A lot more.”

Female Engagement Teams were pioneered by the Marine Corps several years ago and taken up by the Army, but the 24 women currently being trained in Colorado Springs are the first in the 4th Brigade, which plans to have 55 soldiers in the FET’s by the time it deploys.

In four weeks at Penrose-St. Francis Health Services, the engagement teams will learn a little bit of everything, from trauma to childbirth. About 80 percent of the class is the typical coursework civilian students would get to earn their emergency medical technician certification, said Nancy Shakeshaft-Slack, an instructor at Pikes Peak Community College who, on three days’ notice, put together the medical program for the engagement teams.

Much of the other 20 percent is giving the soldiers women and child-specific instruction, since those are the areas that are most lacking in Afghanistan and where the teams can make the most difference. Even simple sanitation techniques can mean life or death in a country where newborns’ umbilical cords are commonly cut with a piece of glass, Shakeshaft-Slack said.

“Afghanistan has probably the highest maternal mortality rate in the world and the second-highest fetal mortality rate,” she said. “I’m really anxious to hear how this works for them and if what we did helps.”

The soldiers are working with Penrose-St. Francis because a civilian hospital offers a wider variety of services and volume of patients than Evans Army Community Hospital, Thomas said.

“When this opportunity came up, we jumped at it,” said Dr. Roger Nagy, medical director of trauma services at Penrose Hospital.

While the course is short, it can give the soldiers tools to evaluate a patient and make a decision, Nagy said.

“They’ve got this bag of tools they can start applying,” he said. “Part of it is just recognizing sick — you may not be able to do a lot in the field, but you can know where those things go.”

Totten and the rest of the engagement team members will spend nine months in Afghanistan and she’s planning for a busy stay.

“I feel like in nine months, we can accomplish a lot,” she said.