Space and Culture

“In a 1,000-square-mile region on the edge of Death Valley, Arab-Americans, many of them from the Iraqi expatriate community in San Diego, populate a group of mock villages resembling their counterparts in Iraq. American soldiers at forward operating bases nearby face insurgent uprisings, suicide bombings and even staged beheadings in underground tunnels. Recently, the soldiers here, like their counterparts in Iraq, have been confronted with Sunni-Shiite riots. At one village, a secret guerrilla revolt is in the works.

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 over the past 20 months 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 …

Today, in a desert region nearly the size of Rhode Island, the network of 12 virtual Iraqi villages are eerie in their likeness to the real things. That is the idea, of course: that American soldiers will find the environment so real that they will make their mistakes here first, so they do not make them in Iraq.

One of the villages is Medina Jabal, a hamlet of wooden huts and gravel roads at the base of a ravine about 35 miles from Death Valley. It is a marriage of military technology and Hollywood fakery; some 350 Arabic-speaking Iraqi-Americans and plainclothes Nevada National Guardsman live here almost year-round to offer American trainees what one officer described as ‘a vortex of chaos’…

But scoring kills is not the main objective at Medina Jabal; gaining the trust of the locals is. When an American soldier loses his cool and kills Iraqi civilians, a simulated television crew from ‘Al Jazeera’ scurries out to videotape the screaming and grieving Iraqis. The inflammatory video is then broadcast over and over on the villages’ television network, just as in Iraq. ‘It’s very realistic here,’ said Sgt. Shawn Stillabower of the 10th Division, a Houston native who is going back for his third tour in Iraq after he finishes the training course. ‘Sometimes, it’s really got me thinking, ‘Am I in Iraq?’

On the training ground, even though it is fiction, the results can be real and lasting. While on patrol in one of the Iraqi villages, [one] soldier wandered off alone, and suddenly found himself surrounded by Iraqi civilians. He panicked and opened fire, killing several of the villagers. The soldier was given a psychological evaluation and dismissed from the Army, for fear that he would have duplicated the behavior with live ammunition in Iraq. ‘If a soldier can’t be trusted in this environment, then he can’t be trusted in Iraq,’ said Brig. Gen. Robert Cone, who runs the base.”

NY Times: Mock Iraqi Villages in Mojave Prepare Troops for Battle (via)