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Roadside bombs. Hostile insurgents. 1,200 extras in Arab dress. Welcome to Louisiana and the Army camp known as the Box, where the violence is fake but the fear is for real.
By Vince Beiser for Wired Magazine.
Something seems not quite right about the half-dozen guys creeping onto the ridge in the predawn light. They're dressed like Iraqi insurgents, in kaffiyehs and camo, and they have the haggard look that comes from having spent a bitterly cold night dodging enemy patrols. They're well armed, carrying M16 assault rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. But then there are those boxy little attachments on the barrels of their rifles and the harness-like vests they're wearing. Plus there's the terrain – scraggly pine forest instead of Iraqi desert.
A rumble of approaching motors swells as the sun clears the horizon: It's a supply convoy, the group's target. Then the relative calm erupts as two ponderous, blunt-nosed Apache helicopters come roaring overhead, sending the men scuttling back down into the concealing woods. They get lucky; the choppers pass without stopping. The squad sprints back up the hill just as a column of heavily armored Humvees and supply trucks comes into view.
A skinny insurgent in a dishdasha lets fly with the rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Then the others start firing, spent shells spitting out of their rifles. The Humvees clatter to a halt and roll this way and that for a minute, utter confusion on the faces of the Minnesota National Guard soldiers driving them. Finally the vehicles' heavy machine guns swing around and return fire. The RPG booms again, and one of the Humvees goes silent. The mock Iraqis scramble off the ridge and scatter into the trees.
Score one for the bad guys in the world's most violent theme park. This is the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, deep in the backwoods of Louisiana – a 100,000-acre US Army training facility that simulates the Middle East in minute detail and on a massive scale. Every year, this literal theater of war is one of the last stops for 44,000 Army and National Guard soldiers before they deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. Their opponents, including my companions in the roadside ambush, are members of the 509th Airborne Infantry, also called the Opposing Force, or Opfor. In addition to sniper fire and car bombs, trainees also contend with civilians – 1,200 role-players who act as Iraqi mayors, imams, journalists, humanitarian aid workers, and ordinary citizens (with the appropriate mix of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds). All of the action takes place amid 18 faux Iraqi towns, complete with mosques, schools, and hundreds of other buildings, detailed right down to kebab stands and street signs in Arabic.
