How often do Marines take the Marine Combat Lifesaver Course (Tactical Combat Casualty Care), and what are your experiences with it?

I actually took this course in the Marines. We learned more than the basic first aid, draw blood, give IV's... We would be provided with a medic kit. To answer your question only once. The program only lasted a couple years.

In battalions now, it's almost standard that we give our Marines CLS classes. We teach them the basics of CUF (care under fire) and stuff such as nasopharyngeal airways, occlusal dressings and tournaquits. We put them under "stress" (I.e. make them run around in flak and do push ups and stuff) and them have them put a tournaquit on their buddy and get them off the X in the "2 minute" time hack. It's pretty great stuff to teach them and they love learning it. We teach them so that they can also start to render care before we (the corpsman) get there if they are closer, saving precious seconds possibly minutes of treatment to the casualty.

My Battalion had the, then, 1st Force Recon one block to our left and 1st ANGLICO one block to the right of us. So, every chance our S-3 got, they were grabbing guys for all sorts of classes that Recon and ANGLICO couldn't fill. And medical training taught by a few SEAL Corpsmen for a week every quarter and every time we had a Damn stand-down.