I have a question that I want you to answer as truthfully as you can about the military medical community.

<p>Sir,</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>In the Infantry, Doc is our Brother. He is treated as anyone else, and valued. Practically, he is a subject matter expert at immidiate field trauma care and medevac procedures. He trains the other Soldiers in CLS, inventories their IFAKs, runs the Aid station while deployed, conducts 9-line RXLs, makes sure everyone is carrying a CAT, issues profiles when required, conducts foot checks, issues medication and a myriad of other tasks. He is not "that damn medic." He is Doc, and he is a brother.</p>

Most of the medics I have known worked their asses off 24/7 on patrol outside the wire, in dustoff/medevac birds, in field / evac hospitals and made the difference between life and death while preserving cognitive and physical functioning.

Sir, I am not sure what has brought up the issue, but I personally have always given a lot of respect to my medics. I say my because if your unit takes care of them, they take care of you, and are therefore part of your "family", and vice versa. I have never had any problems with the medics doing their thing on training days. Why should we harp on them or give them a hard time when we gun bunnies have no clue what they are training on? As long as they do their job when the time comes, and do it well, I could care less what they are doing while we are doing what we do. And as for the talk about "being on the line" or doing "time on the line" etc, I think that is geared more towards certain MOS's. Medical professions are not really the same in my opinion. You can be in a hospital, you can be in a unit, you can be anywhere in the medical field. Either way, you are doing YOUR JOB. For a gun bunny, if you aren't ON THE GUN, pulling string and&nbsp; shooting rounds down range, you are considered inferior to the rest of the gun bunnies. You could be in the office kicking butt by taking care of everyone's personnel issues better than S-1, but if you aren't in one of the howitzer sections, they consider you as substandard or inferior. And trust me, at that point you will hear about it from your peers, no matter how well you are performing at the job you are in. As for the issue you addressed, I do not see the problem you indicate is out there, and if my Soldiers ever treated the medics like that out of contempt, spite etc and not just playing around with them like we all do, I would be SURE to let them know they are screwing with the wrong people. <br>