4 ingear ADVENTURE

timesonline.co.uk/ingear 05.10.08 5

MarkHarriswithtwo ‘insurgents’in theLanes

It’s another scorching day inMedina Wasl, a small market townin the desert outside Baghdad. I’mwalking down the dusty mainstreet, trying to ignore Arabic popmusic blaring from a cafe, watch-

ing women barter for sizzling kebabsand getting a few sharp looks from themen sitting around smoking or playingbackgammon.

Then all hell breaks loose. A roadsideIED (improvised explosive device) deto-nates in a spray of shrapnel that rattlesmy UN-emblazoned Kevlar helmet. Thescreams that follow aren’t all in Arabic.The bomb’s target, a US army Humvee,lies shattered. One soldier is staggeringaround, waving his M16. Anotherwrithes in agony nearby having lostboth his legs. The bitter taste of gun-powder fills the air as Iraqi civilianseither rush to help friends caught in theblast or evaporate into side streets.

As if by magic, the cavalry arrive.Literally. The armoured Humvees andtank-like Bradley infantry fightingvehicles of the 3rd Brigade, 1st CavalryDivision, sweep into the town centre,braving sniper fire and angry locals totreat their injured comrades. Medicsleap into action and gunners rake a near-by hotel with large-calibre machine-guns. Then, with a final roar of theirengines, the Americans load theirwounded and leave the devastated scenebehind them.

I can almost hear the director call“Cut!” As the Humvees growl away,“injured” Iraqis stand up and smile ateach other. Technicians in fatiguescarry fire extinguishers over to thesmouldering Humvee and mutteringofficers behind me start dissecting theAmerican soldiers’ performance.

This isn’t really a town near Bagh-dad. It’s not even Iraq. It’s the US army’sNational Training Centre (NTC) at FortIrwin in California, and I’ve just takenpart in the most realistic paintball gamein the world. Or as NTC commanderBrigadier-General Dana Pittard calls it,

“an interactive, combat-focused Broad-way play”.

Until 2003, Fort Irwin mainly hosted“force on force” training operations. Itsremote location offered the space (if notthe climate) to simulate the sprawlingcold war tank battles the US armyexpected to fight in Europe. An entireUS regiment, the 11th ArmouredCavalry, adopted Soviet uniforms andtactics to become Fort Irwin’s resident“opposing force” — Opfor for short.

Then the Iraq war happened. SinceMarch 2003, more than 4,100 US soldiershave been killed and over 30,000wounded in a war the army simplywasn’t prepared for. Suicide bombs,IEDs and snipers wrought havoc in regi-ments that were ill equipped for urban

warfare. Civilians suffered too, as troopswith little understanding of local lan-guages and culture sometimes adoptedheavy-handed tactics.

The solution? Create a fake Iraqwhere soldiers could learn and makemistakes without adding to the casual-ty figures. And so the idea of the “Iraqsimulation” was born — 13 typical Iraqi(and Afghan) villages scattered acrossthe Mojave desert at Fort Irwin. The vil-lages would offer troops a range of realis-tic training scenarios, from foot patrolsto clearing underground caves.

Fort Irwin’s first Iraqi villages werelittle more than a collection of hurriedlypainted garages and barns purchasedfrom nearby retailer Shed World. Few ofits Opfor soldiers spoke Arabic and alllooked far too clean-cut to pass for Iraqiinsurgents.

The army needed more realism, itneeded it quickly and it had money to

spend — so it turned toHollywood, 200 miles

down the road. Con-struction co-ordinators

from Paramount Picturessprayed stucco onto shippingcontainers to create instantshops, houses and mosques.

Set dressers then added “texture”:broken-down Toyota pick-ups, plas-tic vegetables and meats for stalls,

authentically battered cafe tablesand even Arabic graffiti.The army even relies on Hollywood

for pyrotechnics. The roadside bombs,

for instance, contain only about asmuch gunpowder as a firework, but aredesigned to give the maximum bang forthe army’s buck — including cork shrap-nel for realism.

The latest improvements even useopen cooking fires, live goats and don-keys to give Medina Wasl an authenticsmell. Sergeant Thavone Phavivong ofthe 3rd Brigade has been to Iraq twiceand vouches for the realism of whattroops call the Lanes: “Exercises in Medi-na Wasl gave me flashbacks to when Iwas a gunner in a convoy over in Iraq.Over there, there are huge crowds, civil-ians are all over the battlefield. Everyoneis coming towards you and they’re sim-ply not afraid of us. NTC gives that expe-rience over here.” Just about the onlything missing, he says, are dogs runningaround, an impossibility in the Mojaveas they would get eaten by coyotes.

Phavivong, like the 50,000 other sol-diers “processed” through Fort Irwinevery year, is “getting his head into Iraqspace”, drill slang for acclimatising tothe conditions where you sweat 24hours a day in daytime temperatures of40C and in the knowledge that youcould fall victim at any second to an IEDor a sniper’s bullet.

Phavivong is hoping that the Iraqiconflict is entering its final straight. Hewas in the middle of his second tour inBaghdad last year when he heard thathis fiancée back home in Minnesota waspregnant. He knows that every tourshortens the odds of getting injured or

killed. Once he’s fully into combatmode, it will be as hard to re-enter life insuburban America as it is getting used toconditions in Medina Wasl. “When Iwent back to the States [after my firsttour], it was like I was in the future,” hesays, recalling his homecoming. “Every-thing was new and different. I took a lit-tle time to see each and every one of myfamily and friends — you never knowwhen the next time will be.”

To simulate the conditions of a realIraqi town, Medina Wasl is populated by2,000 villagers, in reality either Opfor sol-diers or unemployed locals from nearbyBarstow. All speaking roles are handledby an ensemble of 250 Arabic actors andémigrés. They live on base for weeks at astretch, playing the parts of Iraqiimams, mayors, shopkeepers and house-wives. The men and women (there areno children, for safety reasons) comefrom all over the Middle East.

Some have fled conflict themselves,others are comfortable Arab Americanswho simply enjoy the wages of around$4,500 (£2,430) for two weeks’ work. For12 hours a day, they live and breathe theroles of Iraqi villagers, wandering backand forth through the streets, sellingclothes and cigarettes to each other overand over again, and screaming hysteri-cally as the same Humvees “explode”every couple of hours.

Another group of actors is even moreunsettling. Make-up artists provide buck-ets of fake blood, and the US army victimof the Humvee bombing I witnessed was

played by a genuine double amputee,whose simulated wounds are goryenough to make some trainees sick.

“When the IEDs go off and you seethe amputees, it really makes it feelreal,” says Phavivong. “It can be hardwhen you see injured civilians, butwe’re taught that our first priority is oursoldiers. And with all the peoplearound, it’s not easy to make a positiveidentification of hostiles.”

The “hostiles” are members of Opfor,US soldiers playing Iraqi terrorists andinsurgents — anyone who might have

to fire a gun, mortar or rocket-propelledgrenade They are trained to use thesame tactics used by real insurgents,and even benefit from acting lessonsgiven by Carl Weathers, star of Predatorand the Rocky films.

That’s because each of the 112 possi-ble major events (or “iterations” in armyspeak) has a fully fledged script, withindividual speeches, motivations andactions planned out. Not every iterationis “kinetic” (with bullets and bombs);many simply involve talking with Iraqiauthorities or patrolling tense situa-

tions. What happens over the course ofthe 14-day training period depends onhow a unit behaves from day to day.

If US troops storm a calm village, kick-ing down doors and shooting on sight,for instance, they’ll face snipers andIEDs the next time they visit. If theyhire an interpreter (using real dinarsshipped over from Iraq) and respectlocal customs, though, they might justlearn about an Al-Qaeda cell shippingguns into the area.

Managing such multi-threaded sto-rylines takes more than a single direc-

tor. So the Lanes has 310. These observer/controllers (OCs) are the simulation’sreferees. Some wander through the vil-lages with the trainees, others monitorthe village’s hundreds of hidden videocameras and microphones from thebase’s control centre.

Forget the .50-calibre machineguns,the armoured fighting vehicles andeven the occasional Apache helicopterthat flashes overhead, the OCs carry themost powerful weapon of all — the GodGun. This small blue plastic revolvercan “kill” anything on the battlefield,from an unarmed civilian to a C-130transport plane, in a silent flash of light.

All weapons in the simulation areloaded with blanks, but woe betide anyfighter who lets their guard down. Everysoldier, villager and vehicle in the Laneswears a harness that is part of a wirelesslaser tag network called Miles, standingfor Multiple Integrated Laser Engage-ment System. Each Miles harness con-tains an array of laser receivers, andevery weapon (except suicide bombs andIEDs) has a laser emitter. “We really justhave a very fancy laser tag warfare sys-tem,” admits John Wagstaffe of the NTC.

The Miles network is smart, so if youtry to shoot a Humvee with a handgun,nothing happens. If you accurately tar-get a person who is vulnerable and with-in range, they hear a buzzing sound thatmeans they are hit. An OC then handsthem a “casualty card” that describestheir injury and whether they can hob-ble away or fall down dead. Every Miles

harness also has a GPS unit that allows itto be pinpointed from the control centre.

The God Gun allows the OCs to simu-late the effects of bombs by disabling sol-diers and vehicles, or simply to punishfoolish tactics. After each iteration hasrun its course, the soldiers get feedbackon their behaviour, discuss the conse-quences of their actions, and often haveto run the exercise all over again.

For the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Divi-sion, the Lanes is the best immersiontraining they can get. “You knowwhat?” says Sergeant Phavivong with asmile. “I’d love to go through thoseLanes again.” But there’s no time forrepeats now. In December, the entirebrigade deploys to Iraq for a 12-monthtour of duty, with no Miles harnesses,no make-up artists and no blanks.

FIGHTING INSURGENTSIN BAGHDAD, USA

Troops check their grenade launchers,far left, for anothermock battle in theLanes at Fort Irwin, above. Make-up

artists help ‘casualties’ such as the onebelow appear as realistic as possible

Pictures by Dan Tuffs

The US army is using mock villages with Arabic actors and moviespecial effects to train for Iraq. Mark Harris steps into a firefight