They planned to have a casual dinner out in town. The sudden sound of crashing dishes brought something else to the table.

  "All we heard was dishes colliding and a little girl screaming," said Petty Officer 3rd Class Margaret R. Reusi, a corpsman with Company B, 1st Medical Battalion, 1st Marine Logistics Group. "The little girl was trying to pick her mother up off the floor."

  Seeing the woman was unresponsive, the group rushed to her side to administer medical attention.

  "We proceeded to the lady, checking her vitals and airway," Reusi said. "She started to turn blue."

  The woman wasn't breathing and had no pulse.

  With little time to spare, the corpsman started the steps of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.

  "I put her in the shock position as (Seaman) Vega started compressions and (Petty Officer 3rd Class) Flores checked her air ways," Reusi said. "What seemed like hours of hard work were a few moments of fast acting procedures."

  Reusi said the emergency medical team arrived after the woman began breathing on her own.

  "When the EMTs evaluated her medical state, they explained that our actions saved her life," said Seaman William S. Vega, a corpsman with Company B, 1st Medical Battalion, 1st MLG. "The ambulance would have arrived too late for her."

  Vega attributed their success, not just to himself and the other corpsmen, but to their military medical education.

  "We are trained to act in life situations, to finish our mission we need to know what we're doing," he said.

  Vega has experienced high-speed, high-anxiety situations first hand during combat deployment. He said that if an emergency situation arises for corpsmen, they react in a heartbeat.

  "We have two uniforms, military and civilian, but it's not like one moment I wake up and say I want to be corpsman and another I want to be a civilian," Vega said. "I'm the same person all the time, and when a situation comes up when I'm out in town, I'll be ready to help someone in need."