Essential Field Skills
The survival skills black-ops environments demand, kept sharp for crews working far from support.
Field Guide — Triage
Field Triage
Survival and medical protocols for field operations. Triage covers the essential survival skills for black-ops environments and the routines that keep the team at operational readiness under fire.
What Triage Covers
The triage discipline sits between the mission and long deployments: what the team carries, how wounds are handled in the field, and how readiness is maintained while the clock is running.
Operational Readiness Under Fire
Maintaining readiness while under fire: conditioning, discipline, and recovery between deployments.
Field Protocols
Order of treatment and triage rules applied when extraction is delayed and the team handles it alone.
Field Checklist
A quick working reference for the medic and the shooter standing beside him.
| Stage | Focus | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| On contact | Control the scene first | Secure the immediate area before treating wounds. |
| Assessment | Find the kill points and the bleeders | Prioritise by threat, not by who shouts loudest. |
| Stabilisation | Stop the bleeding, keep the airway open | Field handling only; keep the crew mobile. |
| Recovery | Restore readiness before the next mission | Recovery time counts as part of the operation. |
Kill First — the first and most important rule of combat, as stated by Jean Vilain, and the standard this field guide is built around.
Jean VilainContinue the guide with Survival Tactics, or head back to the Field Guide hub for character profiles and combat rules.
Triage is the quiet discipline behind every mission that succeeds. Between the planning table and the field, teams rely on a shared system for prioritizing injuries, allocating supplies, and deciding what can wait. This field guide lays out that discipline in plain terms, covering the routines that keep a crew operational when conditions turn hostile and time is measured in seconds rather than hours.
Field survival and medical protocols form the backbone of this material. The focus is practical rather than theoretical: how wounds are handled when evacuation is far away, how supplies are rationed, and how a team maintains its readiness between deployments. Everything is written from the perspective of special missions crews operating far from support, where improvisation is not a luxury but a necessity.
Mission briefings sit alongside the tactical writing throughout the guide, offering context for the equipment and techniques described. These notes reflect the kinds of environments associated with black-ops and special operations work — remote, unpredictable, and unforgiving of careless preparation — without straying into anything that reads as instruction for real-world harm.
Readiness is presented as a continuous habit rather than a single event. Training, maintenance, and review are framed as the same discipline seen from different angles, the ongoing work that turns a group of individuals into a crew capable of functioning together under pressure. The tone stays archival and observational, in keeping with an operational record rather than a piece of promotion.
Accompanying the writing, imagery and archival footage references reinforce the sense of a working reference library. The layout is deliberately spare — a single column, generous spacing, and a dark palette — so the material reads like a manual consulted in a quiet room before dawn. It is meant to be skimmed, revisited, and carried forward as part of an ongoing field practice.
Ready For The Next Job
A field guide to the destruction of The Expendables — characters, missions, and the combat craft that keeps the team in the fight.