Greetings from insurgent city: guardsmen act as foes to aid Iraq-bound soldiers.

FORT IRWIN, CALIF.--The patrol came into town just after 9 a.m. The soldiers, hailing from the Pennsylvania National Guard's 28th Infantry Division, were tasked with identifying and apprehending an insurgent. They expected trouble, and they were not disappointed.

Clouds of dust churned from the wheels of Humvees and M113s as the patrol rolled through the streets. As the residents began to stir, the now dismounted soldiers set up perimeters and started the edgy house-to-house search for their target. Hell broke loose soon after they began--a sharp crack and a plume of smoke heralded the detonation of an improvised explosive device, the bane of soldiers and Iraqi police.

Shortly after, grenades flew from windows of one building. The crackle of small-arms fire and screams of scared civilians floated with the dust, the high-value target hunt forgotten. A team of 28th Guardsmen rushed the house where the grenade thrower was holed up, and from inside came a flurry of gunshots. Soon, wounded and killed U.S. soldiers are carried out on makeshift stretchers made from discarded wood panels.

It's just another morning of training in Insurgent City.

The mock town is one of nine at the National Training Center here, where troops on their way to Iraq learn some of the hard skills they will need to survive while deployed. Over the course of two weeks they will face an array of simulated snipers, mortar attacks, complex street diplomacy and hidden explosives.

Responsible for this mayhem is the Nevada Army National Guard's 1st Squadron, 221st Cavalry, which took over as the opposing force, or OPFOR, from the 11th Armored Calvary Regiment last September. That regiment, currently deployed to Iraq, is expected to return to Fort Irwin in February.

A reporter from National Defense recently witnessed this training while embedded with the OPFOR troops in their mock home, called Tiefort City after a nearby mountain peak. There were 964 players in this dramatic war game, played out at this scorching desert Army base. There are three kinds of players: Iraqi-American contractors as civilians, and National Guardsmen acting in two roles, insurgents or civilians. The first week always features stand alone scenarios, while the second week is a rolling free play, during which all actions influence the larger scenario and the training continues around the clock.

Tiefort City, a collection of almost 50 prefabricated buildings, is the largest of the urban areas at Fort Irwin. Each rectangular shelter looks and feels like a shipping container, and is as sparsely adorned. Stacked prefab houses create multi-story buildings. There are plenty of open windows for snipers, many sharp corners for ambushes and beneath it all are a network of tunnels.

Tiefort City boasts a population of 175, with 40 of them contractors employed and managed by Titan Corp. Titan garners about $1.9 million per rotation. Its role players are security-screened by the company. Nearly every officer at Fort Irwin downplays the fear of insurgent moles at the NTC, but officials acknowledged that several players have been removed for "immigration issues." The contractors are not allowed access to cellular phones or cameras during the two-week training cycle.

The OPFOR Guardsmen live full time in the ramshackle buildings where the scenarios take place. They spend two weeks in the towns while the trainees live in the forward operating bases.

Cities are designated black, gray or white, depending on their level of hostility.

Many of the 221st's troops, having seen field duty in Iraq and other unpleasant places, prefer their tour at Fort Irwin. Boredom, sand flies and heat are the main enemies.

While several OPFOR soldiers playing civilians noted that it's more fun for their town to go "black," others said that their quality of life suffers. Black cities are often cordoned off, a condition that brings an end to OPFOR shower runs to the base. It also takes more energy to simulate the riots and street protests that mark an enraged populace. For mock insurgents, the time passes quicker because they are kept busy sowing violence. A typical night-time mortar run will begin by driving into the desert, setting up a fake mortar tube, firing an M-16 loaded with blanks into the tube to create a flash and reporting their attack to the training personnel waiting within the BLUFOR forward operating base. At the base, the trainers place the smoke grenades and distribute casualties with a device nicknamed the "God gun."

A rapid reaction force then will hunt the insurgents by vehicle, and then usually by foot. The insurgents often shoot themselves to be spared the hassle of blue force detainment and tribunals.

Every war game, from Dungeons and Dragons to military training, needs an all-powerful figure to dictate reality. The dungeon masters here at a Fort Irwin are the observer/controllers, who supervise the chaos to preserve the focus on training. They also shepherd company commanders through their rotation, point out their flaws and assess the impact of their mistakes.

The percentage of combat veterans among these vital trainers is rising, said Michaud. Currently, only 42 percent of the O/Cs have served in combat, but that rate will rise to approximately 70 percent by August, he said. The observer/controllers also travel to Iraq to gather first-hand lessons.

For the OPFOR soldiers, pride and passion have to take a back seat to the larger mission. The goal is not to see who will win, but to ready the visiting troops for conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Everyone knows this is true--but no one pretends to like it.

"Soldiers don't like to lose, but the soldiers here are training aids," said Lt. Lane Evans, executive officer of the 221st's Alpha troop and the officer in charge of OPFOR in Tiefort City. "Sometimes you have to rein them in...You don't want them to wipe out a whole platoon. There's not a lot of training value in that."

Evans straddles the line between the red and blue teams, sometimes a tense place to be. The OPFOR teams like to improvise, score hits and be fiendishly clever. In open discussions, they explain that they want to keep the environment realistic, acknowledge the larger training goal and cede authority to the O/Cs. Behind the scenes, however, they gripe of coddled trainees and O/Cs who grant unfair advantages to their targets. They then enthusiastically plan for sowing upcoming chaos.

The morning of the fourth day of the rotation, an OPFOR sniper carefully prepared his position and escape route. He moved vans to cover windows where trainees could gain entry, placed obstructions in front of doors to slow their pursuit and planned his escape into the network of tunnels running beneath the faux city. When the 6 a.m. patrol rolled in, the sniper scored kills on three dumbfounded National Guardsmen. The O/C complained--the shots could not be heard. "It's not my fault they can't hear me, sir," the sniper said, before crying. "Bang, bang! I'm a sniper!"

A .50 caliber weapon blasted laser light at him, but scored no hits. The O/C noted that the cover he had could not stop the bullets, but was enough to stop the laser light. The sniper wasn't buying it.

"Our sniper this morning," Evans said of the incident. "We had to pull his plug. They weren't engaging him."

During "high-intensity conflict" training, such as traditional tank-on-tank engagements, each blue and red-team member is tracked in real-time. Later, reconstructions of who-shot-whom and when can be created as teaching aids.

Bringing this capability to the urban terrain means installing sensitive equipment to the far-flung cities, which lie about 15 miles away from the main base.

Amid the rolling gunfights and dramatic wails of Iraqi women, contractors laid concrete foundations and unspooled yards of fiberoptic cable. An ambitious expansion of this urban environment is underway as the troops train.

In a bid to bring better training to Fort Irwin's urban landscapes, video and radio-frequency tracking equipment is being installed, according to Maj. Carl Michaud, secretary of the general staff at the National Training Center. The cost of the three-year project is $12 million for construction and $31 million to wire the place with instrumentation.

Some of the base's seven caves already feature cameras. Footage is used to illustrate mistakes and show trainees the opposition's point of view of their actions--someone firing from cover unknowingly may be dangerously exposed.

A plan to bring low-light cameras into the caves and prefabricated buildings also is being drafted, Michaud said. In addition, power lines will be strung to remove the city's reliance on generators.

Tiefort City itself will expand and acquire new distinguishing features. The NTC plans to build an airstrip, buildings with helicopter-accessible rooftops and an overpass. The larger Tiefort City will have middle-class and slum neighborhoods. When the 11th ACR returns from Iraq, many of its soldiers will populate this larger "capital city," Michaud said.

While a brigade's area of responsibility in Iraq will be five times greater than what it faces at Fort Irwin, the base's 1,000 square miles is a "good place to get your feet wet."

The barren roads and simulated urban areas along the route are all considered "in play" during the training. The OPFOR can strike at any time, and probably will. The urban areas provide great cover for ambushes, and to hide red-team insurgents triggering IEDs.

"There's no mobility corridor you can go through without passing through one of these (urban areas)," said Michaud.

The NTC also intends to draw new players into the game, including non-governmental organizations and other government agencies. "The CIA looked pretty interested in coming out," Michaud said. "Special operations forces come out all the time."

OPFOR personnel said that SOF members were often surprised at how difficult the resistance could be at Tiefort City. Nearly all who spoke with National Defense agreed that those units which already had been to Iraq were their toughest hunters.

During training, everyone and everything dons advanced laser sensitive gear, including civilians, horses and vehicles. For anything organic, one beep signifies a near miss, while a steady tone--much like a flat-lining electrocardiogram--means death. Yellow orbs atop vehicles, called "whoopee lights," identify disabled vehicles.

The equipment is designed similarly, but is uniquely configured to bring more realism to the field. An M-16 cannot take out a Bradley, but the laser-rigged rocket propelled grenades can. The fake RPGs let out a whoosh of smoke and a plume of flame from the rear, but its user must lase a target for six seconds before registering a hit.

The Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System is undergoing upgrades as well, with mixed reviews. For starters, the newer version of MILES is not compatible with the old, causing logistical headaches on base. Even worse, the systems are dependent on an automated small-arms alignment fixture to bore-sight the weapons.

"Bring back the manualism," pleaded Sgt. Scott Alexander, the MILES noncommissioned officer at the training center, responsible for the arsenal of OPFOR laser weapons. He added that if one automatic alignment system breaks, about 60 weapons would be rendered useless. On the positive side, the range and accuracy of MILES II have impressed many of its regular users at Fort Irwin. Some claim M-16 hits at 900 meters.

The OPFOR teams receive tutoring in wreaking insurgent havoc, and update their tactics based on intra-military website reports and guidance from the observer/controllers. '[Anti-Iraqi forces" training occurs before the arrival of each rotation--keeping new OPFOR members up to speed on the operation, handling and calibrating the laser-firing weapons and making repairs to the city.

They also learn the art of laying explosives, setting up ambushes and performing sniper missions. The simulated IEDs work at the same ranges and with the same triggering mechanisms as real ones. The current rotation, facing the Pennsylvania Guard, is the 221st's sixth in Tiefort City. The soldiers' familiarity with the terrain adds to their advantage. "This is our town," Evans said.

Their area of responsibility includes key terrain around the city from which skirmishes, scouting and mortar attacks are staged. In the second week, during the free-play scenario, blue and red teams will contest that terrain. Scouts will spy on each other, teams will seek to plant IEDs along the roadsides, and blue teams will try to unravel the scenarios by collecting intelligence from OPFOR members designated as high value captures.

Training includes more than battlefield maneuvering. The delicacies of street diplomacy are an oft-overlooked part of the exercises at the NTC. This segment takes full advantage of the Iraqi-American contractors, who bring their familiarity with Iraqi culture and politics to the scenarios.

In the role of mayor of Tiefort City is an Iraqi-American from San Diego. (Names of Titan contractors are not publicly released for fear of reprisal--the mayor said he has extended family living in Iraq.) His job is to bring the battlefield diplomacy to the exercises, putting colonels and majors through difficult negotiations, as well as holding them to account for any people or equipment detained.

"I push them to the edge, try to get them in a corner," the mayor said. "It's a big game."

The mayor is a stage actor raised in Iraq and trained in California. His roles increased from street agitator to chief of police to mayor over succeeding rotations. It is an incentive program established by Titan; the more speaking parts, the greater the pay. The contractors can receive as much as $6,000 per rotation.

The mayor said the greatest utility of the program was making soldiers familiar with Iraqi crowds and customs, and teaching them how to deal with tense situations without adding to the instability. Body language, patience and self-control are skills that need to be instilled in frontline troops, he said.

"They should have had this program set up before we went to Iraq," he added.

Some of the wartime lessons learned at Fort Irwin are focused on the environment in which the Guardsmen will soon be immersed. For example, unit leaders detaining people or possessions have to fill out paperwork that exactly duplicates the forms they will use while in theater.

The mayor will make quite a fuss if that paperwork is not adequate. OPFOR insurgents could be released back into the mock cities if these details are botched.

Also reflected in the training is the role of media in warfare. Fake news crews participate in the scenarios. Hostile foreign networks and domestic cable news stations are reflected, and fake stories sometimes will be incorporated into a scenario, shown to the commanders in the FOB. Each soldier is also given a briefing on how to deal with embedded reporters and other media.

Combat medicine is another core competency practiced at Fort Irwin. For this, the training center is using an older piece of equipment, called SIMMAN, in new ways. By bringing the lifelike mannequin to the point of injury for frontline soldiers to work on, soldiers can practice first aid and medical evacuation skills. The soldiers train to provide first aid from the moment of injury until the casualty reaches a field hospital.

SIMMAN is known for its gruesome realism. The $30,000 mannequin bleeds profusely, registers a blood pressure and can sometimes be programmed to moan or speak, giving clues to its conditions. A doctor monitors the care given and operates the simulation via laptop to change the patient's condition. There are three SIMMAN systems at work at Fort Irwin, with plans to possibly add more. "The hard part is having the fully qualified doctor on hand," Michaud said.

OPFOR and contractors are required to follow scripts. The carefully crafted scenarios are spread across several cities, with contractors and Guardsmen playing the roles of family members, terrorist cell teammates, cooperative city officials and clandestine bombmakers. The scenarios are brigade level exercises, designed to test BLUFOR commanders' ability to fuse frontline intelligence with the appropriate action.

This, too, is a reflection of conditions on the ground in Iraq. The initiative for action is no longer coming from headquarters to the front line troops, as occurs in traditional fights, said Michaud. "There is more of a bottom-up intel push."

Specialist Nate Zolin is one of the Guardsmen playing an insurgent. By October he will be fighting them in Iraq, having volunteered for the mission. "I think playing both sides will help me over there," he said, loitering in the shade with a bomb detonator in his hand. "A lot of guys come through here and they don't look all around the ground for IEDs. I'll know what to look for."

In fact, later this year Zolin will go through Fort Irwin's training, this time from the other side. As he hid in the shade with a fellow OPFOR insurgent, waiting for an opportune moment to plant an IED, Zolin made a promise: "When I come back, I'll be looking for you."