Just Turn Right at Zzyzx Road

Your tax dollars at work!

Out here, 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles, units of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y., are among the latest war-bound troops who have gone through three weeks of training that introduce them to the harsh episodes that characterize the American experience in Iraq.

In a 1,000-square-mile region on the edge of Death Valley, Arab-Americans, many of them from the Iraqi expatriate community in San Diego, populate a group of mock villages resembling their counterparts in Iraq. American soldiers at forward operating bases nearby face insurgent uprisings, suicide bombings and even staged beheadings in underground tunnels. Recently, the soldiers here, like their counterparts in Iraq, have been confronted with Sunni-Shiite riots. At one village, a secret guerrilla revolt is in the works.

I've often thought the Greater Los Angeles Area was a lot like modern Iraq. The city's essentially impregnable by car during the daytime and unsafe at night. There are many many delicious falafel stands all over the place. Not to mention that more and more unwanted Americans arrive in both places every day. (Seriously, during the summer the tourist traffic in and around Hollywood is maddening. I'd rather try to navigate around Karbala.)

With actors and stuntmen on loan from Hollywood, American generals have recast the training ground at Fort Irwin so effectively as a simulation of conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 20 months that some soldiers have left with battle fatigue and others have had their orders for deployment to the war zones canceled. In at least one case, a soldier's career was ended for unnecessarily "killing" civilians.

Wow, that does sound effective! Imagine that! We've found a way to traumatize young men without even having to send them into battle once! For efficiency like that, you need only to look to the Modern Army.

(Not to mock any of these poor guys who've been emotionally scarred by war or fake war, but if I were shipped out to the Mojave for three weeks to have simulated Arabs attack me, I'd probably fake shell shock as well. "I can't hack it, Sarge! Those extras by the catering cart are freaking me out, man!")

"We would rather you got killed here than in Iraq," said Maj. John Clearwater, a veteran of the Special Forces who works at the training center.

Can I just not get killed, Mr. Major, sir? No? Have to get killed? Then...um...sure, I'd probably rather do it here than in Iraq. I'd prefer to avoid the whole getting killed thing but...yeah, well, I guess that's not happening. Alright, good do know. Thanks.

The troops who come here are at the heart of a vast shift in American war-fighting strategy, a multibillion-dollar effort to remodel the Army on the fly. Here, the Army is relearning how to fight, shifting from its historic emphasis on big army-to-army battles to the more subtle tactics of defeating a guerrilla insurgency.

[Lons spits coffee all over his computer monitor as part of an elaborate, Yosemite Sam-esque cartoon double-take.]

MULTIBILLION-DOLLAR EFFORT? ON THE FLY?

As a general principle, you should never do anything that costs more than $1 billion on the fly. I mean, I know our president wasn't exactly an awesome businessman, but come on! You don't have to be The Donald's next Apprentice to know that's too much to spend on a new army base along the road to Vegas.

How much do you figure they spend putting Burning Man together each year? Probably not anything near a billion dollars. And those guys are fucked up on peyote buttons and ecstasy the whole time! I'll tell you what...once every six months, invite a bunch of trendy bands to play at the base, charge LA fans $100 a head to come out and see them (with an extra $50 for the suckers who want to "go camping"), call it Coachella's Revenge and start earning some of this fucking money back.

(But don't actually invite She Wants Revenge, no matter how tempting the thematic tie-in. They suck.)

It gets even better:

Beneath the public veneer, some American officers say they believe that public support for the war will probably run out before the changes will begin to make a major difference. The more probable chain of events, they say, is a steady drawdown of American forces from Iraq, long before the insurgency is defeated.

Wait, what? It will probably wind up being useless anyway? I guess, if nothing else, they can use it as the primary location for Pauly Shore's upcoming In the Army Now 2. So we'll get something out of it.

At the Army's Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., officers are being required for the first time to complete a course in counterinsurgency. In Iraq, American officers entering the country are now required to spend their first week at the sprawling military base at Taji, on the northwestern edge of Baghdad, attending a crash course in counterinsurgency.

We just sent all these people into harm's way unprepared for what they were going to face. This is the end result of Rumsfeld's nonsensical light army/shock and awe theory. No one wants to send a lot more men into combat. But it's a neccessity to win armed conflicts, you rube. And also, if you're going to send in troops to forcibly keep a major metropolis running while a civil war is going on in the streets, you may want to make sure they already have had a counterinsurgency lesson in the past. So they don't have to have a "crash course" once they're in country. (Also, calling it a "crash course"...inappropriate...)

But, hey, no we shouldn't actually prepare to take control of this country. Let's just start blowing them up, send 100,000 armed dudes over there and hope everything works out. They'll probably be really super-excited to see us!

But back to the secret military training ground on I-15, near Baker, home of the World's Largest Thermometer.

Today, in a desert region nearly the size of Rhode Island, the network of 12 virtual Iraqi villages are eerie in their likeness to the real things. That is the idea, of course: that American soldiers will find the environment so real that they will make their mistakes here first, so they do not make them in Iraq.

One of the villages is Medina Jabal, a hamlet of wooden huts and gravel roads at the base of a ravine about 35 miles from Death Valley.

It is a marriage of military technology and Hollywood fakery; some 350 Arabic-speaking Iraqi-Americans and plainclothes Nevada National Guardsman live here almost year-round to offer American trainees what one officer described as "a vortex of chaos." The insurgents even get acting lessons, coached by Carl Weathers, best known for his portrayal of the boxer Apollo Creed in the "Rocky" films.

Holy shit, never mind! Our troops are being trained by Action Jackson! Forget everything I said...This is an awesome idea!

Oh, for the love of God, please, if you are a documentary filmmaker, get your ass out to the desert. I smell a new reality TV sensation! "The Insurgent!" Action movie hero Carl Weathers trains a group of American soldiers to behave like real Iraqi insurgents. Weekly challenges include bomb-making, issuing murderous fatwas against infidels and getting waterboarded.

16 will enter, but only one will be THE INSURGENT!

A single afternoon in Medina Jabal crystallizes all the confusions and ambiguities of fighting in Iraq. None of the villagers of Medina Jabal are allowed to speak English, and all encounters must be carried out with an interpreter.

Insurgents lurk inside the town, but as in Iraq, they are invisible. The guerrillas maintain a underground tunnel network, smuggle in weapons, and plot nearly continuous attacks on American forces.

The closest American base, where most of the trainees sleep, is only a few hundred yards away, and the insurgents shoot mortar shells at it every night — just as they do in places like Ramadi.

I guess it gives you a sense of what it's like to be in Iraq, but would this really prepare you to enter a violent war zone? I mean, it's hot and loud and irritating and nerve-wracking, sure. But you know you're not going to die. I mean, the guy from Happy Gilmore is there...What could happen? And I doubt it crystallizes all of the confusions of fighting in Iraq. I mean, the thing's located about 2 hours away from where I'm sitting right now. You could probably walk to Bun Boy.

Still, it would make an excellent movie:

To the amazement of American trainers, Sergeant Wilson has found that nearly every American unit entering the training course falls for his tricks — usually leading to catastrophic results. He figures he has "killed" hundreds of American servicemen in his time here. The trap works like this: When the American soldiers first enter Medina Jabal, they usually head straight for the Kamel Dogs stand for a snack. Chatting up the soldiers, "Mr. Hakim" asks if the Americans might let him sell his hot dogs inside the nearby American camp, called Forward Operating Base Denver, to make some extra money for his family. The soldiers inevitably agree, and before long, Mr. Hakim is ferrying huge loads of hot dogs and charcoal briquettes onto the American base.

In the first few days of the venture, everything proceeds safely; the American soldiers, suspicious of Mr. Hakim, search his truck thoroughly. But after four or five days, having decided that he is one of the "good Iraqis," the soldiers begin to wave him and his truck through their checkpoints.

And that is when he strikes. One day, he replaces the charcoal briquettes with Hollywood-grade pyrotechnics, drives the truck deep into the American base and blows it up.

Okay, nobody steal that idea...I'm writing this thing, goddammit.

[Hat tip to Brandoland for finding this article]