Get shot or wounded within an hour of a hospital and your chances of survival are a lot better than if you were farther away. But for U.S. Special Operations Forces and their partners, “farther away” is where the fighting happens, sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest friendly hospital. So they’re closing the gap in places like Syria using jerry-rigged emergency rooms that fit on the back of trucks and lots of freeze-dried, powdered blood.

James Smith, the acquisition executive for U.S. Special Operations Forces Command, or SOCOM, described a recent incident in Syria. U.S. troops were supporting a partner military fighting “well outside of the golden hour” — meaning more than an hour away from a useful hospital..

But the U.S. forces had a Mobile Technical Repair Complex, or MTRC — basically a tent that comes with a lathe, some drilling equipment, and 3D printer to rapidly manufacture tools or parts you might need. SOCOM has 13 such complexes deployed in remote places around the world, along with technicians and engineers to run them.

To help the partner force in Syria, the MTRC crew welded together two transportable sleeping units and put them in the back of a flatbed truck, along with packets of freeze-dried blood. Soldiers maneuvered the makeshift medical facility to within a couple hundred meters to the front lines, Smith said during the annual SOFIC conference in Tampa, Florida, this week.

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