First aid with a Ford & Tips against Terrorism

Arizona Daily Wildcat Ross Lamb has emergency medical stabilization performed on him by Jim McCann, co-founder of Overseas Protection Measures, a company that teaches about terrorism and survival for Americans traveling to foreign countries. All of the tools normally used by an emergency medical technician were improvised using car parts. Here, McCann makes a neck brace out of a car's floor mat and a spine board from the front seat.

With these and a pocketknife, McCann shows his class some ways to perform first aid with just the materials found in a car. The tips are intended for those traveling or working in countries that have no emergency medical service.

"There are so many things you can find in a car," he says. "You're only limited by your imagination."

McCann also demonstrates cutting bandages and dressings from the material in a car seat and splinting a broken arm with a sun visor and the car's weather-stripping.

McCann, a former member of the Army Special Forces and a recent University of Arizona graduate, holds the daylong workshops for groups of eight in the offices of his new business, Overseas Protection Measures. The workshop runs $225 per person and also includes segments on terrorism, how to tell if you are being watched by a terrorist group and how to survive if taken hostage.

The idea for OPM originated in October, when several UA professors asked a friend of McCann's if he could provide some training to prepare them for a trip to Vietnam. McCann and that friend, Gary Pennington, developed the idea that led to founding OPM.

McCann returned to Tucson last March and completed his bachelor of arts degree in political science at the UA in December, a degree he began in 1982 before he started traveling and later joined the Army.

After spending two years as an Army Ranger and five years in the Army Special Forces - "a direct action rapid deployed force," as McCann describes it - he got his share of experience with terrorist groups.

One of the Special Forces' main missions is counter terrorism, he says. Each of the Army's five Special Forces groups is assigned a region of the world.

McCann's region included Southeast Asia. Pick a country in that area - Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, New Guinea - and he rattles off names of terrorist organizations and the region's hot spots.

Often, he has a story about a close call he had in one of those countries.

"About two years ago when I was in Cambodia, I hit a fake roadblock. It turned out to be an ambush." He was traveling in a van with other military personnel and they told the driver to "just run the roadblock."

The incident could only be reported to Army command or his group's mission would be jeopardized. So he could do nothing to prevent a group of foreigners being killed a few days later at that same spot during another fake roadblock.

That's the sort of thing he wants his students to be able to detect when traveling or working in dangerous countries.

"Are you going to be targeted as an American? Absolutely. Don't think for a minute that you're not," he tells the class. "So you've got to harden yourself."

So far, McCann has gotten a lot of calls from geologic companies that often send employees overseas. But he says he would like to see students planning to study abroad go through the workshops. He does not think the price will keep students away.

"This is something students could easily sell to their parents," he says.

He also said he would give a student-group of eight a discounted price of $185.

Along the walls of the small, two-room office tucked in the back corner of a warehouse complex off Prince Road hang reminders of the workshop's messages. Newspaper clippings with headlines like "Iranians threaten to kill U.S. hostages" cover one wall, replicas of automatic weapons are nailed to another, and OPM's motto "PLAN, PREPARE, DENY, REACT" jump out at students from a third.

McCann begins his workshops from a lectern near that spot, sporting a T-shirt with the OPM logo, the "O" designed with a gun scope's cross hairs in its center. With his tall, muscular build and clean-cut good looks, McCann, now a member of the National Guard, fits the stereotype of what a member of an elite military branch should look like.

But he doesn't stay behind the lectern for long, preferring to keep the lecturing to a minimum. He emphasizes interaction in his classes, launched last week, by keeping them to just eight students. That way, everyone participates in the role-playing, some acting as terrorists, others taking the role of hostages.

"We're not trying to generate fear or anxiety, we just want people to be aware of what's going on around them," McCann says.

The first-aid segment that comes in the afternoon is literally hands-on, as students evaluate injuries on their first-aid partners.

"People get a lot more into it," he says, explaining why he tries to keep it interactive.

McCann's assistants work with students two at a time to teach bandaging, splinting bone breaks and fractures, and treating head, face and abdominal wounds using field dressings and a basic first-aid kit, then car parts they cut out with pocketknives.

Some students wince as first-aid instructors demonstrate how to bandage the face of a person whose eye has popped out of its socket, using a latex eyeball taped onto a student volunteer's face as a prop.

But practicing it, McCann says, is necessary to give students the confidence to apply what they've learned in a real-life emergency.

Housewife and frequent traveler Edith Carlson was a student in the first OPM workshop. Her son, a friend of McCann's, told her about the class, which she said was better than she expected.

"Now I feel like I can do something, especially with the hands on. It's sure better than listening to a lecture."