FORT DIX, N.J. – With faux insurgents, fake bombs, real concrete barriers and a little city of tents, training to prepare reservists and National Guard members for Iraq is becoming more realistic.
Over the past few months, one 40-acre section of Fort Dix has been transformed into “Forward Operating Base,” a camp with new gravel roads and 100 tents that replicates an Army base in Iraq.
Similar training bases are going up at installations across the country.
On Thursday, the Army offered civilian base employees and the media a relatively rare glimpse at how the Army trains soldiers to fight in an Iraq where insurgent fighting continues to add to the American death toll.
Fort Dix has trained more mobilizing part-time soldiers than any other base since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Before the camp was built, soldiers training at Dix stayed in barracks and rode uneventfully on buses to each day’s drill.
Now, the drills, like the war, are nonstop.
Simulated mortar fire interrupts moments that are quiet aside from the loud drone of electrical generators. The convoys to drill sessions are sometimes broken up by roadside ambushes.
When soldiers sleep, it’s in tents packed with a score of their colleagues. Meals for the more than 1,300 soldiers staying at the base are taken in a small dining tent without chairs.
Within the next six months, officials plan to have showers, pool tables and facilities to repair military vehicles on the base – all features of bases in Iraq.
Late Thursday morning, a contractor acting the part of an Iraqi insurgent hurled a box containing a firecracker into a checkpoint manned by members of the Virginia National Guard.
In a hectic and smoky battlefield scene, one soldier acted out having a leg struck with shrapnel and a pretend insurgent was “shot” in the chest when a soldier fired a blank at him.
Medics had to sort out the situation quickly and get the “injured” onto stretchers while other soldiers – whose sleeplessness was no act – stood guard.
The medics treated the faux Iraqi with the chest wound before the GI with a leg wound.
The drills are made more realistic by Iraqi Americans hired to play Iraqi civilians. In Thursday’s drill, Munther Alftawy, who came to the United States 14 years ago and now is a U.S. citizen, was playing an agitated sheik.
Reserve and Guard units called to active duty go from their regular lives to overseas battlefields in less than two months.
Col. Dave Anderson, commander of the 5th Brigade of the Edison-based 78th Division of the Army Reserve, which runs the forward operation base on Fort Dix, said the new compound saves precious training time and speeds up the soldiers’ military mentality.
Before the base was established, soldiers might spend a few nights at a time at a camp. Now, they’re staying at the camp for 18 to 32 days before they board planes headed to Iraq.
“The earlier we get them thinking they are involved in a deployment mode, the better their training is going to be,” Anderson said.
Capt. Walter Patrick, of Matoaca, Va., and a commander of the Virginia unit that was involved in the simulated bombing, said his unit expects to go to Iraq just after the New Year.
The 22 days and 23 nights of role-playing, replete with Arabic language speakers, will give the men of his unit valuable experience in how rules of engagement work in the military police-type duties they’ll be performing overseas, he said.
“If somebody comes up to a checkpoint, jumps out of the vehicle and runs away, that doesn’t necessarily mean you get to shoot them,” Patrick said.
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