By Carl J. Haddon

It’s no secret that fire departments/fire districts in some rural communities or areas throughout this country are far better budget wise than others. Some areas, (like mine) fight, bite and scratch for every new piece of equipment or technology that they can get. Fundraising certainly helps, but it only goes so far. As a result, we have to “make do” with what we have and very often employ the “adapt and overcome” philosophy.

Last week, I returned from a training assignment that forever changed my thought processes about “making do” and “adapting and overcoming.” My fire training assignment was to the communist Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam.

Before I dive in, allow me to set the stage a bit. Although Vietnam is a communist country, you would be hard pressed to know it from the outside looking in. Additionally, having been blessed to travel the world teaching firefighters for many years, I can assure you that “firefighters are firefighters” the world over and communist or not, these guys in Vietnam are no different. We’re family, period.

Our assignment was a week’s worth of live fire training according to National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 1403, Standard on Live Fire Training Evolutions, in two live fire trainers that Vietnam purchased from the United States. We were tasked with training the trainers, and that is where the real story starts.

Here at home, I’m pretty confident that we have certain “givens” when it comes to even rural departments. It’s usually a given that at some point in time, we will be issued personal protective equipment (PPE), or bunker gear, right? I would also venture to say that many (hopefully most) departments issue individual, proper fitting SCBA face pieces—at least to those members who are qualified for fire operations that require the use of an SCBA. Having gear that includes helmets, firefighting gloves, and eye protection issued to each active member is all fairly standard practice here at home. Our apparatus and equipment may be another bag of cats. Some of us have newer trucks and equipment, and some of us have older equipment and trucks that we have to “make do” with. At varying levels, we all strive to “work toward” meeting NFPA standards with the understanding that we may never be able to fully meet said standards. The same ideology holds true for training. Some of us train daily, some weekly, and some monthly. But, the goal is to meet or exceed a minimum standard that we set for our department, or that we have set for us.

Not wanting to be ignorant American fire instructors, we realized that our first task in Vietnam was to assess the fire apparatus, the equipment we’d be using, and the skill level of the instructors/firefighters that we would be working with. Offering them a training program that depended on them employing methods, tactics, and equipment that was different than what we used could be a challenge. Little did we know just how challenging that would be.

We had no plans to get crazy. We would be working with them for a week, in two 53-foot live fire, two-story training trailers. Each trailer had two burn rooms, flashover prop, forcible entry door, roof and ceiling prop, and a multilevel confined space prop built into each unit. We figured we’d need an engine, water source, hoses, nozzles, irons, hooks, ladders, saws, and whatever else they wanted to throw into the mix as part of THEIR training SOPs. We admittedly took for granted that this great group of Vietnamese fire instructors would have all of