Sheepdog Tip of the Day, After Combat tip 68
Dr. Greg Belenky is a U.S. Army Colonel and psychiatrist working at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He is also one of the Army's leading experts and a true pioneer in PTSD treatment and critical incident debriefings. I have had the honor of being a co-presenter with Dr. Belenky at several conferences. He teaches that there are two primary functions of a critical incident debriefing. First, it is needed to reconstruct the event from the beginning to the end, to learn what was done wrong, what was done right, and to help develop operational lessons. The Army believes that the majority of the learning on a tactical exercise comes afterwards in what is called an "after action review," where all the participants talk about what took place. This phase is so important that to not do it is to have essentially wasted the exercise. If this is true of a training event, how much more important is it to learn from what happened when blood was shed and lives were lost? Second, the debriefing is a time to put everyone back together. Remember there might be memory loss, memory distortion, irrational guilt, and a host of other factors clouding the ability of the combatants to deal with everything that happened to them. The debriefing is a tool to sort out these matters, and to restore morale and unit integrity. It can make lives healthier and sometimes it even saves them.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, On Combat
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