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 counterinsurgency 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 designed 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).

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

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 Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos 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,

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. To precisely tease out the contours of this ongoing scholarly conversation, however, is no easy task. It is safe to say that not many scholarly works treat Theatre Immersion, and my initial research indicates that descriptions of and thoughts about the National Training Center and similar (though less ambitious) simulation programs at Fort Polk, Louisiana, Fort Bliss, Texas, and Camp Shelby, Mississippi, are limited to Army press releases and blurbs, feature-length newspaper articles, and TV and NPR news stories (see for example Honoré and Zajac 2005; Filkins and Burns 2006; Brand 2004). There are, however, trajectories of thinking that lend perspective and tools for grappling with this emergent phenomenon. The first and most obvious is the tradition of scholarly discourse on wargaming. While this term conjures for many the image of generals in a locked room with miniature armies inching across maps painted on the floor, or hobbyists in the rec room with multisided dice and painted figurines, wargaming scholars like Peter Perla and T.B. Allen posit a spectrum of wargaming techniques: closed map-room sessions are on the abstract, analytical end, and practical field exercises featuring “high operational realism” occupy the other (Allen 1987:4; Perla 1990:155; Lee 1990:40–51). Both kinds of wargames subject player-participants to hypothetical wartime scenarios based on real-world political situations, and both end with a rigorous debriefing or “hot wash-ups,” the Naval War College’s term that evocatively plays on the locker-room talk after a sports match. Fort Irwin’s simulation of Iraq signals a dramatic break with traditional wargaming field exercises, which up until the last decade have been geared toward training lower-ranking officers in decision making on the “tactical” (on the ground) level (vs. the war-room gaming of the higher-ranking officers, which focuses on the strategic and operational levels). Traditional

repetitive training until their response is intuitive” (First Army Public Affairs Office 2004). William Safire, the “On Language” columnist for the New York Times, offers an etymology of this recently emerged appellation for servicemen and -women: Safire writes that “warrior” is less clumsy than “servicemember” when it comes to gender-neutral descriptors that apply across the armed services, and offers the Naval Academy’s course on “the code of the warrior” and the US Army’s “Warrior Leader Course” for platoon leaders as examples of increasing usage (Safire 2007). ScottMagelssen

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 field exercises, in this regard, have centered primarily on measuring “operational readiness” and the efficiency with which officers conduct military concepts and carry out assigned tasks in campaigns and battles, e.g., the logistics of personnel and equipment movement with regard to tonnage, time-distance factors, and so forth (Beynon, Bird, and Moore 1999). While in some instances simulation of enemy forces has been the goal—for instance, dressing tanks to resemble those of the Russian Army during the Cold War—the actual haptic re-creation of small villages with inhabitants is a startling leap in the otherwise relatively static development of wargames in the past century. For decades, writes Thomas B. Allen, those who planned and implemented these exercises focused on the concrete, measurable goals of broad-stroke maneuvers, and tended to avoid factoring in the human elements altogether (individual choice and behavior, cunning, luck), dismissing these as “squishy” variables like weather, leadership, and morale (1987:78). At their most complex, then, these field exercises have resembled elaborate games of Capture the Flag (complete with teams and umpires [Perla 1990:163]), more than the brutal physical and psychological landscapes of the theatres of war for which they were training. Military field exercises go largely untreated in wargaming texts, but that’s the end of the spectrum where theatre and performance scholars encounter more familiar territory, and indeed, Tracy C. Davis finds her most fertile ground here. In her exquisitely detailed book,Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense, Davis draws our attention to the way civilians of allied NATO nations rehearsed for potential nuclear attacks during the Cold War. Davis examines nuclear drills, emergency response exercises, and staged sites of atomic detonation—complete with performers playing radiation burn victims and casualties buried in rubble—and clearly demonstrates that these exercises were “inherently and crucially theatrical” (Davis 2007:2). Of particular importance for studies of Iraq War simulations are Davis’s explorations of how the Cold War performances negotiated between striving for realism/authenticity and finding a space where such qualities are compromised or made elastic for the sake of the goals and protocols of the exercise. Psychological immersion or belief in the situation was not “all or nothing” in these performances, but instead could be stepped up “incrementally,” depending upon the pedagogical needs of each (73). Time and space could be bent for efficiency of the staged events, and contingent factors (“Does exercise play extend over a sufficient period to allow participants to experience the onset, crises, and resolution phases of their work? [. . .] Are players overwhelmed by the workload or coping comfortably with demands? [. . .] Do players work around the clock, making errors that arise from exhaustion and stress? [. . .] Do simulated casualties resemble the victims of nuclear war in the particularities of their injuries but not their numbers?” [73–74]) received more or less attention accordingly. “Realism,” in such practices, she concludes Figure 4. Electronics shop at Medina Wasl, September 2007. Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos at one point, “is not only selectively (Photo by Scott Magelssen) deployed, it is selectively desired” (74). Fort Irwin similarly faces representational issues in the area of realism. It strives to reproduce the martial Iraqi landscape with “fidelity,” but necessarily compresses time to expose soldiers to as many crises as it can in their brief training period. And the communities themselves, while matching up demographically and politically with their real-life counterparts in Iraq, don’t hold up against the standards of kitchen-sink realism. The 12 villages that comprised the simulation

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 in September 2007, when I visited the site, had been quickly cobbled together with corrugated shipping containers and bulk-purchased sheds from hardware superstores, then set-dressed with what the Army calls “texture”: fiberglass stonework on the sides of buildings, low-hanging electrical wires, garbage in the streets, graffiti, used electronics that would be hawked on the corners, burned-out cars. Newer villages are being constructed using Iraqi plans, brick and mortar, but these have been slow to completion because of financial and timing issues (Jason 2007). As near as Fort Irwin and the National Training Center can tell, soldiers find the fidelity acceptable, and those who have already been deployed to Iraq for a tour of duty will corroborate its passing resemblance to the real Sandbox. This is not so in the most extreme exercises of Davis’s study, in which she points out the paradox of representing the unrepresentable and the cognitively inassimilable, that is, the mimetic representation of an unknowable nuclear war through rehearsal: It is difficult for actors to play “as if” with “if” material, and nuclear Armageddon may be the ultimate “if.” Civil defense rehearsal must fail insofar as it inevitably falls short in mimesis, so performance is the term reserved for the execution of similar actions during war, when horror on the fullest possible scale could be known for the first time. (2007:86) Cold War exercises illuminated in Davis’s book also differ from Fort Irwin’s simulations in the degree to which they are acknowledged as a part of an explicitly theatrical exercise. Davis argues in her introduction that the terms of performance—“rehearsal, ritual, socio-drama, play, drama”—were used as casual popular metaphors to ascribe a “superficial resemblance” to theatre, but the deeper implications of those metaphors were until now mostly left unexplored (2). By contrast, the Army is outspoken in its recognition of the immersion theatre training’s use of theatre techniques to train soldiers for war. As John Wagstaffe, National Training Center and Fort Irwin Public Affairs Director likes to put it, the training scenarios are “improvised Shakespearean plays.”4 The scenario writers are playwrights; the villagers, actors; and the staff, who make sure everything is pulled off correctly, the stage managers. The military history of Fort Irwin, a Rhode Island-sized area in California’s Mojave Desert bordering Death Valley,5 dates to the early 20th century. It was decommissioned after World War II but became a federal post again in 1981, when a new doctrine, “train as you fight,” was put into place after the Arab-Israeli War. According to Wagstaffe, the Fort was ideal for “force on force” battle simulations. At 37 miles from the nearest civilian area (Barstow), the Army was free to jam radio signals, play with gas and chemicals, and do all the things that they might in the “real world arena” without encroaching on civilian communities. “So,” continues Wagstaffe, “now they’ve got a post, but they need an enemy army.” The Army at the time, given the current Cold War climate, was the Soviets. NATO forces assumed that when the attack came, it would be at the Fulda Gap between East and West Germany, and to prepare, they played out the attack over and over again on the vast desert floor. Two opposing tank battalions, 600-tanks abreast each, would roll out of camouflaged “spider holes” at dawn (to George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone,” the soldiers’ soundtrack of choice at the time) and engage in massive mock battles. The Soviet forces—in reality US Sheridan tanks dressed up with fiberglass shells to look like Russian T72s—would behave according to Soviet tactics and doctrine and would, with repeated rehearsal, come to brag that they were the best Soviet army in the world, rapidly becoming unbeatable by any American rotation in training. When the Wall came down in 1989, the

4. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations attributed to John Wagstaffe are from interviews conducted in 2007, and unless otherwise cited, all information on the National Training Center and Fort Irwin was supplied by Wagstaffe. 5. At the time of recommissioning, Camp Irwin, as it was called, was 1,000 square miles in area. It is now 1,200 square miles, after a recent acquisition that had been blocked temporarily because of concerns about an endangered species of desert tortoise that was threatened (Wagstaffe 2007a). ScottMagelssen

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 National Training Center needed a new enemy, and the next “logical enemy” was Saddam. They kept the Cold War model, says Wagstaffe, but put the enemy in desert “cammies,” changed the tactics, and added lots of chemical weapons and lots of smoke, “all things we thought they’d do.” They quickly became the best simulated Republican Guard Army in the world, much tougher than the real one since the simulated Iraqi Army rarely lets the American rotations win, whereas the real Iraq, Wagstaffe points out, was taken in 100 hours in the first Gulf War. But recent shifts in policy and doctrine, in answer to today’s unconventional wars, have dramatically altered the practices at the National Training Center. Counterinsurgency analysts have recommended major shifts in the way troops engage with populations in Iraq and Afghan- istan, and a new counterinsurgency field manual, the first revision in 20 years, outlines emerging strategies that are decidedly different from those in earlier editions of the manual (US Army and Petraeus 2006). According to independent analyst Thomas R. Mockaitis’s government-published report on the Iraq War, released in February 2007, Americans would do well to look to the British model of counterinsurgency strategy—that is, balancing a military campaign with a “hearts-and- minds” campaign designed to build trust. By sending troops to live and work with the occupied community—learning customs and, as a sign of good faith, leaving fortified fortress outposts to visit the villages without helmets, goggles, and flak jackets—the goal is to gain the trust and respect of the occupied citizenry so that they will resist hosting insurgents in their communities. Comparative analysis with recent insurrections suggests that insurgents win struggles against the occupying force not with conventional warfare (which the Army up to this point has tradition- ally been trained to handle), but with repeated small attacks that weary the occupying nation, provoke retaliations that kill innocent civilians, gain the attention of the global community, and ultimately turn the tide of the occupying nation’s public opinion. “Popular democracies,” Mockaitis shows, “have great difficulty sustaining support for pro- tracted, open-ended conflicts like counter insurgency” (2007a:v). As he puts it, “The decisive battle may take place, not in the streets of Baghdad, but in the living rooms of America” (32). Furthermore, the insurgency in Vietnam was so distasteful to the Pentagon that it thereafter delegated all future counterinsurgency issues to Special Forces—a move that has left the regu- lar Army’s front-line soldiers lacking necessary training and has resulted in situations where uninformed soldiers with little experience in unconventional warfare have responded with indiscriminate killing (1, 32). Mockaitis’s study includes many recommendations for the present war and for conflicts in the future; for example, insurgencies should be officially acknowledged by the administration at the very outset, something the Bush Administration failed to do for several months. He stresses that the US should seek to understand the insurgency in all its complex- ity and multiplicities (e.g., the Sunni moderates, the disenfranchised Ba’athists, the Islamists, the Mujahideen/al-Qai’da). He reminds his readers that it is far more effective to address economic and social issues first, and only then attempt to answer political grievances (7). In this regard, the traditional British “hearts-and-minds” model has been much more successful in answering to insurgencies (as seen in Malaya and Northern Ireland) due to its minimal use of force, civilian- military cooperation, and a decentralization of command (13).6 By contrast, the first months of the Iraq War, concludes Mockaitis, were plagued with errors, from the Coalition’s zero-tolerance firing of 650,000 employees of Saddam’s Iraqi Government and Army (after convincing them not to resist the invasion); to awarding the most lucrative Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos

6. Mockaitis acknowledges that the British, too, have made several mistakes (suffering “serious defeats in Ireland [1919–1921] and Palestine [1944–1947],” [Mockaitis 2007a:10] and committing notorious atrocities like the 1919 massacre at Amritwar in India [17]), and that these “victories” over insurgents were to some little more than delaying inevitable decolonization, but, when studied over a period of several decades, the record shows that the British have achieved a great amount of success (relatively bloodless compromises) when compared with the strategies of other nations (Mockaitis 2007a:12–13).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 rebuilding contracts to US firms; to micromanagement through the ranks; to “reconnaissance by fire,” in which American soldiers would drive through hostile areas hoping to draw even a single round of incoming fire so they could respond with 3,000 rounds “before we even dis- mount from our vehicles” (14). Most of all, it would seem from Mockaitis’s summary, American troops must learn to sensitively deal with the civilian population and avoid making the errors that have turned would-be supportive Iraqis into haters of America. He quotes a correspondent’s letter on this point to illustrate: We have broken down their doors, run them off the roads, swiveled our guns at them, shouted profanities at the[m], and disrespected their women—all this hundreds or thousands of times every day. We have dishonored them publicly, and within a society that places public honor above life itself. These are the roots of the fight we are in. (Langewiesche 2005:95; in Mockaitis 2007a:38) Such institutionalized cultural insensitivity and arrogance has, in fact, created much of the problem in Iraq. And that’s not even mentioning the even worse injustices perpetrated by paramilitary security contractors, or the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib (Mockaitis 2007a:38).7 Training at Fort Irwin, then, has changed to reflect a very different kind of war, one that puts new paradigms of counterinsurgency into the hands of frontline troops. It has become clear that force-on-force battles are no longer what the soldiers will encounter in Iraq, but the actual transition to new techniques has been made more difficult in the face of entrenched American attitudes toward cultures in the rest of the world. As Wagstaffe put it, “There are kinetic and non-kinetic battles, now. Kinetic is bullets and bombs. Non-kinetic is hearts and minds.” Americans, he says, don’t do the latter very well. “Vietnam is a good example: You don’t win hearts and minds by Napalming [. . .]. Americans’ culture is a big part of it. We don’t learn second languages [. . .]. With force-on-force training, you don’t need culture and language” (2007a). And this is exactly where the Iraq simulation at Irwin differs so strikingly from traditional wargaming. As the book on counterinsurgency and war is literally being rewritten to accommo- date new strategies such as “small operations” and “limited war,” the military is responding in kind to meet the new demands. Time is of the essence. In a very real sense, the unrealistic expectations that a Coalition invasion of Iraq would play out as a traditional “total war” and consequent conventional invasion strategy (after all, this is how the Army had been trained at Fort Irwin and other facilities) have resulted in the overwhelming insurgency and unrest in the area. The consequences of these misguided expectations necessitated immediate “hearts-and- minds” training and counterinsurgency measures before tragically inappropriate war-waging pushed Iraq into an irreparable state of affairs. To begin to make the switch, the NTC mobilized quickly to construct the dozen Iraqi Villages that represent the fictional province of Ghanzi. Nine villages have live actors; three are “live fire” villages with pop-up targets and firing ranges. Interspersed are Coalition-controlled forward operating bases (FOBs) and contingency operating bases (COBs). Fort Irwin contracted with L-3 Communications Corporation to recruit 250 Iraqis from the large American Iraqi populations in Detroit and San Diego to play village inhabitants. As contractors, the actors make $20.00 an hour8 but must pay for their travel to Fort Irwin and for their own insurance.

7. Consider the recent Blackwater case: In September 2007, armed contractors from the US firm Blackwater shot into a crowded square in Baghdad, killing 17 Iraqis. Blackwater employees maintain they were responding to terrorist fire, but eyewitnesses claim the attack was unprovoked. Subsequent investigations by the FBI concluded that at least 14 of the 17 shootings were “unjustified and violated deadly force rules in effect for security contractors in Iraq” (Johnston and Broder 2007). 8. Glenn Zorpette’s radio piece “Iraqi Actors Train U.S. Soldiers for Conditions in Iraq” puts the Iraqi actors’ earnings at $30,000–$40,000 a year (2007). ScottMagelssen

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 Actors live in the villages for 17 days out of each month, sleeping, cooking, and eating in their shotgun-style shipping container houses and using portable latrines. As in Iraq, many of the villages have only four hours of generator power per day. Every three days the villagers are bussed several miles back to the garrison for showers. The daily life of each Iraqi is produced in detail by scriptwriters, or “lizards” in NTC argot. Actors are instructed to remain faithful to their actor sheets so that when for instance the Americans interrogate them, they keep the simulation watertight. The NTC brings in 10 rotations of soldiers-in-training each year—one a month, with breaks in July and December. The rotation personnel fly in, and the equipment (their own) is brought in by rail and truck from nearby Yermo (700 rail cars per rotation).9 Over the course of 14 days, each unit in rotation needs to be confronted with a number of issues. The first week of training—“STX Week”—is made up of what are called Situational Training Exercises, or “STX,” (pronounced “stix”), covering courses in robot equipment, house searches, sniper and IED responses, and so on. A standard medical response exercise, for instance, begins with an IED attack that wounds several soldiers. The responders need to secure and evacuate the area and administer aid to the wounded. As time elapses, more “heat” is added: After 10 minutes, snipers start shooting. After another 10 minutes the mortar fire starts. The intensity is increased until the responders get out or are killed. Wagstaffe tells the story of one unit that took a fatal 28 minutes to complete this exercise the first time. After carrying out the after-action review to measure their mistakes, the responders got the next iteration down to 8 minutes, even with altered conditions and sniper locations (Wagstaffe 2007a). The second week of the rotation has far more “free play.” This is the week in which real-world scenarios unfold in relative real-time in the villages. “The play is written in acts,” Wagstaffe explains. Events, called “injects,” are strung together in narratives called “threads.” Perhaps a sniper is supposed to attack on Tuesday morning. That attack, though, might come anytime between 8:00 a.m. and noon. Perhaps the Shias will conduct a rally decrying a recent Sunni bombing of one of their mosques. The lizards identify the desired injects, but not the precise times, and not necessarily in a particular order. The free play, then, is driven by the behavior of the Americans. They are rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad. And the events won’t occur if they’re “interdicted” by the Americans. If a sniper is identified and killed or detained before acting, that inject will not be part of the day’s scenario. It should be said, however, that if an event is deemed particularly necessary and needs to happen for the purposes of the training, steps will be taken to guarantee that it happens (e.g., a major player, like the mayor of a town, will be hidden away until the inject takes place, to avoid the possibil- ity he will be killed and taken out of play). In the event that a major player is killed unintention- ally, the Controller-Observers (COs) will step in and change the “kill” to a “shoulder wound,” for instance, a compromise they call “controlled free play” (Jason 2007). On the other hand, the Americans can create an incident not planned by the scriptwriters. For example, if a soldier disregards the very particular cultural mores about the treatment of the female body and searches a woman (rather than having the husband search her, or having her conduct a self-search), the husband or father might need to “strap on a bomb and go blow up some Americans” to vindicate her honor. “Every act has a consequence,” says Wagstaffe. The lizards’ threads, furthermore, are very complex. In one scenario, a woman in one village

gives money to a cab driver, who delivers it to a bomb maker in another village, who will make Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos a bomb to be used in a third village. Even if the Americans don’t see a particular event in the thread, it still needs to happen. These acts fit into an immense puzzle that the Americans, if they do everything “right,” can put together. If done perfectly, the Americans should be able

9. In peacetime, the battalions transport their equipment and vehicles from the “afloat pre-positioned fleet” (ships carrying equipment, ammunition, and supplies that are not currently assigned to a particular conflict, but which are strategically placed for rapid response to unforeseen military situations), instead of from pre-deployment bases or war zones.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 to decipher the puzzle, go to a village, “knock on door number three and find the leader of al-Qai’da” (Wagstaffe). The immersed soldiers, in desert camouflage and body armor (“full battle rattle”), are equipped with harnesses and head halos studded with the black nodules of the Multiple Inte- grated Laser Engagement System (MILES) gear, as are all Iraqis in the villages when they’re in play. The MILES system, an advanced form of laser tag, tracks rounds of ammunition and accurately gauges hits and misses. Each weapon has a unique audio-visual signature, and if an actor is “hit” by a round, a box on his harness will emit a high-pitched ringing, which can only be disarmed with a key attached to the front of his weapon. Removing the key from the weapon effectively takes the actor out of play, and a CO will assign him a casualty card determining whether that character is dead or wounded, and to what degree. If medic teams don’t show up to administer aid or are kept away by sniper fire for more than 30 minutes, the wounded dies by default. (This is a far more satisfactory system, says Wagstaffe, than in the days of force-on- force battle simulations, when umpiring the winner of a play was sometimes literally a matter of a dice toss.) Vehicles, buildings, and tanks are likewise equipped with nodules, and police lights (whoopee lights) will signal when such an object is damaged. Smoke grenades and fireworks are employed for effect. Then there’s the “god gun,” carried by every CO in the simulation. Despite its impressive title, the god gun is a rather diminutive blue plastic pistol with an LED screen and a handful of buttons. It has ultimate control over the field of play. A god gun can wipe out every MILES system, tank, or human, in a given radius—say, if a plane flies over and drops a bomb. Conveniently, it can also check to make sure batteries are good on nodule harnesses, re-set weapons if there’s Figure 5. A “god gun” used by controller operators a mistake in the play, and so forth. All this is in the simulations at the National Training Center, exhaustively tracked back at the garrison, in September 2007. (Photo by Scott Magelssen) the control center affectionately dubbed by residents of Fort Irwin as the “Star Wars Building.” And there, as is common knowledge among players in the Sandbox, a man can sit at a desk and kill everyone in all the villages instantly with the push of a button. The performance of kinetic battles, as described above, is inextricably wrapped up in the nonkinetic scenarios. Bilateral issues, especially “how to talk to Iraqis,” are heavily emphasized. For instance, one of the mistakes that Americans in Iraq most frequently commit is making promises to Iraqi civilians in an attempt to build good will, but which they cannot keep or don’t really intend to keep. Everyday promises have relatively little coinage for soldiers from the West. As Wagstaffe puts it, if you promise to go to lunch here and it doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal. In Iraq, if you don’t keep your promise, he says, you are a liar. There is something deeply wrong with your character. If a soldier promises to bring water and the next day shows up without it, he’s wrecked his reputation with that Iraqi. I would see this played out several times on my visit to the village. It then becomes quickly clear that, while laser-tag gunplay is a large portion of the exercises, the ultimate goal is to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. Lizards predesignate some villages as pro-American (“white”), neutral (“gray”), and anti-American (“black”). (The telltale sign of a black town, Wagstaffe says, is that everyone carries an AK-47.) The rotational unit’s goal is to turn all towns white before their time is up. The Americans have done their job right if they can turn black towns gray or white, or at least keep gray or white towns from downgrad- ing a shade. Lizards layer in opportunities for these conversions. Perhaps a neutral village is harboring insurgents. Everyone in town knows who the “bad guys” are, but only two are desig- ScottMagelssen

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 nated “snitches.” Those snitches, though, only do so if they know it’s worth their while. The Americans have to gain their trust and determine the right incentive. Another scenario was outlined to me by Jason, one of the L-3 Communications contractors in charge of the “linguists” (the Arabic-speaking Iraqi actors): There is a wedding in which a “high-value target” is a member of the wedding party. The Americans need to figure out how to extract the target without ruining the wedding, and thereby turning the town against them (Jason 2007). To attempt to offer a sense of daily life in the Sandbox, let me offer a brief account of my visit to the National Training Center and Fort Irwin in the fall of 2007. I agreed not to use real names of Iraqi actors to protect family members in Iraq, and many Iraqis I interviewed would only agree to speak to me off the record. Wagstaffe took me to visit two of the towns in the simulation, Medina Wasl and Medina Jabal, the two villages accessible from the Fort’s garrison without a Humvee or other tactical vehicle. In the world of the simulation, we leave Kuwait when we pass through the range checkpoint. On our way to Medina Wasl on desolate Iraqi Highway 1, we pass wrecked cars along the roadside—potential beds for IEDs. An austere mosque is silhouetted in the morning sky atop a distant hill. After stretches of nothing but desert road and occasional convoys of trucks and armored vehicles, we come upon roadblock checkpoints where soldiers stretch swaths of concertina razor wire across the road. “Nonplayer” John yells out the window of our van, and most of the time we’re waved through, though we were stopped and checked more thoroughly by one cautious platoon. With few exceptions like this, heralding our arrival with “Nonplayer!” effectively made us invisible in the simulation. We arrive in Medina Wasl, one of the most “realistic” towns in Ghanzi, and boasting the most integrated set of Ameri- can and Iraqi actors. Wasl is 70 percent Sunni and 30 percent Shia, similar to Mosul in Figure 6. Improvised graffiti at a roadblock-checkpoint deep in northern Iraq. It is a poor town, the fictional province of Ghanzi, September 2007. (Photo by with a majority of the residents Scott Magelssen) lacking jobs. The major industry, a fertilizer plant, only employs the owner and his sons. An abandoned Borax mine sits silently up the hill overlooking the village. A Sunni mosque, small hospital, and electronics shop make up the main business district. There’s a sleepy Shia ghetto on the outskirts. We pass a pen with a half-dozen live goats on the way to the village center. There’s a card game going on in the schoolhouse. In the main square, a group of Iraqis are playing volleyball with an improvised net. Although there are no Americans nearby, the volleyball players all wear their noduled MILES

harnesses. Wagstaffe points out a two-story building with two satellite dishes and tells me sotto Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos voce that that’s where the al-Qai’da finance minister lives. He proceeds to point out where the hidden weapons caches are. I get a little thrill from being in on a secret kept from an entire platoon of American soldiers. Wagstaffe introduces me to Sam, an Iraqi Chaldean Christian who plays a Shia deputy mayor in the village. Sam invites us into his “home,” and begins by telling me that, although he’s an actor, the border between acting and real life is often crossed. “I’m not gonna lie to you. Could be theatre. Could be acting. Could be reality. Sometimes our act change[s]. Like we really want to act but sometimes it goes from the heart.” Sam explains:

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 So yeah, I’m acting as a Shia [pronounced shee-ay]. I’m a Christian Catholic. I’m acting as a Shia deputy mayor, but sometime[s] [. . .] I lose it. I might just go just like, uh, “I am the deputy mayor for real. [. . .]. I’m for real, you know?” I just feel like, “Hey, why you not doing nothing [for] me? Where’s the project you promised me? I have 60 percent unemployment people. Why are you doing this? Why are you guys not working?” [. . .]. (Sam 2007) Sam describes his own motivation for playing the deputy mayor 17 days out of each month. Christians like himself have no future in Iraq, he has concluded, but he still has Muslim friends there. Sam was born in Iraq but moved to the US when he was 23 and has lived here close to 30 years. As he puts it, he feels he owes both countries. If his efforts can help save one life, Iraqi or American, he feels his job is worth it. We want these soldiers to be trained in the right way, so when they go over there they do the right things [. . .]. The injects, the playing we do, everything we do, it happen[s] every day in Iraq. For example: innocent people, they don’t stop at the checkpoint because there’s no Iraqi sign [that] says “stop” in Arabic or they don’t even read Arabic, probably they don’t even read or write [. . .]. They don’t stop, and [the Americans] shoot them and they’re dead, and that’s innocent people who got lost. (2007) For Sam, acting as the deputy Mayor in Medina Wasl has gotten into his blood after three and a half years. He talks about it in terms of an addiction, like to cigarettes or gambling, and after two weeks at home, he can’t sit still. “I gotta go back. I gotta teach the soldiers not to make mistakes.” He regularly hears back from soldiers who’ve been in Iraq that the training program is the best thing the Army could be doing for preparing troops for deployment. And he received congratulations from President Bush himself when he visited last spring. And the acting? It’s good, says Sam. He tells me about when the terrorists used to behead him every rotation and broadcast the act over the networks: “If you look at my tape when they beheaded me [. . .] my sister look at my tape, she start crying. She thought it was for real. I’m right next to her! [Laughs] I swear to God!” (2007). While we’re in Sam’s house, we hear loud pops of gunfire going off outside. The volleyball game breaks up and the players scatter and run indoors. We rush outside and meet Naji, Wasl’s chief of police and a Sunni, who explains that a sniper came out from around a corner and shot an American soldier. The body has already been evacuated, and soon more Americans will show up from the nearby FOB. Wagstaffe brings up a story from a few weeks ago when Naji became positively incensed at the American troops in the village. As Wagstaffe tells it, an IED went off, and when the Red Crescent ambulance arrived on the scene, the Americans shot the driver. “No warning shots, no translator, nothing.” Naji went up and yelled at them in Arabic. “How can you do this? What were you thinking? You shoot the responder? How could you be so stupid?” Naji smiles at the story, but the anger is still apparent underneath. “I was pissed,” he said. Like Sam, Naji experienced the slippage between his character and his actor’s self. He was playing a character, but was sincerely angry with the Americans for such behavior. Wagstaffe points out that this was a good learning experience for the soldiers. Maybe now they won’t shoot ambulance drivers in Iraq. Naji ruefully agrees. The goal, he says, is for the soldiers to make the mistakes here, so they don’t make them in Iraq (Naji 2007). For lunch, we head to Medina Jabal, a kind of “surrogate” for Fallujah. This is the oldest village in the Sandbox, and the provincial capital of Ghanzi. It is larger than Medina Wasl: instead of one street, the layout of the town has several thoroughfares, making it much harder for a patrol to quickly move through. There is also a mile and a half of tunnels underneath the town—hiding places for insurgents. Above ground are a mosque, several storefronts, and a police station, as well as the infamous restaurant, Kamel Dogs Cafe. By spring 2006, as a New York Times article reported, the proprietor, Mansour Hakim, had killed hundreds of Americans, one rotation after another. After convincing patrols to allow him to sell his hotdogs in the FOB, ScottMagelssen

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 and after the Americans got used to him and stopped searching him, Hakim would show up with a truck full of fireworks and blow them all up (Filkins and Burns 2006). We’re here during Ramadan, though, and Kamel Dogs is closed until sundown. I’m disappointed, but not as much as Wagstaffe, who’s dying for a Kamel Dogs burger. He breaks out a package of cookies10 and tells me about the plans for Medina Jabal’s expansion. The plan calls for an eventual total of 330 buildings, at the cost of 57 million dollars. When Figure 7. Construction of a new city outside Medina Jabal, completed, Jabal will be the September 2007. (Photo by Scott Magelssen) largest urban warfare laboratory in the world. Compared with the relative quiet of Medina Wasl, this town is abuzz. There are several Americans visible in the streets, a good sign that we’ll see some action, Wagstaffe hints. A robot is checking for explosives in and around the well at the town’s center. Iraqis are out and about, too, strolling through the streets, lingering in front of shops. Americans playing Iraqi insurgents prepare a hookah in a lean-to nearby—this is taboo for Muslims during Ramadan, Figure 8. Iraqi actors—some in traditional Iraqi garb, and some in but it doesn’t seem to matter more Western dress—stroll through the streets of Medina Jabal moments to the Americans, who work the before an IED explosion, September 2007. (Photo by Scott Magelssen) intricate steps with delight. The Americans’ preferred hookah tobacco this afternoon is a deep purple smear of blueberry and strawberry they’ve mixed together. We chat with the lieutenant Officer in Charge (OIC) of Medina Jabal. He explains why the town is so alive this afternoon. A truck is slated to come into town today and explode a vehicle-borne chemical IED. It will be happening sometime soon.

While we wait, he tells us about some of the issues of “texture” he has been working with. Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos He recently found out that the tea set they thought they’d been using in their bilateral talks with Iraqis was actually a Turkish coffee set, and they had to find a replacement. He also explains why the Americans with the hookah are playing the insurgents. While Iraqis are in full support of

10. For safety reasons, vehicles traveling into the Sandbox from the garrison checkpoint must bring coolers of ice, 48 hours worth of water, food, and other supplies. Between the villages and FOBs, there are miles and miles of uninhabited desert, with very limited cell phone reception.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 giving the Americans the training they need, the Army has learned not to ask them to play “bad guy” characters, for sensitivity reasons. The complexities emerge elsewhere, too. If the Iraqis agree to record an incendiary message in Arabic to be broadcast over the mosque’s loudspeaker for a particular situation, they ask that it be played no more than just for that one time. They’re pro-American, says the lieutenant, but they want to avoid trouble, too. An American patrol enters and moves past us. The lieutenant points out surreptitiously that they’ve walked right past the truck with the chem-IED without checking it. I point out that it’s like a horror movie where we know the killer is under the bed but the characters don’t. He agrees. We wait. There’s been a mix-up with the keys to the truck, and one of the insurgents has to get another one. The remaining insurgents in the lean-to offer me a puff of the strawberry- blueberry hookah. This is what it would be like to smoke a Sno-Cone, I imagine. We wait some more. The OIC lets me hold a god gun. Then it happens. The new truck pulls into town, does a wide, slow circle in front of the Americans’ headquarters but draws no particular attention (this will be shown to them later in the “hot wash”). The IED goes off with a bang. Thick, yellow smoke representing chlorine gas fills the air, and bystanders in immediate proximity drop to the ground. Villagers start yelling in Arabic, and others start running this way and that. Soldiers in gas masks respond within seconds, carting the victims away on stretchers. The driver and the passenger of the truck (suicide bombers) are slumped in their seats. Around the corner, there’s a burst of machine gun fire, and a high-pitched ringing fills the air—the alarms of the MILES system signaling a hit. We race around to the side street, where responders are administering to a downed soldier. While first aid is being conducted, a young woman—the Crazy Woman of Medina Jabal, as she’s known here—is up in the faces of the soldiers, alternately shouting “Hey!” and railing at them in dialect. As they strip the wounded soldier of his armor, she stealthily steals their lighters, their helmets, and almost makes off with the stretcher. The soldiers are clearly rattled, alternately trying to ignore her and ineffectu- ally pushing her away. A small crowd of Iraqi men chuckle at this from a nearby covered door- way. The intense ringing in our ears continues. The soldiers finally get their comrade on the stretcher and, after several false starts, get him away from the crazy woman and into the barricaded police station. We follow. Within minutes, more soldiers come in through the barricade with a captured Iraqi insurgent, hands secured behind his back. An American soldier chides him for having tattoos, the reason he was positively identified. We linger a bit longer, but this is the end of the “action” we’ll see this afternoon. The next morning we start out again in Medina Wasl, the first town. There, I speak to Nadia, another Chaldean Iraqi-American. She smokes as we talk, but keeps an eye out for American patrols, who shouldn’t see her smoking during Ramadan. When she arrived here, Nadia tells me, she was taken aback by the poverty of the simulated village. She grew up in Iraq, but had lived only in Baghdad. She hadn’t seen poorer villages, and Medina Wasl was eye opening for her. Her kids told her to quit: “Even the poor villages have bathrooms in the houses,” they said. But Nadia stresses that she doesn’t mind the living conditions (except for her fear of scorpions). For her, as for Sam, this is a very fulfilling experience. Nadia tells me about a recent experience when she was detained by Americans, who brought her out of the village and took her to their FOB for interrogation. Even though her character card says she finished university and speaks fluent English, Nadia refused to acknowledge that she understood their questions, much to their indignation. They kept telling her, “We know you speak English. We heard you on the way here!” but she kept insisting she needed a translator. The Americans, at a loss, asked her afterward why she behaved like this. She told them that that’s what they’ll do in Iraq. “They’ll give you a hard time.” Nadia explained: “I’m being picked up from my own house. Of course I’m not going to like them. This is my point. You captured ScottMagelssen

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 Figure 9. A patrol moves through the streets of Medina Wasl, accompanied by a reporter and cameraman from INN (the CNN-surrogate in the Sandbox), September 2007. (Photo by Scott Magelssen)

me. You took me. You’re interrogating me—for what? I don’t know what’s going on. I’m being treated like a criminal” (Nadia 2007). Unlike Naji and Sam, however, Nadia seems to harbor little resentment for the American’s insensitivity and naiveté. She told me that when she sees how many lives they’re saving, and how the Americans are trying so hard to understand what they’re saying, it pleases her to know she’s doing good. She gives the Americans a lot of credit: “It’s so new to them, and so hard for them,” she says. Some of them are so young, younger than her own kids. “Their eyes are so big when they come here.” Our conversation is interrupted as Jason, the L-3 contractor, sweeps through, telling the Iraqis to get ready. Nadia hurries to put out her cigarette and get her headscarf. Within minutes, an American patrol enters. They come to the hospital, next door to Nadia’s home, and speak to the doctor with the help of a translator. The doctor is visibly upset. They’d come by the same way yesterday to ask him if he needed anything, and when he told them he needed medicine as well as a female doctor to check female patients, and someone to fix the starter on his ambulance, they promised to come through with each of his requests. Now, he points out angrily, they’re here again and haven’t kept their promise. They’ve shown up empty handed. These soldiers have not yet learned the importance of promises. To their credit, the Americans will come back later in the day with a mechanic to fix the ambulance, but not before Judy, a reporter for INN (the CNN surrogate in the Sandbox), and Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos a cameraman show up to interview the doctor on camera. He derides the Americans for their broken promises, as Nadia translates. This will air in all the villages tonight, exponentially exacerbating the faux pas and making it more difficult for all of the platoons in the province. We conclude the day with one last visit to Medina Jabal, after grabbing lunch back at the garrison. It’s clear from what we see on our arrival that we’ve just missed something big. There are a lot of American soldiers in the village, darting back and forth across the street and taking up positions behind corners and cement barricades, rifles at the ready. A blue pickup truck

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 stands empty in the main street, its yellow MILES whoopee-light flashing, as is the light on the building directly behind the truck. Apart from the soldiers, the town is silent. It has been totally locked down. Outside the barricades of the police station, a robot picks at a vest on the ground with its mechanical arm. A black wire peeks out from underneath the vest. One of the officers helps us piece it together. Apparently, the truck rolled into town with a vehicle- borne IED. The VBIED (he pronounces it “V-Bed”) went Figure 10. A robot and an ammunition technician attend to a suicide bomber’s off, and it took out the building vest outside the barricaded police station in Medina Jabal, September 2007. next to it—or else the building (Photo by Scott Magelssen) had been shot up in the attack; that had not yet been determined. Next, a young woman suicide bomber in a bomb vest approached the American soldiers responding to the scene. The vest didn’t blow as it was supposed to, and the woman instead stormed the police station; they shot her dead through the barricade. The body is gone now, but the vest is still a threat and needs to be disarmed. As we talk, a bomb squad technician emerges from the police station in heavy armored padding and begins to work with the vest; the robot is off to check the pickup to make sure it’s clear of any remaining explosives. While we observe the various parts of the cleanup stage, Wagstaffe comments on the ways the simulation adapts to emergent ideas, conceived in the field, for responding to the insurgency; every unit coming in with a rotation brings new elements into the simulation. The way the soldiers keep darting across the streets and taking up new positions, for instance, is a technique new to Wagstaffe. He’d asked the “unit boss” why they do this. It’s to keep their eyes from “going buggy” from looking at the same spot in a desert village for too long. We also see a “snitch box” that has been placed next to a heavily trafficked throughway. It’s a cardboard box with a slot in the top, and a list of rewards for those who turn in any information leading to the detention of the “bad guys” or the identification of weapons caches. Wagstaffe nods with approval at this new idea, but points out an irony: If you want the reward, you have to put your name in there. If the bad guys get hold of it, you’re in trouble. It’s the end of day two, and we head back to the garrison. Wagstaffe waxes a bit on what we experienced over the past two days, and the conversation returns to theatre. In the old days of the National Training Center, he says, the force-on-force battles weren’t theatre. He would compare it more to a sparring match between two boxers. Theatre, he says, came into the process with the addition of the kinetic/nonkinetic elements to the simulated landscape. We witnessed a lot of the kinetic battles in these two days, but not a lot of nonkinetic. Those battles were happening at the same time, often behind closed doors, in bilateral talks between Coalition representatives and the Iraqis. While we had browsed through cleanup in Medina Jabal this afternoon, there were fierce bi-lats going on in the building with the snitch box out front. The battalion commander was hearing the arguments presented by the Sunni and the Shia representatives, and the sectarian complaints were reaching a stalemate situation. The commander apparently had to threaten to lockdown the whole town and search all the houses if the repre- ScottMagelssen

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 sentatives wouldn’t compromise. Such a lockdown would have real consequences for the Iraqi actors. It would make village life much more difficult, for one thing—and it would mean no busses would be let in to take the actors back to the garrison for showers. Again, the already- blurred border between the simulation and real life is elided. Reflecting back, the simulation of Iraq at the National Training Center is a strange form of theatre indeed. It is a ludic, ritualized space of play, where identities are performatively forged and stabilized through reenactment, or pre-enactment, on the limen of the actual Iraq—also a complex episteme of performative choices. It is obviously simulacral. In terms of the attention to physical appearance, the villages in the province of Ghanzi are only shadows of their referents in Iraq. While new construction of more realistic looking villages is slowly underway, and, more recently, Hollywood set dressers have been brought in to improve the look of the structures (Wagstaffe 2008),11 the current houses, businesses, factories, and outbuildings are shoddy, the fiberglass stonework appliqués starting to slip off, and, once the smoke grenades are spent, the sites of IED attacks bear little resemblance to the real thing. But no one is complaining. According to Jason, the real value, and where the NTC energy goes, is in how the simulation adapts and changes in response to new information on insurgent and civilian behavior “in- country,” as well as to comments and suggestions that come back from trainees once they’ve been deployed. His job working with the linguists and translators is a case-in-point. In the early stages of the simulation, before the Iraqis were brought in, actors playing Iraqis made no attempt at capturing the language. If there was a situation in which the Americans weren’t supposed to understand what an Iraqi was saying, the latter would speak in a “Charlie Brown’s teacher” voice—just nonsense-talk. It came back to them that real Arabic would be a valuable element in the simulation, and they mobilized to make it happen. There are long-term plans for making the “look” of the villages better, says Jason: to get desks in the schoolhouse, improve the living spaces, have enough buildings so the mayor and the insurgents don’t have to sleep in the same quarters. But the biggest obstacle is a lack of time between rotations to make such changes. “This is high-intensity shit,” he says. “We just don’t have enough downtime to be making improvements to facilities” (Jason 2007). Wagstaffe adds that another obstacle is the financing. To do a “perfect” replication of an Iraqi village would cost 10 million dollars. Medina Wasl alone, the one-street town of sheds and shipping containers, cost upwards of half that amount. When new Commanding General Dana J.H. Pittard took charge of the National Training Center and Fort Irwin in August 2007, a month before my visit, he announced ambitious plans for a greater degree of fidelity: more villages, increasing the number of Iraqis from around 250 to 1,000, adding more animals and, a key ingredient, incorporating children (perhaps through school programs). Soldiers who have been to Iraq point out that there are a “million” kids in every town, and the children are often the first thing they see when they arrive, whether clamoring for toys and money or just excited. (And according to one National Guard soldier, who went through theatre immersion training at Camp Shelby, the children can be found out in the middle of the desert, too, sharing the narrow roads with the tank convoys [2007].) Within nine months of General Pittard’s ingenuity, in addition to adding towns and contracting with Hollywood carpenters to work on the look of the buildings, Fort Irwin has employed the homeless population of the nearby town of Barstow. Christened the “Barstow 300” (there are 300 of them), these new employees are dressed in

costume, coached to speak three anti-American phrases in Arabic, and inserted at key moments Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos into the simulation to add to the intensity of the scenes of conflict (Wagstaffe 2008).12 Pittard wants “all five senses to be assaulted” in the villages—to have soldiers leaving Fort Irwin thinking they’ve been in Iraq (2008).

11. Three new villages were added in the nine months following my visit, with 40 inhabitants each, for a total of 15 villages. 12. The members of the “Barstow 300” are paid at a lesser wage than the Arab “linguists,” says Wagstaffe, because, apart from their three repeated phrases, they’re not speaking characters.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 In terms of expenditures, continues Wagstaffe, it all comes down to “risk assessment”: “Is it better to have a thousand Iraqis or a town that looks 100 percent realistic?” He described the four painstakingly detailed houses, back within the garrison itself, which the trainees currently use for conducting searches. Each is filled with furniture, belongings, valuables, and residents behaving as real Iraqi families would (sleeping on the roof when the cool night air is more pleasant than indoors, etc.). “We’d love to have villages that are filled with these search houses in terms of quality,” says Wagstaffe, “but that’s not economically viable.13 Remarkably, I heard the fewest complaints about the fidelity from the Iraqi actors, who need to live in the simulation. As Sam, the Deputy Mayor in Medina Wasl, told me, the houses may not resemble the real thing, but the people do, and that’s what’s important for the soldiers. “[T]hey’re not gonna deal with the houses, they’re gonna deal with the people, the Iraqi people. So that’s what they’re gonna get. Same faces. Same attitude. Same culture. Same thing.” Again, Sam describes it in terms of teaching the troops how to avoid mistakes. He brings up a recent real-world killing of Iraqi civilians when American troops opened fire on celebrants shooting guns into the air.14 “How many innocent people died in Iraq because they were shooting in the air, because they’re celebrating? They don’t know about this culture.” So, he says, rapping the table with every word for emphasis, they do the same thing in the simulation. “If we have a wedding or a funeral. That’s the Iraqi way. Soccer team won? Iraqi soccer team? We’re all gonna shoot. So they should know about this. That’s what we do. We don’t wanna kill innocent people.” He continues that it’s not only the situations, but the particular attitudes with which the Iraqis confront the Americans every day in the village, in a manner meant to prepare troops for what they’ll encounter in Iraq: “I mean, ‘hey, are you here to help me, or are you here just to take care of your country?’ ‘You here to steal my oil, or you gonna help […] Iraq?’ So make sure. That’s the way we teach” (Sam 2007). As Jeff Parker Knight reminds us, performance has a long history in training camps as a way to indoctrinate and socialize soldiers into specific narratives, starting with the call-and- response cadences or “jodies” chanted on boot camp jogs. These performances are steeped in, among other things, the rhetoric of violence, providing soldiers with what Knight calls “equipment for killing,” playing on Kenneth Burke’s notion of literature as “equipment for living” (Burke 1967:293; Knight 1990:158). The major narratives15 that coalesce out of the scenarios and threads in the Iraq simulation become very clear after only a brief time in

13. Worth noting is that Camp Shelby in Mississippi has found more cost-effective ways to approach their training simulations, including putting soldiers to work building the villages and FOBs rather than contracting the work out. According to Camp Shelby reports, “Joint Coalition Council facilities where soldiers interfaced with indig- enous civil leaders replicated those in-theater. The Army transformed cantonment areas into three FOB analogs with entry control points (ECPs), guard towers, and wire. FOBs and towns were named after existing locations in-country, and road signs, police cars, and markets were created based on recent photos from Iraq. To save time and conserve costs, 3d Brigade, 87th Division, soldiers performed most of the construction work to build these sites. For example, the 2d Company, 305th Battalion TSB, built most of the two FOBs for defense training and battalion ARTEPs and FCXs” (Honoré and Zajac 2005). 14. I haven’t been able to confirm the details of the event in 2004 or 2005 to which Sam referred, when 21 innocent civilians died, but other events are a matter of public record, such as the 2003 wedding parade in Samarra when American troops killed and wounded several teenagers firing guns into the air. 15. Game theorists often separate into camps when querying their subject. Some take an approach grounded in narratology, seeking out narratives that organize the gamers’ experience. Others find the ludology approach more helpful, as narratology suggests overarching shared experiences among gamers rather than a unique and autono- mous experience for each, governed by rules of play and game interface, with narrative elements of plot and character being merely incidental. Ludology is useful in analyzing the National Training Center’s practices but, as Fort Irwin’s simulations are admittedly “theatrical” and soldier experience is framed in terms of storylines, scenarios, and scripts, I find myself gravitating toward a narrative analysis. ScottMagelssen

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 the Sandbox: the Americans are in Iraq in an effort to foment democracy, to work with the Iraqi population to redress their economic and social needs, and to take police action necessary to put down insurgents, all the while doing everything possible to avoid making more enemies by generating bitterness and mistrust. In the simulation, then, the battalions in rotation are supposed to make the mistakes stateside so they won’t make them “in-country” or “in-theatre.” Platoons are to convert the black towns and gray towns to white towns through kinetic and nonkinetic battles—military campaigns and hearts-and-minds campaigns. The organizing discursive principles in this regard are “train as you fight,” “adapt training as Iraq changes,” and instill the “warrior ethos” in the soldiers to be deployed. That’s how to win in Iraq, according to the US Military. As General David Petraeus, Commander of Multinational Force-Iraq, told Debora Amos on NPR’s All Things Considered in March 2006, the Army is trying with the NTC’s Iraq simulation to “get it as close to right as we can” but “right” is always changing (Amos 2006). The narratives for the contractor Iraqi actors are not as institutionalized, but they are still infused into the performance. While on the face of it the Iraqis are “playing themselves,” it would be far too simplistic to leave it at that. These are Iraqis who’ve spent time in America, some for decades. Sunnis and Shias are very often played by Christians or by Muslims of other denominations, and though not all the actors speak the dialect called for on their character sheet, they can pass as their regional and ethnic cousins in the Americans’ eyes and ears. And some, like Nadia, have grown up in environments vastly different—economically, demographically, and socially—than their characters, and find their settings in the simulation almost as alien as a non-Iraqi would. The Iraqi actors with whom I spoke presumably share the goal of winning in Iraq, and many for decidedly selfless reasons. Even if there is no hope of returning perma- nently, especially for the Chaldeans, Iraqis like Sam would hope someday for a peaceful and economically solvent Iraq for the sake of their Muslim friends. Other Iraqis are there for a multiplicity of reasons. Many on-again-off-again Detroit-area auto factory workers are currently out of work, and the Army’s financial incentives for contracted Arabic speakers are competitive, if not ideal. On the other hand, if any are like “Zuhur,” who fled Saddam’s Iraq six years ago and now works as an Iraqi character in Camp Shelby’s Theatre Immersion facility in Mississippi, they are there “to help the soldiers stay alive, and also to help Iraqi women, including potentially members of [their] own family, by ensuring that they are treated properly by the U.S. troops” (in Pessin 2005). Some Iraqis find the work important enough to do even if they are regularly employed in the outside world. One woman I spoke to, a pharmacist when she’s not at Fort Irwin, is there for intimate and deeply personal reasons. Though she plays an Arab Iraqi in the simulation, she herself is a Kurdish Iraqi, a member of an ethnic group that faced brutal targeting by Saddam Hussein’s regime in the late 1980s, including mass murder and chemical attacks. As I noted earlier, the emergent narratives of the Iraqi simulation—win hearts and minds in addition to military victories—jibe with the most recent counterinsurgency thinking, and are rapidly moving away from unhelpful and reductive terms such as the “War on Terror.” But whereas the Army is seeking to implement these changes in doctrine through the ranks as quickly as possible, a strong and persistent counternarrative threatens to undo these philo- sophical changes. When George W. Bush visited Fort Irwin in the spring of 2008 to review

the exercises, he told the gathered audiences that what is happening in Iraq is not a civil war: Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos “It is pure evil and I believe we have an obligation to protect ourselves from that evil” (in Kozaryn 2007:6). As Mockaitis reminds us, this unhelpful, reductive rhetoric is not the best way to understand the situation in the Middle East, but it is the rhetoric the Administration has unflaggingly used from the start. Indeed, Mockaitis damns the November 2005 White House publication, A National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, on several counts, from the inordinate delay in publishing a plan to deal with the insurgency to its insistence on using words like “War on Terror,” and framing Iraq as the “central front” in that war—“even though few independent

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 analysts understand the conflict in these terms” (2007a:47–48).16 James F. Dunnigan warns against the dangers of designing wargames with a politically determined template, a syndrome he diagnosed at the time of his writing during the Cold War: If your games reflect political, rather than combat reality, you’re likely to find yourself fatally ill-prepared on the battle field [. . .]. Unless someone is shooting at you, immediate political demands take precedence over potential military ones. This can change if you actually develop realistic war games, use them diligently, and widely distribute the results. (1990:xvii) But if Knight is right that soldiers have, to this point, been equipped to kill, then theatre immersion is running against the grain of generations’ worth of training. The rehearsal in the Sandbox is equipping soldiers not to kill, as evidenced by the Crazy Woman of Medina Jabal, who does everything she can to get the soldiers to shoot her. But, as Georges Bataille would have it, the constitution of a taboo merely defers its transgression, which necessitates and reifies it (Bataille 1986). This is perhaps why the last day of every rotation, as Wagstaffe tells me, the soldiers are always fully geared up, weapons at the ready, itching for action. And then there’s Carl Weathers, filmdom’s Apollo Creed. I did not have the privilege of meeting Weathers while on-site, nor had most of the individuals I interviewed. While his brief and infrequent visits are apparently characterized by the same stealth possessed by his special- operative character in Predator (along with those played by future governors Arnold Schwarzen- egger and Jesse [the Body] Ventura), his connection to the simulation program is well known and celebrated among the staff. In addition to providing stage-combat training for the insurgents, Weathers has also reportedly helped with modifications and improvements to the MILES laser-tag system (Wagstaffe 2007a; Battalion Commander 2007). But his pedigree of film characters displaying a “warrior ethos” is perhaps the biggest boon for the program. Those who’ve seen Predator might remember his character Dillon’s persistence in fighting the alien enemy, unchecked in the face of death and dismemberment. Even at the moment of his demise, Dillon’s severed arm continues to fire rounds from the powerful automatic weapon still in its grip. The arm, its hard muscles pulsing and throbbing, has served as the extension of its body, but also its principal member, as the body is that of a soldier. The loyal appendage, now divorced from the body, continues to do its duty. In an interesting inversion, another of General Pittard’s enhancements of the simulation in his first year as Commanding General of Fort Irwin and the National Training Center has been to recruit amputees now divorced from their appendages into patriotic service as IED victims, their stubs dressed in gore by Hollywood “blood girls” to generate a visceral battlefield reaction for trainees (Wagstaffe 2008).17 Davis describes a compa- rable situation in Stages of Emergency in her account of a mastectomy patient who volunteered her body as a simulated chest-wound victim (2007:200). Weathers’s presence in the Fort Irwin program, then, however fleeting, firmly grounds the exercises in a series of links traced through Hollywood and politics, which, in popular perception, forms a specific constellation that shades Fort Irwin’s practices. It also makes Fort Irwin vulnerable to detractors in the public arena who perceive the link with Weathers as an allegiance with all things tawdry and kitschy. As one commentator for the London Guardian put it, Death by Rocky training montage . . . Awesome! You can’t help feeling the US Army will be a little disappointed when they finally venture out of the Baghdad Green Zone, only

16. The Bush Administration is also criticized for its simplistic and reductive take on the insurgency, its failure to take sectarian violence into account, and for maintaining that the US has no intention of imposing an outside government on Iraq, even when so many other nations indicate they believe the US is doing just that. 17. Amputees have also been hired at Fort Polk’s training ground in Louisiana and elsewhere. At Fort Polk, these are often out-of-work survivors of dynamite and forestry accidents, occupational hazards of local industries (see Tower 2006:57–66). ScottMagelssen

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 Figure 11. Soldiers evacuate a role-player wounded in a simulated bomb attack during a training rehearsal in the town of Medina Wasl at the National Training Center, 11 July 2008. (Photo by Etric Smith, courtesy of The High Desert Warrior)

to discover that real insurgents don’t use skipping ropes, and would have no need to beat Sylvester Stallone in a barefoot beach running race, preferring instead to decapitate him on the internet and walk it instead. (Hyde 2006)

Another popular watchdog waggishly adds, “That’s right, the Carl Weathers. As anyone with good taste in TV can tell you, he’s one of the greatest acting teachers in the world” (The Talent Show 2006).18 This brings me to a pertinent question: Are the American soldiers in training also actors? Wagstaffe, despite his enthusiasm for using theatrical terminology to describe the simulations, says no. He prefers to think of them more like audience-participants. I hold that they are actors, in much the same way that Boal’s spect-actors are: they certainly perform roles in an unfolding and coproduced narrative. It may be more, though, than just a matter of semantics. The cata- loguing of participants in the exercises into categories of actor and audience has its consequences. Actors, in perception, are in control of the narrative. Audiences generally, while they

may, as Marvin Carlson says, coproduce and “co-actualize” the meaning of events on the stage, Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos are not in control of what happens on the stage (1989). But it’s been demonstrated that the soldiers in the Sandbox can control the narrative to a certain degree: by stopping a particular inject, by behaving outside expectations, by altering the trajectory of the thread through really good or really bad behavior. But then again, they’re always reined in within the tightly

18. This is a reference to, among other things, Weathers’s parodic guest appearance as himself, an acting-instructor- for-hire, in three episodes of the Fox Network’s Arrested Development (2004/05 season).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 controlled world of the Sandbox. Only certain choices, determined by the lizards, are available to them at any given time. Are there possibilities for resisting this narrative, if only to affirm one’s own agency as an actor? Consider this illustration: Tigerland, the otherwise forgettable 2000 Joel Schumacher film, depicts Fort Polk in Louisiana, which trained outbound infantry for combat during the Vietnam war using immersive simulation techniques. Private Bozz (played by a not-yet-famous Colin Farrell) and his colleague Private Paxton converse late at night by flash- light. “You’re dead,” growls Sgt. Eveland, scolding them for making themselves visible to the enemy. Eveland proceeds to graphically illustrate with an account of how his buddy was killed by a sniper, after only being in-country a couple of days. He lit up a cigarette at night, and the next thing he knew his brains were in his lap. “You’re dead. Do you understand that, gentleman?” “I’m still alive Sergeant,” responds Bozz. “I miraculously survived the attack [. . .]. If you’re going to make up a story, why not make up a happy one?” Here, Bozz is the enlightened troublemaker, bucking the system he sees as corrupt—a formulaic stock character in revisionist boot camp movies. Where Eveland calls Tigerland the “best Vietnamese village we could create for you,” Farrell’s Bozz sees it as a “war theme park.” But Bozz’s lines illustrate an important point. Sol- diers have little agency in the narrative inscription of war wholly produced by the American Army and its contractors, and, if only by this token alone, they perhaps are more like the audience participants in Wagstaffe’s analogy. The simulation of an Iraqi province at Fort Irwin is an impressive feat of theatre and performance. I frankly didn’t know what to expect upon my arrival. Prior to my visit, my colleagues’ jaws would drop when I told them about it. When my friend John Troyer emailed me the link to the New York Times article, knowing of my interest in simulacral environments, he described it as a “living history museum gone terribly, terribly wrong” (Troyer 2006). It seems particularly distasteful, and politically sketchy, does it not, to consider the idea of real Iraqis playing themselves and possibly terrorists in a fake Iraq? A manipulative exoticism on Americans’ part, it is in keeping with the worst kind of colonialist ethnographic spectacle found in 19th-century worlds fairs and wild west shows. This is compounded by feelings about the war, which to many in academia was utterly and completely misguided and arrogant at the start: based on the flimsiest of evidence, and conducted without the support of the international community, its motives seem grounded in some personal family vendetta or a lust for oil, trumped up with a tiresome ideology of war on terror and evil. Even as I write, a Senate committee report’s findings indicate that Bush and his top officials deliberately misrepresented the threat of Iraq and downplayed intelligences suggesting the contrary as they built a case for invasion in the months following September 11 (Mazzetti and Shane 2008; Hess 2008). But Army staff I spoke to in the simulation are pragmatic about the current situation. They don’t pretend that this is a popular war, and will start out with a caveat: “We’re here to do some good regardless of what anyone thinks of the reasons for why we’re over there.” I sensed a genuine desire on the part of Army and Iraqi staff to make things right by teaching the troops about the changing face of the cultural and political landscape in Iraq, and a deep resentment toward those who act poorly, as in the case of the alleged Blackwater massacres. No one in the Sandbox talks about the insurgents as “evil.” Instead, they regard the insurgency in human terms, with psychologies directly related to how Americans are acting over there: “Insurgents can be products of American mistakes” is a refrain one hears throughout the villages. And not insignificantly, by virtue of the heterotopic nature of the Sandbox, there is a healthy camaraderie between Iraqis and American NTC staff here, as well as between members of different Iraqi sects and ethnicities—which is not to be found everywhere in the real Iraq. To- gether, the American and Iraqi actors produce and coproduce narratives about Iraq in the shared space of the Sandbox, each group with its own complex agenda, each responding to given situations from a dynamic habitus, and each within the mediated flux of controlled free play. Admit- tedly, my impressions are carefully mediated by Fort Irwin itself. I don’t entertain illusions that I saw anything the Army didn’t want me to see. At the same time, the Iraqi actors were surpris- ScottMagelssen

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 ingly frank in their condemning of the US’s handling of the war, from the firing of the Ba’athists after the invasion of Baghdad, to what amounted to the martyring of Saddam Hussein in their perception. Thus, the performances that take place here cannot easily be framed and dismissed as either a manipulative objectification and exoticization of Iraqis on display, or as a patriotic bit of military pageantry, serving purely ideological ends. What is abundantly apparent from my observations is that, while all political theatre hopes its messages will be explicitly manifested in the world outside the simulation, theatre immersion in the Sandbox is clearly one example where there is no question about theatre having an impact on reality. One final question remains: Without a doubt, the current war is intimately a product of George W. Bush’s administration. With a new presidential administration in place, and the future of the War in question, what will become of Fort Irwin’s simulation of Iraq, not to mention the nearby towns of Yermo and Barstow, whose economies depend on the Fort’s support industries? What will happen to the Barstow 300? I put the question to Mockaitis, the independent analyst and expert on counterinsurgency. Mockaitis doubts that the National Training Center would go away soon if the war were to end. If a president like Barack Obama were to take the United States out of the War soon after taking office, he says, the withdrawal would “not be as dramatic as pundits are anticipating” (Mockaitis 2008). And even if immediate and complete withdrawal were possible, the Armed Forces would still find a need for the facility as a training area for mid-level armored warfare, just as it always has. “You’ve got to keep in mind,” says Mockaitis, “that it’s the largest armored warfare training center we have,” and that, even if we choose to leave Iraq and the conflict with the insurgency there, “traditional conventional warfighting skills are still going to be needed.” The interesting question for Mockaitis will be whether the Army will turn its back on counterinsurgency training after Iraq, as it did after Vietnam, or instead, institutionalize it. Will the Army go as far as to “Iraq-ize” training for future conflicts “and become so over-focused [on counterinsurgency] that we neglect other missions?” (2008). Wagstaffe concurred when I spoke with him on the subject. He put the very question (“What if the enemy goes away?”) to General George W. Casey, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, when he interviewed the general in July 2007. General Casey confirmed that even if the next president were elected tomorrow and said, “I want out of Iraq, now,” it would take a minimum of five to ten years before this could happen. “Barack and Hillary are Senators, and they’ve been briefed,” says Wagstaffe, referring to Senators Obama and Clinton, the contenders for the Democratic nomination at the time he interviewed Casey. They know that immediate withdrawal is impossible. “Extraction takes a long time [. . .] and is very hard [. . .] We have 140,000 soldiers over there, plus US contractors from Blackwater on down.” Even with maxi- mum efficiency, it would take several years to properly “move out and turn the lights off,” as Wagstaffe puts it.19 “If one accepts what Casey says as true, that says we’re in for a while, no matter who gets elected” (2008, citing his personal interview with General George William Casey, Jr., July 2007). Adaptability, though, is the watchword at Fort Irwin, and, in the unlikely event that Iraqi insurgents and terrorists would cease to be a threat, says Wagstaffe, the National Training Center would just shift right away to the next enemy on the list. “We’ve done four enemies” at Fort Irwin, he says, and all it takes to do a new one is to take the time to look at the enemy’s doctrine and mobilize to mirror their equipment. This seems to be already in the works. In Rehearsing the Warrior Ethos January 2008, Fort Irwin rolled out its Afghanistan simulation, which runs alternate months in the same facility as the Sandbox (Wagstaffe 2007b). (“Barack and Hillary aren’t talking about

19. Wagstaffe differentiates proper extraction from the quick extraction at the end of Vietnam, “where we blew everything up,” referring to the destruction of US military equipment in lieu of extracting it from the country in the evacuation.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.1.47 by guest on 26 September 2021 leaving Afghanistan,” Wagstaffe reminds. “Where they differ with Bush is on Iraq” [2008].) And Wagstaffe says that they will adapt and convert to simulations of the other potential enemies in the world, as needed. “The Iranians,” he says, or “the North Koreans”—lest there be any doubt this goes for any enemy. As Wagstaffe is fond of saying, “Give us Canadian doctrine and equipment and in a month we can give you the best Canadian Army in the world.”

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