COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: General
Computer games play role in combat training
Jose Antonio Vargas, Washington Post
Feb. 14, 2006
WASHINGTON - One blistering afternoon in Iraq, while fightinginsurgents
in the northern town of Mosul, Sgt. Sinque Swales opened fire with his
.50-cal. That was only the second time, he says, that he ever shot an
enemy. A human enemy.
"It felt like I was in a big video game. It didn't even faze me,
shooting back. It was just natural instinct. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! "
remembers Swales, a fast-talking, deep-voiced, barrel-chested
29-year-old from Chesterfield, Va. He was a combat engineer in Iraq for
nearly a year.
Like many soldiers in the 276th Engineer Battalion, whose PlayStations
and Xboxes crowded the trailers that served as their barracks, he
played
games during his downtime. "Halo 2," the sequel to the best-selling
first-person shooter game, was a favorite. So was "Full Spectrum
Warrior," a military-themed title developed with help from the U.S.
Army.
"The insurgents were firing from the other side of the bridge. . . . We
called in a helicopter for an airstrike. . . . I couldn't believe I was
seeing this. It was like 'Halo.' It didn't even seem real, but it was
real."
This is the video game generation of soldiers. " 'Ctrl+Alt+Del,' " the
U.S. Army noted in a recent study, "is as basic as 'ABC.' " And
computer
simulations -- as military officials prefer to call them -- have
transformed the way the United States military fights wars, as well as
soldiers' ways of killing.
"There's been a huge change in the way we prepare for war, and the
soldiers we're training now are the children of the digital age who
grew
up with GameBoys," says retired Rear Adm. Fred Lewis, a 33-year U.S.
Navy veteran who now heads the National Training Systems Association, a
trade group that every year puts on the Interservice/Industry Training,
Simulation and Education Conference, the military counterpart of the
glitzy Electronic Entertainment Expo. "Live training on the field is
still done, of course," but, he adds, "using simulations to train them
is not only natural, it's necessary."
Technology facilitates revolution
War is no game, of course, but games, in a big way, have updated war.
The weapons Swales uses when he plays "SOCOM 3: U.S. Navy SEALS," for
example, are virtual replicas of the weapons he used as a soldier in
Iraq.
"The technology in games has facilitated a revolution in the art of
warfare," says David Bartlett, the former chief of operations at the
Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, a high-level office within the
Defense Department and the focal point for computer-generated training
at the Pentagon. "When the time came for him" -- meaning Swales -- "to
fire his weapon, he was ready to do that. And capable of doing that.
His
experience leading up to that time, through on-the-ground training and
playing 'Halo' and whatever else, enabled him to execute. His situation
awareness was up. He knew what he had to do. He had done it before --
or
something like it up to that point."
* More Iraq news
In the mid-1990s, Bartlett, an avid gamer himself, created "Marine
Doom," the military version of the original "Doom," the granddaddy of
first-person shooter games. The simulation was conducted in a lab with
six PCs networked together. It served as a precursor for more
expensive,
highly immersive, state-of-the-art military simulation centers and PC
labs. Some, like the Asymmetric Warfare -- Virtual Training Technology,
largely train soldiers how to coordinate complicated missions. Think of
it as a sort of military "EverQuest" that can be played by multiple
people in multiple places at the same time. With the Indoor Simulated
Marksmanship Trainer, soldiers train to effectively shoot their weapons
by holding a rifle that looks like an M16, except it fires a laser and
the target is a giant screen.
Lt. Col. Scott Sutton, director of the technology division at Quantico
Marine Base, where the mock-up M16s are used, says soldiers in this
generation "probably feel less inhibited, down in their primal level,
pointing their weapons at somebody." That, in effect, "provides a
better
foundation for us to work with," he adds.
No one knows for sure whether Sutton is right. Since at least World War
II, studies purporting to explore how readily troops pulled the trigger
-- S.L.A. Marshall's "Men Against Fire," for example -- have aroused
controversy and been scored as anecdotal. Indeed, collecting data in
the
swirl of battle is no less formidable a challenge today than in the
past. As a result, comparisons to previous generations of soldiers are
problematic. Nonetheless, soldiers today are far more knowledgeable
about weaponry than their predecessors, Bartlett feels sure, and have
"a
basic skills set as to how to use them."
The new Spartans
Retired Marine Col. Gary W. Anderson, former chief of staff of the
Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, agrees. And he takes it a step further:
Today's soldiers, having grown up with first-person shooter games long
before they joined the military, are the new Spartans, he says.
"America's Army," a free online game with more than 6.5 million
registered players, is being used by the U.S. military as a recruiting
tool. "Call of Duty," "Medal of Honor" and "SOCOM," to name just three
best-selling military-themed titles, are popular with soldiers, whether
they're deployed in Iraq or back home in the States. A version of
"America's Army" will be available on cell phones this summer.
"Remember the days of the old Sparta, when everything they did was
towards war?" says Anderson, now a defense consultant. "In many ways,
the soldiers of this video game generation have replicated that, and
that's something to think about."
Swales, the 29-year-old combat engineer from Chesterfield, joined the
National Guard in 1998 "as a way to get my life in track," he says.
While deployed in Mosul, he mostly hung out with Sgt. Sean Crippen,
Spec. Alfred Trevino and Spec. Mike Jones -- they were all in the
Guard,
all in their twenties, all from Virginia. They were dubbed "the
minority
squad" (Swales and Crippen are black, Trevino is half Mexican American,
Jones is Korean American). To pass the nights, they watched such
classic
war movies as "Full Metal Jacket" and "Apocalypse Now."
"Saving Private Ryan" was their favorite.
"That's gonna be us, man, when they first opened the doors on the boat,
when they're hitting the beach, just watching guys get mowed down,"
Swales, the eldest of the group, the big brother type, would joke.
Even more, though, they played military-themed games, thumbing away
into
the wee hours of the night. "Sometimes we'd be up till 2 or 3 in the
morning, and we gotta get up, like, 0900" to head out for a foot patrol
through town, says Crippen.
"We're doing this stuff for real and we're playing it on our spare
time," adds Swales. "And yeah, it was ironic. But it was so normal, we
didn't think nothing about it."
Swales had a PlayStation2 that he brought from home in the portable
trailer that he shared with Crippen. They became roommates after their
former roommates, Spec. Nick Mason and Spec. David Ruhren, died from a
bombing attack. Nearby, Spec. Idrissa Hill, who was rooming with Jones,
had an Xbox and a PlayStation 2. (They can be bought online, as well as
at the PX.) Everyone kept busy. Crippen, by far the best gamer in the
group, got through the last levels of "Call of Duty" and "Full Spectrum
Warrior," both military-themed games.
"The very first time I fired my rifle" -- it was an M249 squad
automatic
weapon, a machine gun -- "I was scared. I had never shot my gun before
at an actual person. But once I pulled the trigger, that was it, I
never
hesitated," says Crippen, 22. He's now a sophomore at Virginia State
University, studying computer engineering, trying not to get so
distracted by his Xbox. "All I saw was the street where the RPG
[rocket-propelled grenade] came from, and I just fired in that
direction, maybe 20 rounds at most, and it felt like I was playing
'Ghost Recon' at home," referring to a Tom Clancy game.
"I've always had access to a shooter game. Ever since I could pick up a
controller," he goes on. One of the first games he recalls playing as a
little kid was "Commando," a shoot-'em-up game where the player's
character, Super Joe, is dropped into a jungle and tries to fight his
way out. "And over there in Iraq, I think playing those games helped.
It
kept me on my toes. It taught me what to do and what not to do."
Trevino's weapon was the M16A4 assault rifle.
"You just try to block it out, see what you need to do, fire what you
need to fire. Think to yourself, This is a game, just do it, just do
it,
" says Trevino, 20, the baby of the group, recalling his first shot at
a
human enemy. He lives in Virginia Beach and works at nearby Bradco
Supply, running a forklift. He's a hard-core gamer like Crippen, plays
"anything that races," he says, "anything that shoots."
"Of course, it's not a game. The feel of the actual weapon was more of
an adrenaline rush than the feel of the controller," he continues. "But
you're practically doing the same thing: trying to kill the other
person. The goal is the same. That's the similarity. The goal is to
survive."
Some not as battle-ready as they think
Still, many PlayStation-playing soldiers aren't as battle-ready as they
think. Evan Wright, author of "Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman,
Captain America, and the New Face of American War," a stirring account
of young Marines in Iraq, spent six weeks in early 2003 with the 1st
Reconnaissance Battalion -- nicknamed the "suicide battalion" -- which
traveled far ahead of the main invasion force. The soldiers he
interviewed were "on more intimate terms with the culture of video
games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than with their own
families."
However, he says, "What I saw was a lot of them discovered levels of
innocence that they probably didn't think they had. When they actually
shot people, especially innocent people, and were confronted with this,
I saw guys break down. The violence in games hadn't prepared them for
this."
Sgt. Michael Stinetorf, one of those 1st Recon Marines, used three
weapons in Iraq: a heavy .50-caliber machine gun, an M249 light machine
gun, and a suppressed M4, "which is an M4 with a silencer," he says. He
had played shoot-'em-up games, mostly James Bond titles and "Grand
Theft
Auto III" before he left for the war. But since returning home in
September 2004, he can't stand watching his friends play those kind of
games, much less play them himself.
"It just doesn't appeal to me anymore," says the 23-year-old, now a
freshman at Grossmont College in San Diego who hopes someday to study
medicine. "I found the easiest way to release all the violence, to walk
away from it all, is not surround myself with it."
So he says no to violent games, no to violent movies, no to violent TV
shows, and declines to talk about how many people he shot while in
Iraq.
"That's one thing I don't get into. Even to my closest friends," he
says. "It's kind of a way to separate yourself from it."
Unlike Stinetorf, Swales still can't seem to get enough of shooter
games, especially military-themed ones. He got back from Iraq more than
a year ago. A banner that reads "Welcome Home Que" still hangs in his
cluttered room, upstairs in the two-story, four-bedroom home that he
shares with his mom, sister, niece and a 7-year-old Labrador named Kim.
Nearby, three commendation medals are collecting dust. Swales, who at 6
feet 3 and 225 pounds could easily pass as a linebacker, until recently
worked two jobs -- in the produce section of Wal-Mart, from midnight to
9 a.m., and at Best Buy, from 3:30 to 10:30 p.m., with a sideline gig
installing car stereos. He quit Best Buy a few weeks back. Too much
work.
In his spare time, he's hunkered on the edge of his futon, or on the
off-pink carpeted floor, reliving his days as a soldier in front of his
30-inch TV, playing "SOCOM 3: U.S. Navy SEALS." These days, it's the
only thing he plays, three hours at a time. He's showing off the
weapons
in the game, describing them one by one.
There's the AK-47, the most common insurgent weapon in Iraq, he says.
Here's the M4 carbine, the weapon a lot of the American infantry guys
are running around with.
"This game takes place in Southeast Asia. I'm the commander of the guys
here, in charge of three guys. In this game, you gotta try to be as
quiet as possible. You gotta find the informer, the mole, and get intel
and find out what's going on. But you gotta be quiet," explains Swales.
In the game he's playing, his character is in Army fatigues, crawling
in
the rice paddies of the village, gripping an M16A2 with a high scope.
And outside of the game, he's sitting in his room, dressed in black
sweats and Newport tennis shoes, gripping his controller. He's
whispering, though the only person in the room, besides the reporter,
is
him.
"Can you hear the heartbeat? That's my heart. In the game. When you're
trying to get a steady shot, you hear the heart beating. That right
there felt like the real thing."
The game, of course, comes with a restart button.
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