Rehearsing the “Warrior Ethos”

Rehearsing the “Warrior Ethos” “Theatre Immersion” and the Simulation of Theatres of War Scott Magelssen As America’s embedment in the Middle East has become increasingly entrenched, complicated, and violent, the Armed Forces are looking to theatre and performance for new counterinsur- gency strategies to keep apace with the shifting specificities of the present war.1 To pre-expose deployment-bound troops to combatants’ unconventional tactics, and to the sharp-eyed gaze of the local and international media, the Army has constructed vast simulations of wartime Iraq and Afghanistan. Termed “Theatre Immersions,”2 these sites feature entire villages—living, breath- ing environments complete with residential, government, retail, and worship districts—bustling 1. It should be said that, whereas the military uses “strategies” to denote overall plans to win a war, and “tactics” to denote the practices used in the field to implement these strategies (Mockaitis 2007b), I use these terms in the sense articulated by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). To paraphrase de Certeau, strategies are the methods used by those in power to rein in and police the space they control, and tactics are used by those to whom the space does not belong, but who occupy it and maneuver through its landscape, resisting or playing by its rules. In this case, the US and Coalition forces, in cooperation with the interim and permanent govern- ments, ostensibly own and control the space of Iraq, and operate strategically to maintain this control. 2. “Theater immersion rapidly builds combat-ready formations led by competent, confident leaders who see first, understand first, and act first; battleproofed soldiers inculcated with the warrior ethos man the formations. Theater immersion places—as rapidly as possible—leaders, soldiers, and units into an environment that approximates what they will encounter in combat. At the soldier level, training is tough, realistic, hands-on, repetitive, and de- signed to illicit intuitive soldier responses. It thrusts formations into a theater analog soon after they arrive at their mobilization station and places stress on the organization from individual to brigade levels. Theater immersion is a combat training center–like experience that replicates conditions downrange while training individual- through brigade-level collective tasks” (Honoré and Zajac 2005). TDR: The Drama Review 53:1 (T201) Spring 2009. ©2009 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 47 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 Figure 2. Role-players gather in the marketplace during a training rehearsal in the town of Nahiat al Bab al Sharq in “The Box” at the National Training Center, 11 July 2008. (Photo by Etric Smith, courtesy of The High Desert Warrior) with costumed inhabitants. The largest such facility is at the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, a 1000-square-mile simulation of an Iraqi province in California’s Mojave Desert— appropriately dubbed the “Sandbox.” It is both a virtual space of play and experimentation, and a mirror reproduction of the real Iraq (also referred to as the “Sandbox” by US troops). Ten months out of the year, battalions of soldiers are immersed into this full-size simulation, complete with nine working villages peopled with Arabic-speaking Iraqis engaged in quotidian business and social transactions. The townspeople are portrayed by Arabic-speaking Iraqi expatriates from Detroit, San Diego, and other cities with established Middle Eastern American populations. Alongside this, the soldiers are exposed to guerilla combat, convoy ambushes, IED (improvised explosive device) encounters, and televised beheadings. The American soldiers’ job, over the course of two weeks in the Sandbox, is to learn to live and work sensitively with Iraqi civilians, to mediate in sectarian and ethnic conflicts, and to gain trust, all the while trying not to produce more insurgents by making mistakes. At the same time, they must learn to deal with snipers, bombs, riots, and bad press from the simulation’s equivalents of CNN and Al Jazeera, Figure 1. (previous page) Role-players scatter after simulated sniper fire breaks out during a training rehearsal in the town of Medina Wasl in the National Training Center’s training area, “The Box,” 11 July 2008. (Photo by Etric Smith, courtesy of The High Desert Warrior) Scott Magelssen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film, teaches theatre history and performance studies at Bowling Green State University. He is the author of Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance (Scarecrow Press, 2007), and coeditor, with Ann Haugo, of Querying Difference in Theatre History (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). He is currently coediting a collection of essays with Rhona Justice Malloy entitled Enacting History, to be published by University of Alabama Press. ScottMagelssen 48 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 Figure 3. Role-players react after a simulated bomb explodes during a training rehearsal in the town of Medina Wasl in “The Box” at the National Training Center, 11 July 2008. (Photo by Etric Smith, courtesy of The High Desert Warrior) which televise their every move in the villages. The Iraqis’ job is to portray civilians, civic leaders, police, and military figures in the villages based on their own character sheets detailing their family history, education, profession or civic position, ethnicity, and beliefs. Whereas an Iraqi might initially have a guarded neutrality concerning the Americans’ presence, she might quickly become pro- or anti-American, depending on how she or her family is treated by the occupying American soldiers. The efforts at the National Training Center, it would seem, are meeting the program’s goals for “fidelity” in simulating Iraq. As a spring 2006New York Times article put it, “With actors and stuntmen on loan from Hollywood, American generals have recast the training ground at Fort Irwin so effectively as a simulation of conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan [. .] that some soldiers have left with battle fatigue and others have had their orders for deployment to the war zones canceled. In at least one case, a soldier’s career was ended for unnecessarily ‘killing’ civilians” (Filkins and Burns 2006). Army Press releases and servicemen and -women’s blogs frame immersions as a means to indoctrinate soldiers with a “warrior ethos”—promising decreased collateral damage and improved US-Iraqi relations.3 Soldiers in training are subjected to rigorous sur- 3. The “Warrior Ethos” creed reads: “I am an American Soldier. I am a Warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the United States and live the Army Values. I will always place the mission first. I will never accept Ethos Warrior the Rehearsing defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade. I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough, trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills. I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself. I am an expert and I am a professional. I stand ready to deploy, engage, and destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat. I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life. I am an American Soldier” (US Army n.d.). Lt. Gen. Russell L. Honoré, Commanding General First US Army, connected the Warrior Ethos to training strategy when he addressed the First US Army Commander’s Conference in Atlanta in 2006: “We are in a war with no rear areas or front lines. We have to instill the Warrior Ethos into the mobilized Soldiers we train. Every Soldier must be able to function as an Infantryman. Soldiers must have tough, realistic, hands-on, 49 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 veillance by the Army, and “after action reviews” debrief them on their successes and mistakes before further restaging. Not by chance, Fort Irwin’s “insurgents” are trained by film and television star Carl Weathers. As the actor who played Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies, the man who bequeathed Sylvester Stallone his stars-and-stripes shorts, and later portrayed a special forces operative deployed to fight and protect our interests against a deadly alien invader in the 1987 filmPredator, Weathers’s connection to the simulation is perhaps intended to lend an air of Hollywood professionalism and a genealogy in line with pro-American values. Based on my research and interviews there in the fall of 2007, I have isolated the major performance practices used by Fort Irwin’s soldiers and Iraqi actors, and have begun to unpack some of the representational and performative issues that emerge when the program is subjected to consideration from a theatre and performance mode of inquiry. I hope to offer the beginnings of an analysis of the kind of theatre and performance taking place at Fort Irwin, and, if I’m not overstating the stakes, what this means for all of us. On the face of it, by staging the present and near future of Iraq and its thriving insurgency, the simulations at the National Training Center and similar sites are rehearsing American soldiers for not only fighting “terrorists” and “winning hearts and minds,” but for further performing America for the world. But unlike Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre, which similarly rehearses for “Real Life,” these operations do not equip “the Oppressed.” Rather, they labor to buttress “Nation Building” in the face of resistance—to perform and instill American-ness and protect American interests. But even more compelling is the way the Iraqi actors position themselves in the simulation. Operating tactically in another’s space, they stage Iraq and portray their countrymen for Americans, with agendas sometimes similar to those of the Americans and sometimes all their own.

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