(Photo: Training scenarios are monitored from a control room where video cameras hidden in turrets and window bays record the Marines’ reactions. Alison St John/KPBS )
The Marine Corp has opened a new $2 million training facility on Camp Pendleton. It’s designed to help marines heading to Iraq make instant life and death decisions. They often have only milliseconds to consider the rules of engagement before they shoot. KPBS reporter Alison St John has more.
Two Camp Pendleton based Marines will face court martial later this month for their role in the killing of 24 Iraqi civilians, including women and children, in Haditha in 2005.
The Marine Corp’s Commanding General at the time, James Matthis, suggested better training to help prevent a repeat.
In the hills at the north end of Camp Pendleton an unexpected sound echoes around an old tomato packing warehouse, now known as the Infantry Immersion Training Center.
The inside of the building has been transformed into an Iraqi village: a maze of adobe courtyards, complete with washing on the line, dusty bushes and rusty propane tanks.
A squad of Marines makes its way gingerly between the high walls and dark doorways. Robed figures appear and disappear around blind corners.
An explosive device sets off a flurry of activity and the marines kick open doors and go house to house, searching for insurgents. In one room, a video image projected on the walls simulates an Iraqi woman and a figure with a gun who turns to shoot..
Buscemi: So the thing that they are practicing in there is making instantaneously the correct moral, ethical and legal and tactical decision,
Tom Buscemi is the Director of the Battle Simulation Center
Buscemi: If they see a situation with a woman, child and an insurgent, what do they do? Take a shot, back away, take it another day, certainly not harm all three.
The training scenarios are monitored from a control room where video cameras hidden in turrets and window bays record the Marines’ reactions.
Buscemi says the facility is using the kind of sophisticated techniques used in aviation simulation for fighter pilots.
Buscemi: The Infantry does 89 percent of the dying and not nearly that much money is spent on infantry simulation. So this is the first attempt at creating what we’re calling mixed media pyrotechnics, light role players and virtual targets.
The Iraqi village looks like a Hollywood set. In a windowless room furnished with oriental rugs and low couches piled with cushions, an Iraqi actor role plays a friendly sheik. He negotiates with the Marine squad leader through a translator.
Sheik Translator: He said he got information they cross the border to our town and he knows one of the leaders in the town here, and he needs your help to put him down. He knows the house.
Marine: That’s exactly why we’re here sir. If we can get that information we will go there.
Translator: He says if you have a map, he would like to show you the house on the map.
The Marines discover first hand how difficult it is to find the right house even if shown on a map. To an untrained eye all the adobe door ways look the same. The men make their way through the maze of courtyards, struggling to determine whether the robed figures they meet are innocent civilians or armed insurgents.
It turns out it’s only too easy to react to the wrong people in the chaos and confusion of the darkened rooms, narrow passageways and seemingly endless maze of adjoining courtyards.
The training simulation even recreates a certain smell, reminiscent of cow dung and burning fuel oil. Buscemi says it’s all designed to prepare a marine for those crucial moments when he must decide to kill or hold his fire.
Buscemi: So that his first real fire fight is no different than his last simulation. That when the Marine rifleman gets into the combat situation, he’s seen, he’s heard, he’s smelled, he’s less likely to be emotionally disturbed or not follow procedures, and do the correct thing.
The Marines hope the $2.5 million investment in this inconspicuous looking warehouse on Camp Pendleton will help save lives, both American and Iraqi.
Alison St John, KPBS News.
