Sick of Humans v. Zombies? There's a better game in town. For the low, low price of your life as you know it, you could become a U.S. Marine. After a short period of basic training, and an all-expenses-paid flight aboard a luxurious transport jet, you could be living out your wildest "Operation: Iraqi Freedom" fantasies in a fully simulated Iraqi village environment. Your safety is 100 percent guaranteed.
Such are the thoughts that danced through my head after reading up on "Operation Mojave Viper," the U.S military's premier simulated-combat exercise. To make a terrible story short, "Mojave" is a series of patrol drills conducted in a mock-up Iraqi township smack in the middle of the California desert. The drills cover all the basics. They've got real soldiers toting real guns. They've got real Iraqis speaking real Arabic. They've got real everything you need, from combat boots to air support, except, of course, for a few key items: blood, fear, shock, death and war, to name a few.
In a USA Today article from last year, the following statement was attributed to Gunnery Sgt. Kelly Crawford:
"This [Mojave Viper] is as real as you can get."
As unenlightened and badly worded as such a sentiment may be, the man, we must admit, has a point. When it comes to fighting hopeless wars in strange and foreign lands, bad training is better than no training at all.
Ever since its early days in the spring of 2003, the war in Iraq has been a hotbed for appalling tales of cultural interaction. From Abu Ghraib to Blackwater, we've had no shortage of proof that when the legions and the locals are separated by race and language, everything goes to hell. Teenage Marines in full-out camouflage point loaded guns at panicking shopkeepers. Frightened women stand by in horror. Everyone screams at the top of their lungs, and no one understands a word. All too often, shots are fired. When the smoke clears, it's safe to say that we with the guns are the "bad guys."
So the United States has blood on its hands, and a month-long crash-course in the California desert is all we can do stop it. If "Operation Mojave Viper" can prevent even one sorry episode, then it's worth 10 times its cost. However, you won't find me asking an Iraqi to agree.
It's a tall order for a coddled, middle-class college student, but it's worth a try: put yourself in the shoes of an Iraqi. What are you to do? You have a history that goes back thousands of years, yet you live in a country whose arbitrary borders have been drawn and redrawn for ages. You've lived under the rule of an egotistical despot for your entire adult life, and you've just been rudely awakened from that nightmare by yet another imperial force. Truth be told, they may be a democracy. Half of their population may disagree with the invasion, but could that really matter?
And what if they asked you to help them out, to act like yourself in some makeshift military fantasy so that maybe the bloodshed would lessen a little?
If you said no, I'd be the last to stop you.
I'd be the last to stop you because here in the United States, it's easy to equivocate.
"Sure," we could say to ourselves, "it's good that the Iraqis are helping us to understand them. It's a shame that it's such a mess over there, but it's out of their hands either way."
Such is the stuff of politics. In an occupied country, things are a little different. In the Middle East, there is no middle ground.
"You're either with us or you're with the terrorists." So the saying goes. Although that lovely bit of Texan rhetoric might not ring true for you or I, it holds on the ground in Iraq. A modification might be in order: you're either with the project of global democracy, or you're with the project of rebellion.
Not all wars are the same. On a Christmas day during World War I, British and German troops declared an ad-hoc truce, left their trenches, and met in no-mans-land to drink together, to revel. Not in a million years would this happen in Iraq. In a war of occupation, there is no man's land. There is no common tongue. The Middle East is the center of the world, and there is no easy way out.
Such are the lessons that can't be taught in a make-believe drill in California. Nothing can prepare a young man's mind for the strange nature of war, or for the gravity of the situation in Iraq. A simulated war is no more than a role-playing game. But unlike the "zombies," Iraq is a very real place.
James Mathews is a Collegian editor. He can be reached at jwmathew@student.umass.edu.
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