The Army’s Iraq Simulator
Last November, Public Radio International’s Here and Now broadcast a news story about the U.S. Army’s 1,000-square-mile National Training Center at Fort Irwin, in California’s Mohave Desert — an urban warfare simulator now being used to train soldiers bound for the real Iraq. Now a documentary film about the site, Full Battle Rattle, follows an Army battalion and role-playing insurgents “as they attempt to quell an insurgency and prevent Medina Wasl, a mock Iraqi village, from slipping into civil war.” Fake body parts, robot mannequins, costumed American and Iraqi actors, and Killed In Action cards are all part of the mix. The film’s site includes a trailer, a statement by directors Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss, and a blog with links to reviews. It’s playing in New York City, and the DVD is coming soon. Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir writes:
In response to the most obvious question about this movie — why did the Army allow two documentary filmmakers from New York inside this training facility, unfettered and uncensored, for two full weeks? — Gerber and Moss have observed that the military is proud of the Iraq Simulation, perhaps more so than of the real thing. “It is one aspect of the war effort that has gone according to plan,” they write. Indeed, as the likable but bewildered [Lt. Col. Robert] McLaughlin and his troops lurch from one blunder to another, and the violence accelerates in this plywood Iraqi town (where the casualties are latex dummies with gruesome, photo-realistic wounds), the simulation comes to seem like an eerily effective replica of the real war.
[Image: Full Battle Rattle site]
