Battle Drill: When to Click on Air

I remember it as clear as if it were yesterday. We we’re on a foot patrol in Eastern Afghanistan when we heard the “POP! POP! POP!” of gunshots ringing out. I turned, positively identified my target, and returned a massive volume of fire to achieve fire superiority while seeking cover. All of this happened in a matter of seconds. And before I realized it, I was reloading my weapon.

You see, React to Contact is a battle drill, which, according to Army field manuals, is defined as a “collective action, rapidly executed, without applying a deliberate decision-making process.”

For five years prior to the scenario described, I had been trained ad nauseam to positively identify my target, return fire at a rate that would achieve fire superiority, and seek cover. I had been trained on this so effectively that I was able to conduct these tasks rapidly and without applying a deliberate decision-making process.

How does this apply to the fireground? Consider this scenario: It’s 4:30 a.m., and you’re dispatched to a residential structure fire. On arrival, you find a heavy body of fire in the front of what you assume to be a living room. A frantic woman grabs your officer and screams, “My kids are still upstairs!”

Vent, enter, isolate and search (VEIS). Your officer determines which windows on the back of the house are the kids’ bedrooms while you grab a ladder and head to his position. You throw the ladder, your officer heels, but when do you click on air?

In the fire service, there are a million different ways to do just about everything, and I am typically cautious about telling someone that the way they do something is wrong. Let’s face it, there are so many different complements of staffing levels, equipment types and apparatus types, and each incident is different. Telling someone their way is wrong is sometimes foolish.

You throw your mask on, but you don’t click on air. You climb the ladder and take the glass. At this point, the clock starts ticking. The fire, heat and smoke are coming for that vent you just created. You need to isolate that room. You click on air, sound the floor, enter and isolate the room.

Could you have done it faster if you clicked on air before ascending the ladder? I have heard the arguments against this—“Don’t be a yard-breather” and “You need to conserve your air”—but think about it. How much air is it going to take for you to complete VEIS in that room? This is supposed to be a rapid action because you don’t have a hoseline to protect you. So 500 psi? I understand it’s different for everyone. Even if you triple that to allow yourself an emergency supply, that means perhaps 1,500 psi of your 4,500 psi? The name of the game is expeditiously isolating that room because that is what protects you and any possible victims from the fire. So again, the question is to click or not to click?

My argument isn’t that you should always do it one way or the other. But at what level should we be telling people they have to do it one way? What if your department had a battle drill for this situation? The argument: In the interest of training a collective team, these are the steps we are going to use to perform this task. Everyone will ladder the window, put on all of your PPE to include clicking on air, take the glass, sound the floor, enter the room, and rapidly isolate the room. You will then conduct a right-hand search, evacuate any victims, then exit the structure.

You then train on this battle drill. Every single crewmember trains, hard, the exact same way, the exact same steps, as if you were in academy again and that instructor (you know which one I am talking about) is watching you like a hawk, waiting to make you do push-ups. You train on the battle drills determined by your department until they become collective tasks, rapidly executed, without applying a deliberate decision-making process.  

Will this work for every single situation? No. The fireground is entirely too dynamic to write a book about how we do it every time. What if a specific random situation doesn’t allow me to do the task the battle drill way? Remember, “Doctrine is authoritative but requires judgment in application.” That is the difference between you and a robot. I could program a robot to do this job, but it would fail. Because it is the firefighter applying judgment and critical thinking to each incident who will achieve the desired end state. All that said, the U.S. Army has demonstrated for decades that battle drills work. It is time that the fire service make them work for firefighters as well.