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WASHINGTON Running away from the sound of gunfire and IED blasts toward a shelter door, 2nd Lt. Rowan Sheldon of the U.S. Army suddenly stopped dead and gasped out an expletive: It wasn't an escape, it was a solid wall.

Behind him, all the medics and others in his platoon were carrying badly wounded soldiers, looking to him to lead them to a safe spot where they could triage, put on tourniquets, get patients on litters and move them away from the battlefield for treatment.

There are tough final exams. There are grueling final exams. And then there is the test at the nation's medical school for the military, in which students must navigate a simulated overseas deployment culminating in a staged mass-casualty incident with deafening explosions, screaming, smoke, gunfire and fake blood everywhere.

In the intense stress of that moment, sweating fourth-years have to pull up the lessons learned in class to bring order to chaos. Enough order, at least, to get people somewhere safe enough to start healing.

"It's the most important week of medical school," said Arthur Kellermann, dean of the F. Edward Hebert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. It's the week when students camped at a National Guard base take on every challenge instructors can think to throw at them. Suicide bombers. Unraveling diplomatic relations. An influx of refugees. A sexual assault. And hundreds of wounded soldiers.

"We had a great plan going in," Sheldon said. "But they say no plan passes first contact with the enemy, right? We quickly realized there was no way this plan was going to work."

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The country's only medical school for the military began in an unlikely spot: on the third floor of a corner lot in Bethesda, above a drugstore and a bank.

That was in 1972, not long after President Richard Nixon called for an end to the draft. Now the school sits on the grounds of Naval Support Activity Bethesda, next to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, across from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Military medical school pushes would-be combat doctors to their limits