March 4, 2007:
One
of most unnerving things about combat is the uncertainty, especially for those
who are experiencing it for the first time. This uncertainty causes
first-timers to make mistakes, and that gets people killed. So the U.S. Army
has developed new training methods, to eliminate a lot of the uncertainty, over
the last two decades. First came the laser tag attachments to weapons (from
rifles to tank guns), which exposed the troops to an environment where lots of
people were shooting at you. Now the troops knew how easy it was to get hit if
they were not careful about where they were, where they were going, and how
they got there.
When the war on terror came along, troops had to
face other new experiences. Mainly involving dealing with people from a
different culture. Most of them were not shooting at you, but you had to get
information from them. And do so without turning them against you. Laser tag
wouldn't help, but a large scale re-creation of a piece of Iraq would. Staffed
with 3,000 civilians trained to play the roles of Iraqis (including 300 Arab
speakers, some of whom are Iraqis) and others (aid workers, journalists), the
army training program was a huge role-playing game. Normally, these
exercises are run at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) in Louisiana,
in a special facility that contains
fourteen Iraqi villages and enough area for a brigade to run realistic missions for days on end. But
the civilian actors can, and sometimes are, brought to any military base large
enough for a brigade to move around in, and use any buildings available. The
important thing is to get the troops some real experience dealing with a
different culture.
Troops coming back are full of praise for this
preparatory training. While 80-90 percent of the officers and NCOs going over
to Iraq now are combat veterans, they still have to get the many younger, first
time, troops up to speed. The realistic training does it. This sort of thing
isn't sexy or newsworthy, but it's one of those things that saves lives,
American and Iraqi, and does wonders for the morale of troops headed into
combat for the first time.
