Leaving Mundania (22 page)

When it came to moulage, I knew what Captain Bickford was talking about—it's possible he and my larpers bought their supplies from the same theatrical company. During my brief tenure at the zombie apocalypse larp Dystopia Rising, I'd seen “infected” characters with gross open wounds on their necks or bullet wounds created from bits of latex and fake blood. Players created these looks by either buying premade latex wounds or using liquid latex to create their own prostheses. They would attach, for example, the circular ridge around a bullet wound to their skin with spirit gum, camouflage the edges with a flesh-toned makeup, and paint the oozy parts with bottled fake blood. It's probably not as realistic as army-created injuries because, well, zombies aren't realistic, but the wounds are made of the same core ingredients.

As it turns out, the army and a larp game have much more in common. They're both communities with their own strange activities intended to bond participants: basic training in the case of the army and larp in the case of larpers. Larpers wear costumes; soldiers wear uniforms. Larpers come from different walks of life, and so do members of the National Guard. Soldiers learn tactics, while many larpers enjoy tactical games.

The army and a larp both constitute subcultures with their own distinct languages, based heavily around acronyms. For example, larpers enjoy talking OOG (out-of-game) and IC (in-character) with NPCs (nonplayer characters). But in the land of acronyms, the army is truly king, or perhaps should I say HRH (His Royal Highness). It has departments like the PTAE (Pre-mobilization Training Assistance Element), which organizes a lot of role-play and teaches TTP (tactics, techniques, and procedures) to soldiers according to their MOS (military occupation specialty). One sergeant even joked to me that the army is full of TLAs—three-letter acronyms.

But at the end of the day, larpers play at going to war while soldiers actually go. The point of larp is fun, and the point of the army is to win wars. Yet the army jargon for going to war, for deploying, is being “in theater,” a phrase that suggests performance and playing
a role. Given the army's training activities, the word
theater
is oddly appropriate.

Fort Indiantown Gap contains a fake Arab town called the Combined Arms Collective Training Facility, or the CACTF (pronounced cack-tiff) for short. It's on a small paved hill in the middle of the woods. It's got a mosque that peculiarly resembles a New England country church, complete with a graveyard filled with round cement gravestones. Next to the church, there's a pile of rubble ringed by a round asphalt drive. The rest of the town consists of about three blocks of buildings, including residences, half-finished cinderblock structures, a police station, a hotel, and an open-air market with stalls made of timber. A short distance away lies the shell of a burnt-out car. Underneath the words “Police Station” and “Hotel” their translations are stenciled in Arabic lettering. Inside, the hotel is sparsely furnished with desks in some rooms, bureaus, the odd stack of mattresses, and bookshelves.

First Sergeant William Hyatt is an instructor with the PTAE, which manages, runs, and coordinates training at Fort Indiantown Gap, and he shows me around the CACTF on my visit. Like most of the people in charge of training soldiers who are about to deploy, he has recently returned from a tour of duty; he returned from Iraq in July 2006, shortly before taking the post. The theory is that soldiers recently returned from deployment will be up on the most current insurgent tactics and therefore able to help train deploying soldiers accordingly, Major Angell says.

At the CACTF, Sergeant Hyatt shows me the little details that make this fake town mimic the real ones he fought in abroad. He points out the thousand places where an enemy could be hiding. For starters, the buildings are rife with sniper nests, tiny holes in some of the interior and exterior walls at about knee height, some of them covered with tape or cardboard. He informs me that insurgents use these both visually, to watch people approaching the building or inside it, and as sniper holes, akin to the narrow arrow-slits in medieval forts and castles. In the basement of the “hotel,” a bookcase hides a tunnel that leads underneath the town, into a sewer system. This part of the design makes the CACTF a truly three-dimensional training facility,
he says, since enemies can be stationed on top of buildings, inside them, and below them, like a real city. In one of the townhouses down the street there is a weapons cache set up with mock trip wires and traps, like real weapons caches are. Rush to discover what's inside the cache, and a soldier could end up “dead.” The graveyard outside the church is important, Sergeant Hyatt says. Sometimes during exercises they stage burials there, because insurgents have been known to bury large caliber weapons and rockets in fresh graves.

During scenarios, the military used to use laser guns to simulate live fire but has since ended the practice since laser guns aren't realistic enough. Plywood stops lasers, for example, while a real bullet rips through to whoever is standing behind it. For this reason, most training scenarios use real weapons, to give soldiers the experience of feeling the recoil of a gun. Usually, the guns fire blanks, with an honor system determining who dies or is wounded, along with a set of observer-controller trainers who monitor the fight and tell soldiers when they're out of play or wounded. Sometimes the soldiers use rubber bullets, which hurt when they hit but don't do permanent damage.

Toward the rear of the town, behind the hotel, the wooden remains of a mock open-air market flank a paved road. Sergeant Hyatt conjures the image of a training exercise for me, lots of soldiers dressed in flowing robes and head-wraps pretending to be locals, while one of them, one bad guy, needs to be winnowed out. Nearly everyone is a civilian in that scenario, and there's only one bad guy. How do you tell who's who? That's realism, he says.

The CACTF is a $10 million town, finished by the government contractor ECI in 2008, and it has been wired within an inch of its fake life. It contains seventy-two cameras, which can be moved to different areas of the town depending on which parts of it are “in-play” during a training exercise. The cameras can shoot during the daytime and have infrared settings for night. The town is also wired for sound, with speakers capable of generating noises from dogs barking to kids crying to gunshots, helicopter rotors, and the Muslim call to prayer. Some of the furniture has outlets under it where the HUTs, humanurban targets, basically remote-controlled dummies, can be wired.

All of these speakers, cameras, and dummies are controlled from the Range Operations Center, a small building perhaps a mile away that is staffed by Raytheon Technical Services Company, another government contractor. David Moyer, a forty-something veteran of the first Gulf War, works in the control center as an electronics technician. At the end of a training session, Moyer and his team edit the video footage and screen it for the trainees. The camera gives an objective picture of what goes on during training scenarios. Soldiers who didn't learn what's being taught correctly can actually see where they went wrong, and it's hard to deny one's own mistakes when they're caught on tape.

The CACTF isn't only used by the military. Federal, state, and local first responders, including SWAT teams, police, and EMTs also use the facility to test their preparations for emergency situations. A group might practice setting up decontamination tents in case of a nuclear explosion or coordinating between a SWAT team retrieving “bodies” from the rubble, in reality dummies stamped with numbers indicating their injuries, and medical teams decontaminating and treating the bodies.

Not every training scenario is high tech. Sergeant Hyatt also takes me to see something called lane training, a battle drill designed to help a single squad, a collection of about twelve to fifteen soldiers, put together several tasks it's learned. The point of this exercise is not to simulate combat but to show the squad what to do in combat, Sergeant Hyatt says. Today, two squads from the 131st Transportation Company will be “walking the lane” and will practice responding to direct and indirect fire, responding to flares, moving around an obstacle, and several other tasks. This exercise will be “dismounted,” or on foot. The 131st Transportation is not primarily a fighting unit; rather, its function is to supply other troops with fuel, water, food, ammo, and anything else, using trucks. Because their function is not necessarily to fight, they are what Sergeant Hyatt calls “soft targets” for insurgents, as opposed to the “hard targets” of infantry companies, for example. But due to the number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that insurgents are using in Afghanistan, these support units are now very likely to face combat, and so training is geared to hone
their basic soldier skills. They may not be kicking in doors, but it's possible they'd face small arms fire with a disabled vehicle. The two squads that I will watch are relatively green and have not worked together before—this will be their first foray into battle conditions as a team.

We begin at a shanty town the size of a city block, set around a central square. The town consists of a collection of giant steel shipping containers that have doors and windows cut into them, some stacked two high to create buildings that have stairs leading to a second story. Everyone is milling about outside, waiting for instruction.

The two squads are briefed on today's mission. The mansion in town, one of the two-story buildings, is a known Taliban stronghold, and there may or may not be Taliban there when they arrive. Each of the squads will walk the lane on its own. We all drive up to the start of the lane, about three-quarters of a mile away. Each squad has its own leader and divides into two teams, each one with its own leader. The squad leader establishes a chain of command; if he should go down, or his second should, there is a third person in charge. Everyone jumps up and down to make sure his equipment—his flak jacket, helmet, water, ammunition clip—is secure. They must be wearing at least fifty pounds of gear. For the most part, they are armed with rifles that have a yellow block screwed into their barrels, which creates a seal so that when the gun fires a blank it will recoil as if firing a real round. The soldiers talk among themselves, doling out numbers that will determine how they will cover doorways once they get to town. They receive cautions not to fire at someone's face and not to fire at civilians. They psych themselves up, saying things like, “Let's do this together. Let's get home together.”

They walk two by two on the road down to the town, a gravel lane that wends its way through woods and fields. Two veterans follow behind. They will give hints and suggestions if the squad really seems stuck. They will also tell a soldier when he or she is “out of play,” should one be felled by fire. The first squad to walk the lane encounters an enemy on the hill, hiding behind a tree below them and firing up through a field of tall grass. The squad drops to the ground to avoid being hit and in hopes that the enemy may not have
seen all of them, Sergeant Hyatt says. He and I are strolling behind them. The soldiers gather behind one section of the grass and scrubby brush and perform a flanking maneuver, with one group establishing a base fire and another, mobile group flanking to the left, pinning the OPFOR, the opposing force, between them. The enemy is wearing a headdress and a long robe over his army fatigues for the role. One of the soldiers gets left behind. When the team splits, he doesn't go left or right, and so he's told that he's now “out of play” and he mock limps down the road for a stretch and then returns to his team to get practice with the next obstacle, which is a line of razor wire stretched across the road.

Such wires can be trapped with explosives, Sergeant Hyatt tells me. The squad takes positions on the ground on either side of the road, and one member takes a grappling hook on a long rope, swings it, and sends it sailing toward the wires. As soon as he's thrown it, he hits the ground. The hook misses the wire, so he stands up and does it again, pulling the razor wire toward him. Nothing happens. A nearby piece of carpet is placed over the wire so that everyone can walk over it and on toward town.

No sooner is the squad across the wire than a rocket-propelled grenade is fired at them from afar, in this case represented by a smallish, pale yellow football fired out of a grenade launcher. The soldiers again hit the ground. Sergeant Hyatt picks up the rubber projectile and hands it to me.

Finally, after a few more trials and tribulations, the squad reaches “town,” where a group of soldiers awaits them. There are three men in the main square, wearing their army tops inside out to denote the fact that they are, essentially, NPCs. One of them sits on top of a couple benches in front of a door that leads into the mansion courtyard, while the other two mill about with loose joints, pretending, perhaps, to be drunk. As the soldiers enter, these NPCs keep attempting to interact with them. The one in front of the courtyard door offers to sell them bullets in a mock Arabic accent. The other two do anything in their power to distract the soldiers, from walking into their personal space and gyrating to falling down in front of doors. The first group of soldiers negotiates all this with a little fumbling but eventually
makes it into the two two-story buildings and successfully “kills” the hiding Taliban who are firing on them. When the second squad approaches the end of the lane, they choose to enter town through its main entrance, and one of the NPCs, one of the mock-drunk ones, runs at them, and they fire on him, killing him. He says something like, “Jeez, guys, not good. I'm an unarmed civilian!”

Sergeant Hyatt speaks quietly into my ear, telling me that if a guy ran at him like this in a situation like this, he probably would have fired too. One of the realistic portions of this scenario, Sergeant Hyatt says, is that there aren't many people around in the mock-town. Soldiers in theater call it the ghost town effect—when a town empties out during the day, it often means that the locals have gotten wind of an impending attack and fled. We watch the second squad successfully displace the man selling bullets and cover the doorway into the courtyard. One man checks it for traps by hovering his hand a few inches away and tracing the doorjamb in the air. Someone inside the mansion fires at the soldiers in the doorway, but they make it through, one by one. Doorways like this are called “fatal funnels,” Sergeant Hyatt tells me.