Army AOC 62B

[ericd8]

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[ArmyTiger]

I have a relatively simple question. I'm a HPSP applicant and I believe my dream job is to be a field surgeon (AOC 62B). Hold the HPSP negativity; I want to be a military surgeon serving in or near a combat setting with the responsibility of bringing soldiers home alive. I understand the implications of military service: lower income, sub par living conditions, separation from family, etc. My question is how competitive is that AOC? If I am accepted into HPSP and do well in medical school/boards, how likely is it that I end up in this AOC?

AOC? I believe you meant to say MOS. That said, pretty sure Field Surgeon is the Army's term for a doc attached to a line battalion. This is not an actual surgeon spot, mind you, just an antiquated terminology we hold on to for traditional reasons. You want to look into General Surgery match stats for the Army, and then trauma surgery fellowship stats too. Don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'd think they're close to the civilian numbers, if not higher.

 

[ArmyTiger]

Thanks for your response. However, I meant to say AOC. MOS is for enlisted.

Again, you are incorrect. Officers have an MOS, too (ex. - 11A = Infantry officer). AOC is used for functional areas or medical officers with fellowship qualifications.

 

[ArmyNeuroGuy]

As stated above the 62B is an MOS specifically for "field surgeon" which is the generic name for any doctor assigned to a line unit. In that position you do no surgery you are on staff at BN or BDE and answer to the commander you are responsible for the general health and medical readiness of the unit and will see a lot of sick call related to chronic complaints and musculoskeletal injuries. You will not be on the front lines saving lives per say if that's what you want to do then as stated above you need to look into doing general surgery to be attached to a forward surgical team which is a completely different MOS. As far as competitive to be a 62B it's not because no one wants to do it, you can get a job doing that easily after doing an intern year, but you can't stay in that position forever you will need to do a residency I'm something at some point

 

[244913]

Dude, you don't "match" into an MOS. You receive an MOS qualification based on your specialty and or additional training.

62B is a catch-all term for Battalion surgeons, but I believe that any Army trained physician even if you are flight qualified ie. 61N gets classified as a 62B.

Infantry/combat arms units do not have battalion surgeons in garrison, they are taken care of by a PA. When they head out the door to deploy they pick up a PROFIS battalion surgeon (Doc) for the duration of the deployment and x months afterwards. The only line units that have organic physicians in garrison tend to be aviation, Group, and maybe the BSB (support unit attached to an infantry/combat arms BDE).

Trust me when I say that if you want to serve as a BN Surgeon down the line, that will not be a problem. Complete any residency training especially primary care and chances are good that your first "utilization" tour will be as a deployed battalion surgeon. Or don't complete a residency, be a GMO and you could be sent out as a BN surgeon although if you're physically qualified they'd send you to flight (61N).

Additionally, most residency trained docs in the army regardless of specialty are being tapped to do brigade surgeon tours for 1-2 years. I don't recall the BDE surgeon MOS but you're attached to brigade staff and oversee all the infantry battalion PA's in garrison and do a bunch of admin crap. Basically the same job as a battalion surgeon except when deployed you're at a bigger FOB and you deal with a lot more administrivia.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you join the Army as a physician you won't have to "find" the 62B designation as a battalion or bde surgeon. It will find you.

Good luck.

- ex 61N

 

[DeadCactus]

You're asking people to give you odds on something a decade away crossing multiple branching points in a career trajectory and further clouding the issue by misapplying terminology. No one has a real answer for you. But you, like hundreds before you, don't want to hear any of this so allow us to give you the reassuring answer you seek.

If you enter medical school, maintain your interest in being a surgeon, complete medical school, successfully match into the middle tier competitive specialty of surgery, complete a surgical residency, and still maintain the attitude that spending months in a far away war zone twiddling your thumbs as your skills atrophy is far more desirable than drinking a beer on your porch while your children play and providing mentally interesting patient care during the day - then you should have no problem convincing your command to send you to Afghanistan or Iran or Antarctica or wherever the hell we're fighting a war in the 2020's as a 61J, 61N, or 62B. If you ever crich a penguin, please make sure you catch a video on your iPhone 18T...

 

[ArmyNeuroGuy]

I guess I have more misconceptions than I thought. Could you elaborate on this? Before I lock myself into HPSP, I'd like to have a better understanding of the process of working my way into the job I want.

A field surgeon does not operate and I would say is not really involved in saving lives on the battlefield, you are basically an administrator who keeps the troops healthy. If you want to be saving lives in combat you need to focus on trauma through something like general surgery or emergency medicine and being attached to a forward surgical team and not to a line unit.

 

[colbgw02]

OP is correct regarding AOC vs. MOC. Here is the link to AR 611-1 where chapter 4 talks about officer classification system.

http://www.apd.army.mil/pdffiles/r611_1.pdf

 

[bryce]

OP is correct regarding AOC vs. MOC. Here is the link to AR 611-1 where chapter 4 talks about officer classification system.

http://www.apd.army.mil/pdffiles/r611_1.pdf

OP you are correct. I am a Captain/Field Artillery Officer & my AOC is 13A... for the time being...

 

[Perrotfish]

Thanks for straightening this out. I went from being convinced I was right to being sold on the fact that I was wrong, just to be informed that I was in fact right in the first place. I don't understand why I continue to use this website as a resource. So far my topic has had an entire discussion regarding AOC vs MOS and one individual bashing the HPSP program as a whole (which I explicitly requested remain out of this discussion) without receiving a concrete answer as to how one gets into their preferred AOC or the competitiveness of those slots. I suppose I'll have to go find a ex-HPSP doctor personally.

Alright, I'm getting the feeling that you're confused about some really basic stuff here, like how the medical education system works in and out of military medicine , and what physicians actually do in their respective specialties. I apologize if I'm wrong, but you're using a lot of borderline irrelevant terms like AOC and MOS and you aren't really using the terms like 'specialty' and 'billet' that would indicate you know what you're asking. So, to give a primer

How to become a doctor:

1) The first step in becoming a physician is to get an undergraduate degree and finish your premedical requirements, and then go to 4 years of medical school and become a doctor. However a 'doctor' who graduated from medical school can't actually do anything yet, he needs to go through another 3-10 years of training known as residency.

2) Your residency is where you train for your specialty, which means whatever kind of doctor you want to be. Residencies, like medical school, are something you need to apply for. Some are competitive, like Neurosurgery, and you need a really good application to get in. Others are open to almost any graduate, like family practice. You apply to residencies in your last year of medical school, through a process called the match. If what you're asking is how competitive the match is, you need to tell us what specialty you're trying to match into. Even then, the answer might change by the time you get here.

3) The military has its own, internal residency system, and when you take the scholarship you need to apply for military residencies through the military's own match. Just like the civilian match your odds of getting what you want depend on your grades, your standardized test scores, and how well you interview. The only difference is that the odds of getting some specialties are much worse (for example Pediatrics is more competitive) and the odds of getting some specialties are slightly better.

What you can do in a warzone:

The reason so few people here know their AOC/MOS/whatever is because these terms aren't that important to us. In military medicine what you can do in combat is the same as what you're credentialed to do out of combat. Some examples:

1) If you want to work in a warzone, and put bleeding/burned/blasted service members back together again, you need to be a Surgeon. To be a Surgeon in a warzone the only requirements are that you did a surgery residency, and you were willing to go/couldn't weasel out of going to a warzone.

2) If you want to go to a warzone, and put those same injured soldiers to sleep so that the surgeons can fix them up, you need to be an anesthesiologist, which means you need to have finished an anesthesiology residency

3) If you want to just provide primary care for service members in warzones ('hey doc, what's this rash on my ***?) you can do a residency in anything. A primary care job for a battalion is called a 'battalion surgeon'. There is, as previously noted, no surgery involved. There's just administrative work, corpsman training, and sick call.

BTW if you want to crawl out into gunfire and drag wounded soldiers to the safety of the line like the 'doc' in band of brothers... that's not a doctors job. That's a medic/corpsman, enlisted medical personnel who work a lot like EMS in the civilian world. Doctors do other things. Watch MASH for a good overview.

How you get your billet (i.e. job)

So how do you get hooked up with the marines to go to a warzone? The key word here is billet. Every 2-3 years you apply for a new 'billet' in the military, which means a new job. You are given a list of jobs you qualify for by a person called the detailer, and then you bargain with that person for the job you want. For example if you're a surgeon they might need one person to provide care at a hospital in Baghdad for a year, another person to cover the surgery service at a family practice residency in camp Lejune, and a third person to handle surgeries at a major medical center like the big hospital DC. Billets are not 'competitive' per se, there is no objective merit based application process to decide who gets what. Anything that's far or dangerous, though, is generally something the detailer is happy to give away to someone who asks.

So if you want to do surgery in a warzone you need to do well enough in school to get a surgery residency, then complete the residency, then ask to go to a warzone.

 

[notdeadyet]

1) If you want to work in a warzone, and put bleeding/burned/blasted service members back together again, you need to be a Surgeon. To be a Surgeon in a warzone the only requirements are that you did a surgery residency, and you were willing to go/couldn't weasel out of going to a warzone.

Perrotfish's entire post is excellent, but I wanted to emphasize one point of his.

The "if you want to work in a warzone" has the obvious but often overlooked prerequisites of having a warzone.

The last 10 years have been atypical in that we've been in a fighting war for 10 years. In U.S. history, military docs have spent a lot more of their time in environments of peace than in environments of war. Even during times of war, only a portion of your career will be spent in the conflict itself.

Do not join if you'd be satisfied with combat military medicine if you wouldn't also be satisfied peacetime military medicine. The surgeons who spent some of their combat deployments fighting the clock putting people back together during deployment in Iraq will then potentially spend a couple of years down south somewhere struggling for cases or moonlighting to prevent skills atrophy. The psychiatrists who were flown from base to base in combat mental health teams to help soldiers in the aftermath of loss and trauma will likely potentially return to a rural midwest base practicing "diagnose then adios" as all of the severe mental illness is chaptered out and becomes the VA's problem. Similar scenarios exist for every service and specialty.

It's easy to watch MASH and get excited. Make sure you can be excited about peacetime military service. The current environment is not the one you'll serve in by the time you're done training. And you may (God's mercy on our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines) find yourself fulfilling your duties domestically with nary a combat deployment. Make sure you're down with that.

 

[pgg]

Thanks for straightening this out. I went from being convinced I was right to being sold on the fact that I was wrong, just to be informed that I was in fact right in the first place. I don't understand why I continue to use this website as a resource. So far my topic has had an entire discussion regarding AOC vs MOS and one individual bashing the HPSP program as a whole (which I explicitly requested remain out of this discussion) without receiving a concrete answer as to how one gets into their preferred AOC or the competitiveness of those slots. I suppose I'll have to go find a ex-HPSP doctor personally.

Welcome to the internet. Filtering what you need and discarding what you don't is generally necessary.

Consider the possibility that some of the information being offered to you might be useful, even if you didn't know enough to ask for it in the first place. There is no better resource for pepole to learn about military medicine, HPSP, and other related programs than this forum.

While you absolutely should seek out a current or ex HPSP doctor (off the internet) to discuss the program and talk about experiences and options, be aware that many aspects of military medicine are very complicated and change from year to year. Odds are a random medical corps officer won't be able to give you definitive answers on many important subjects. I've been in a while and I still learn new things about the system all the time ... almost never from people I work with, almost always from this forum.