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harvezd

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Amputees have star roles in war games

Like densely plotted, big-budget movie
Army fights insurgents in fictitious town

PETER CARLSON
THE WASHINGTON POST

Grandma used to say that there's a silver lining inside every dark cloud and maybe she was right. This month, Harper's magazine has found a big, heartwarming silver lining inside that gloomy old Global War on Terrorism. Here it is:

The United States government has hired a bunch of poor souls who lost their arms and legs in accidents and has rigged them up with bags of fake blood so they can play wounded civilians in war games down at Fort Polk, La.

Not only that but Cubic, the defence contractor that produces these games, has also hired 250 Arabic-speaking immigrants at $220 a day (all figures U.S.) as "Cultural Role Players" in the war games.

They've also hired hundreds of local Louisianans to play random Arab civilians, plus "dozens of scriptwriters" to come up with realistic scenarios for the war games.

"The best way to describe what we're doing here," says one of the U.S. Army intelligence officers who plan the games, "is that we're producing a very complex movie with a huge number of plotlines and a very high budget.''

How high is the budget?

"The military spends an average of $9 million staging each 3 1/2-week mission rehearsal exercise," writes Wells Tower, author of this jaw-droppingly bizarre article. That works out to about $117 million a year, he writes.

That doesn't include the $49 million spent constructing the state-of-the-art fake city of Suliyah, which contains 29 buildings, each one equipped with remote-controlled, smoke-making machines and an intercom system that pipes in "recordings of screaming women, crying babies, barking dogs and other sound effects throughout the whole city.''

Plus there are 900 video cameras so the brass can watch the games in real time while sitting in high-back, black-leather chairs in Suliyah's control centre.

"We also are fixing to start implementing smells of the battlefield," said Marty Martinson, Suliyah's chief administrator. "Smells like vomit, burning rubber, burning bodies, those kinds of things ... Soldiers need to understand, there's a smell to the battlefield. There's a smell to death.''

Needless to say, the army doesn't use live ammo in these exercises. Basically, the soldiers are playing very sophisticated games of laser tag.

Each of the 4,000 or so participants wears a harness that chirps when it's hit by a laser "bullet." And when the game is over, referees wander the battlefield with "god guns'' — devices that erase "wounds" from the harnesses and resurrect the ``dead" so they can play again.

One day at the war games, Tower was chatting with some of the amputees who play wounded civilians when suddenly a horn went off, signalling the start of another fake battle.

A Humvee and a convoy of trucks were attacked with a fake rocket-propelled grenade, causing a fake explosion that caused Cole Young, 71, who lost a leg in an oil pipeline accident, to lie on the ground with fake blood spurting from his amputated leg.

A soldier came to give Young some fake first aid. But when he saw that Young's hand was under his poncho, working his blood-spurting machine, the soldier yelled, "He's got a (bleep) wire!" and started firing laser bullets into Young's chest.

That caused the other fake civilians to start screaming, "Murderers!"

That distracted the soldiers, enabling a bunch of fake insurgents to sneak up and wipe them all out — "mowing down the troops as effortlessly," Tower writes, "as they might a herd of grazing cows.''

Which is, alas, not unusual: Time after time, Tower reports, the fake insurgents massacred the American troops in these games.

Grandma would no doubt say that the silver lining in that news is that the games are just ... well, games.

In the real war in Iraq, America is kicking insurgent butt, says President George W. Bush.

harvezd

Ogólnie rzecz jest antyamerykańska, ale war games same w sobie dość.. kontrowersyjne.

Nurglitch

Ja jakoś tej kontrowersyjności nie widzę. W końcu US Army wpadła na oczywisty pomysł szkolenia żołnierzy do tego, co będą robić rzeczywiście, a nie co mogliby robić, gdyby Wujek Stalin napadł kiedyś na Europę.

MarheF

Craven

Czy to najdroższy larp na świecie? :P

Ekelmann

I nawet kalekom dali zarobić... :D

A tak w ogóle, to Nurgli ma rację. Na tym to polega - wydajesz miliony dolarów teraz i oszczędzasz dziesiątki milionów dolarów później w zniszczonym sprzęcie, zabitych żołnierzach i działaniach PR, żeby jakoś wytłumaczyć własnym obywatelom porażkę.