by Lizzie Stark
Jeff moved back to the East Coast and retired from army life in 2010, entering college in upstate New York. He is a history major and plans to focus on European history and military history and to go on to grad school one day. It’s a new chapter in his life. He still attends Knight Realms regularly and intends to return to reenactment now that he’s found a German unit nearby.
Jeff spent sixteen years in the army, attaining the rank of sergeant first class. It’s clear he has complicated emotions surrounding his service. He took pride in his work while he was enlisted, says he took care of “my guys” and his duties, exercised the skills he took so much care to learn, and felt that brotherhood with his comrades. But the wars also cost him his peace of mind. It took him years to come to terms with his PTSD. He sometimes talks about how the propaganda whitewashes the job of a soldier, which is to kill people.
Politically, he says he is confused but loyal. He has an idea of what Vietnam might have been like. He gives the distinct impression that he is glad to be out of the army. His close friend Joe Bondi, who has larped with him for the last twenty years, says that feeling is new for Jeff, that it was hard for him to retire and leave the bomb disarmament to someone else. Given his mixed emotions about the army and war, it’s curious that all of Jeff’s hobbies—miniature war gaming, larp, reenactment—have to do with war, fighting, or violence in some manner. Joe tells me that Jeff painted war-gaming miniatures while deployed abroad and that he suspects that they served as a tether to the here and now for Jeff. Jeff himself talks about his love for larp, which predated his long stint in the military, and how it introduced him to so many great people, like Joe or his roommate, Terry. He says this old guard sometimes laughs that in twenty years of larp, no one has died. Sure, people have had asthma attacks and twisted ankles, but in all that time, no one has fallen off a cliff or died of exposure or been mauled by a bear.
Maybe World War II reenactment offers Jeff a safe space in which to relive and deal with what he saw on deployment, a way to revisit it in an environment where he has some control over circumstances and outcome. Maybe he games for the simple pleasure of it, because he loves stories and has always been fascinated with war. Maybe he larps because in a synthetic reality, everything has meaning, and heroism is still possible. At Knight Realms, he started out as the hero paladin Aradiel, but now, twelve years later, he can’t play that role anymore. Instead, he’s created a new character and a new history for himself, a man named Radu Dragovic, a gravedigger.
* No one quite knows where the word came from, but as Tony Horwitz pointed out in Confederates in the Attic, which explored Civil War reenactment: “‘Farb’ was the worst insult in the hard-core vocabulary. It referred to reenactors who approached the past with a lack of verisimilitude. The word’s etymology was obscure; [reenactor Robert] Young guessed that ‘farb’ was short for ‘far-be-it-from authentic,’ or possibly a respelling of ‘barf.’”
9
Larp as Training Tool
A thick, putrid smoke permeates this place. Broken Jersey barriers and other rubble cover the ground. Lit-up oil barrels offer flickering light in the darkness, and in the distance, bright lights flash at irregular intervals. Machine guns fire continuously, and the cry of “More ammo!” sounds periodically. A small team of soldiers in fatigues and with guns on their backs has dragged two of their bleeding fellows into a cinderblock room, attempting to stabilize the patients while one of them calls in the injuries over the radio.
But the man with the book and the flashlight that gleams so brightly in the darkness is only calling someone in the next room to report mock injuries. This isn’t real, but it’s not a game either; the simulation, which helps soldiers practice lifesaving techniques under stressful battle conditions, is part of Combat Lifesaver Training at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, a National Guard training center. I spent a day visiting the site to examine how the army uses something very like larp to prepare its soldiers for real battle. This particular training simulation is realistic—these rooms have roused vivid memories for some veterans preparing for deployment.
It’s not just the darkness, the rubble, or the flashing lights that give soldiers flashbacks, says Captain Adam Bickford, the medical operations officer in charge of the Medical Battalion Training Site at Fort Indiantown Gap. Most particularly, it’s the smell that sends some soldiers back. According to Captain Bickford, the training area is equipped with smell generators that send out smoke that smells like war—like blazing diesel, sewers, or burning human flesh. The smell generators aren’t military grade—they come from a special effects company. Captain Bickford’s least favorite odor is the eau de sewer, which we’re enjoying together. The smell is faint at first, unfamiliar, with a hint of rotten, and after ten minutes I’m still not used to it; its unpleasantness has become pervasive without becoming more intense, a fragrant backdrop to the action. Captain Bickford warns me that the smell clings to clothing. If they don’t open the doors and fan out the room, it can linger for weeks. Sometimes after training, he says, they run a coffee odor through the smell generators to help clear the rooms.
The tapes of machine gun fire are less high-tech. I wonder if they are recordings taken during battle, but Captain Bickford informs me that they’re audio tapes from a Hollywood sound website.
He takes me and Major Corey Angell, the post’s public affairs officer and my escort for the day, into another room, this time one with the lights on, although it is also filled with sewer smoke. Captain Bickford says that they must have just finished up training in this room. When we walk through the doorway, we appear to be standing on some sort of porch. In front of us, a door leads into a shed-like structure with windows cut into it, a mock house made with drywall and two-by-fours. A poor legless, armless dummy lies on the ground inside, rubber lips open. To our right is a deck with a banister and steps that lead down to the ground, out into a large open space. There is a human hand lying on the banister—well, a firm rubber hand with realistic modeling and a wire loop coming out of the wrist.
Captain Bickford says that the army, and sometimes teams of state and local first responders, including the Veteran’s Affairs emergency medical response team, practice house rescues here. The army sometimes uses amazingly lifelike moving dummies controlled by computer for training, he says. In fact, for Halloween he is thinking of dressing up this area as a haunted house and inviting military families inside. We all laugh. For a moment, he’s thinking like a larper instead of an army captain.
As we’re leaving, another door opens, a door down the deck stairs and across the room from us, and several soldiers in fatigues enter. Apparently they’ve forgotten their poor patient’s hand and have returned to retrieve it. We leave quickly to allow them to complete their exercise in peace.
These simulators are a part of the training for combat lifesavers and combat medics at Fort Indiantown Gap. Of course, the army trains medics before deployment, but it also trains many ordinary soldiers in a variety of EMT-like duties, from controlling bleeds to chest decompression to treating a collapsed lung. Training begins with classroom instruction and practice on dummies, and soldiers work their way up to the elaborate scenarios filled with stressors. The goal for combat lifesavers is to make the techniques so automatic that they can perform them under pressure. The lights, the smoke, and the smell are all part of increasing the stress a trainee is under. In advanced scenarios the army also uses moulage kits, essentially makeup kits, to make realistic, stomach-turning wounds on live patients in order to help combat lifesavers and medics learn to assess injuries. Moulage simulates any kind of visible injury, including bruises, burns, compound fractures, open wounds, and, at the highest levels, amputation. Combat lifesavers learn basic techniques, while medics require a more complex and deeper understanding of injuries, and the intricacy of moulage used to simulate wounds varies accordingly. At its simplest, moulage is fake blood purchased from a Halloween store, but if there’s the budget for it—and at Fort Indiantown Gap
there is—it includes high-quality fake blood, makeup, and latex prosthetics. Captain Bickford says that he’s got some guys with art backgrounds who help create prosthetics and a couple who have been trained at the military’s moulage school, where they learn to create and apply realistic moulage.
When it came to moulage, I knew what Captain Bickford was talking about—it’s possible he and my larpers bought their supplies from the same theatrical company. During my brief tenure at the zombie apocalypse larp Dystopia Rising, I’d seen “infected” characters with gross open wounds on their necks or bullet wounds created from bits of latex and fake blood. Players created these looks by either buying premade latex wounds or using liquid latex to create their own prostheses. They would attach, for example, the circular ridge around a bullet wound to their skin with spirit gum, camouflage the edges with a flesh-toned makeup, and paint the oozy parts with bottled fake blood. It’s probably not as realistic as army-created injuries because, well, zombies aren’t realistic, but the wounds are made of the same core ingredients.
As it turns out, the army and a larp game have much more in common. They’re both communities with their own strange activities intended to bond participants: basic training in the case of the army and larp in the case of larpers. Larpers wear costumes; soldiers wear uniforms. Larpers come from different walks of life, and so do members of the National Guard. Soldiers learn tactics, while many larpers enjoy tactical games.
The army and a larp both constitute subcultures with their own distinct languages, based heavily around acronyms. For example, larpers enjoy talking OOG (out-of-game) and IC (in-character) with NPCs (nonplayer characters). But in the land of acronyms, the army is truly king, or perhaps should I say HRH (His Royal Highness). It has departments like the PTAE (Pre-mobilization Training Assistance Element), which organizes a lot of role-play and teaches TTP (tactics, techniques, and procedures) to soldiers according to their MOS (military occupation specialty). One sergeant even joked to me that the army is full of TLAs—three-letter acronyms.
But at the end of the day, larpers play at going to war while soldiers actually go. The point of larp is fun, and the point of the army is to win wars. Yet the army jargon for going to war, for deploying, is being “in theater,” a phrase that suggests performance and playing a role. Given the army’s training activities, the word theater is oddly appropriate.
Fort Indiantown Gap contains a fake Arab town called the Combined Arms Collective Training Facility, or the CACTF (pronounced cack-tiff) for short. It’s on a small paved hill in the middle of the woods. It’s got a mosque that peculiarly resembles a New England country church, complete with a graveyard filled with round cement gravestones. Next to the church, there’s a pile of rubble ringed by a round asphalt drive. The rest of the town consists of about three blocks of buildings, including residences, half-finished cinderblock structures, a police station, a hotel, and an open-air market with stalls made of timber. A short distance away lies the shell of a burnt-out car. Underneath the words “Police Station” and “Hotel” their translations are stenciled in Arabic lettering. Inside, the hotel is sparsely furnished with desks in some rooms, bureaus, the odd stack of mattresses, and bookshelves.
First Sergeant William Hyatt is an instructor with the PTAE, which manages, runs, and coordinates training at Fort Indiantown Gap, and he shows me around the CACTF on my visit. Like most of the people in charge of training soldiers who are about to deploy, he has recently returned from a tour of duty; he returned from Iraq in July 2006, shortly before taking the post. The theory is that soldiers recently returned from deployment will be up on the most current insurgent tactics and therefore able to help train deploying soldiers accordingly, Major Angell says.
At the CACTF, Sergeant Hyatt shows me the little details that make this fake town mimic the real ones he fought in abroad. He points out the thousand places where an enemy could be hiding. For starters, the buildings are rife with sniper nests, tiny holes in some of the interior and exterior walls at about knee height, some of them covered with tape or cardboard. He informs me that insurgents use these both visually, to watch people approaching the building or inside it, and as sniper holes, akin to the narrow arrow-slits in medieval forts and castles. In the basement of the “hotel,” a bookcase hides a tunnel that leads underneath the town, into a sewer system. This part of the design makes the CACTF a truly three-dimensional training facility, he says, since enemies can be stationed on top of buildings, inside them, and below them, like a real city. In one of the townhouses down the street there is a weapons cache set up with mock trip wires and traps, like real weapons caches are. Rush to discover what’s inside the cache, and a soldier could end up “dead.” The graveyard outside the church is important, Sergeant Hyatt says. Sometimes during exercises they stage burials there, because insurgents have been known to bury large caliber weapons and rockets in fresh graves.
During scenarios, the military used to use laser guns to simulate live fire but has since ended the practice since laser guns aren’t realistic enough. Plywood stops lasers, for example, while a real bullet rips through to whoever is standing behind it. For this reason, most training scenarios use real weapons, to give soldiers the experience of feeling the recoil of a gun. Usually, the guns fire blanks, with an honor system determining who dies or is wounded, along with a set of observer-controller trainers who monitor the fight and tell soldiers when they’re out of play or wounded. Sometimes the soldiers use rubber bullets, which hurt when they hit but don’t do permanent damage.
Toward the rear of the town, behind the hotel, the wooden remains of a mock open-air market flank a paved road. Sergeant Hyatt conjures the image of a training exercise for me, lots of soldiers dressed in flowing robes and head-wraps pretending to be locals, while one of them, one bad guy, needs to be winnowed out. Nearly everyone is a civilian in that scenario, and there’s only one bad guy. How do you tell who’s who? That’s realism, he says.
The CACTF is a $10 million town, finished by the government contractor ECI in 2008, and it has been wired within an inch of its fake life. It contains seventy-two cameras, which can be moved to different areas of the town depending on which parts of it are “in-play” during a training exercise. The cameras can shoot during the daytime and have infrared settings for night. The town is also wired for sound, with speakers capable of generating noises from dogs barking to kids crying to gunshots, helicopter rotors, and the Muslim call to prayer. Some of the furniture has outlets under it where the HUTs, humanurban targets, basically remote-controlled dummies, can be wired.
All of these speakers, cameras, and dummies are controlled from the Range Operations Center, a small building perhaps a mile away that is staffed by Raytheon Technical Services Company, another government contractor. David Moyer, a forty-something veteran of the first Gulf War, works in the control center as an electronics technician. At the end of a training session, Moyer and his team edit the video footage and screen it for the trainees. The camera gives an objective picture of what goes on during training scenarios. Soldiers who didn’t learn what’s being taught correctly can actually see where they went wrong, and it’s hard to deny one’s own mistakes when they’re caught on tape.
The CACTF isn’t only used by the military. Federal, state, and local first responders, including SWAT teams, police, and EMTs also use the facility to test their preparations for emergency situations. A group might practice setting up decontamination tents in case of a nuclear explosion or coordinating between a SWAT team retrieving “bodies” from the rubble, in reality dummies stamped with numbers indicating their injuries, and medical teams decontaminating and treating the bodies.
Not every training scenario is high tech. Sergeant Hyatt also takes me to see something called lane training, a battle drill designed to help a single squad, a collection of about twelve to fifteen soldiers, put together several tasks it’s learned. The point of this exercise is not to simulate combat but to show the squad what to do in combat, Serg
eant Hyatt says. Today, two squads from the 131st Transportation Company will be “walking the lane” and will practice responding to direct and indirect fire, responding to flares, moving around an obstacle, and several other tasks. This exercise will be “dismounted,” or on foot. The 131st Transportation is not primarily a fighting unit; rather, its function is to supply other troops with fuel, water, food, ammo, and anything else, using trucks. Because their function is not necessarily to fight, they are what Sergeant Hyatt calls “soft targets” for insurgents, as opposed to the “hard targets” of infantry companies, for example. But due to the number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that insurgents are using in Afghanistan, these support units are now very likely to face combat, and so training is geared to hone their basic soldier skills. They may not be kicking in doors, but it’s possible they’d face small arms fire with a disabled vehicle. The two squads that I will watch are relatively green and have not worked together before—this will be their first foray into battle conditions as a team.
We begin at a shanty town the size of a city block, set around a central square. The town consists of a collection of giant steel shipping containers that have doors and windows cut into them, some stacked two high to create buildings that have stairs leading to a second story. Everyone is milling about outside, waiting for instruction.
The two squads are briefed on today’s mission. The mansion in town, one of the two-story buildings, is a known Taliban stronghold, and there may or may not be Taliban there when they arrive. Each of the squads will walk the lane on its own. We all drive up to the start of the lane, about three-quarters of a mile away. Each squad has its own leader and divides into two teams, each one with its own leader. The squad leader establishes a chain of command; if he should go down, or his second should, there is a third person in charge. Everyone jumps up and down to make sure his equipment—his flak jacket, helmet, water, ammunition clip—is secure. They must be wearing at least fifty pounds of gear. For the most part, they are armed with rifles that have a yellow block screwed into their barrels, which creates a seal so that when the gun fires a blank it will recoil as if firing a real round. The soldiers talk among themselves, doling out numbers that will determine how they will cover doorways once they get to town. They receive cautions not to fire at someone’s face and not to fire at civilians. They psych themselves up, saying things like, “Let’s do this together. Let’s get home together.”