By Paul Alongi
GUNSHOTS CRACKLED as a man dressed in camouflage sat on the ground with a red stream trickling from his ear and a purple splotch marking the skin near his cheekbone. A medic asked what happened.
“A clown ran up, balloon popped,” the man replied incoherently.
It sounds like a scene out of a war zone, but the man was an actor at a simulation center in Columbia, where researchers from Clemson University and Palmetto Health were recording the events as part of a $1.6 million project funded by the Department of Defense.
