Weapons of mass distraction

Capt. Amerine is a Green Beret with Fifth Special Forces Group. And when Defense Secretary Rumsfeld demanded summary "boots on the ground," two of the first were Amerine's. Scarcely a month after 9/11, his A-Team detachment was airdropped deep within Taliban-controlled territory, to link up with then-tribal leader Hamid Karzai and his lightly armed band of highly irregulars. Armed with an improvised arsenal of satellite phones, Karzai's charisma and the best air support after the wrath of God, Amerine's detachment and Karzai's freedom fighters rode in motley caravan from village to village, fomenting rebellion, gathering a makeshift militia, until they reached and took the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. (A friendly fire incident blew out Amerine's left ear and battered his leg with shrapnel, removing him from action days before Karzai marched into the city.)

Kandahar's fall was a turning point in the conflict, but Amerine names as his proudest moment an earlier engagement, when he and his men deployed on a ridgeline above the small town of Tarin Kot. Kandahar's leaders had sent 500 heavily armed Taliban and al-Qaida fighters rumbling to the town in 80 vehicles, with orders to slaughter its civilians, sparing neither woman nor child (retribution for driving out their Islamist masters, days earlier). From the height of the ridgeline, Amerine and his men turned a tripod-mounted laser onto the convoy, to guide in the F-18's that were arcing into position, high above. (Amerine's unit was eventually forced to return to town, and continued directing the airstrike from there -- even as village children laughed and scampered at their feet.) The Taliban murder party was still barreling through a narrow valley, closing on Tarin Kot, when the laser-led bombs found them. And discounting the battered survivors who fled back to Kandahar, killed them all. The town was secure.

At the moment, though, Amerine is still trying to secure a copy of Battlefied 1942, a new tactical shooter set in various World War II theaters. "Babbages messed up and gave away the copy that I pre-ordered," he says, "but I should be picking that up I think tomorrow." He speaks with an easy, placid drawl that belies the ferocity of his chosen profession -- but seems more reflective of a childhood spent on Oahu. Recovering from his wartime injuries, he's now earning a master's, in preparation for lectureship duties at West Point.

When he first got a chance to play America's Army, "I was really curious what the Army was going to come up with," says Amerine. "Knowing Col. Wardynski and the people who were working on the game, I had high hopes that it would be something pretty hot." A longtime gamer who counts Command and Conquer and Rainbow Six among his favorites, Amerine was not disappointed. It was so realistic that for the first time, he says, "I was actually looking at it more as a soldier than even a gamer -- but it happened to be good in both ways."

And what's impressed him, playing America's Army, is how many competitors he's fought who come to the game without his experience base, but learn usable tactics on the fly: "You could tell in some cases you have significantly younger people, probably junior high or so ... they'd be saying things back and forth that indicated to me that this was sort of an extension of guys who grew up on Rainbow Six and other first-person shooters ... the techniques they would use just by figuring it out would end up being very similar to what we would do in real life." He found himself up against kids staggering their formations, using smoke to cover their approach, closing on the enemy with fire and maneuver, individual movement techniques (IMT) -- in short, acquiring through gameplay knowledge that was once available only through military training.

At one point during his tour in Afghanistan, Amerine was on a ridge, outside a town where Taliban gunmen had pinned down Karzai's men with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

"So I got on up there and started shooting to try and get my guerrillas into the fight ... [T]he Taliban were all shooting AK-47s and RPGs, and with my M4 and an ACOG, I was able to outshoot the Taliban. Especially at 300 meters, they weren't very good shots. The RPG was getting close," Amerine deadpans, "but I got him before he could get me."

Emboldened, the freedom fighters returned to the fray, and helped Amerine drive the Taliban from the village. But during the firefight, Capt. Amerine had an odd thought. "It was kind of funny, because it was sort of like, Well, this is just like what I did on my computer, I guess." Having reenacted similar scenarios so many times, he found these games had helped prepare him for that moment, when he came up firing. "It definitely made it easier ... in a lot of ways it was similar to what you would see if you were playing a sniper in the original Delta Force, for example."

And apart from his concern for the safety of Karzai and the soldiers, Amerine describes the experience as, well, fun. "It was exhilarating, the actual going through it, bullets whizzing over your head, bombs blowing up. But as far as taking human life, that's a horrible aspect of the job -- but you know, they were trying to do the same thing to us, and we got them first."

And about here is where the similarities end. "When I was in a shootout with the Taliban, it occurred to me that I had to stick my head up to shoot at them and I might very well catch a bullet between my eyes ... and I was aware of it, but I knew what I had to do. That's not something you can re-create in a computer game, the fact that your life is in danger. And also, when you actually have to see the results of what you did, when you go over and you see the enemies that've fallen by your hand, that's something else you can't re-create."

But even here, developers are seeking to convey, if not the horror, the strategic implications of violence. With America's military dominance never in doubt, victory now depends not just on winning the battle, but on preventing as much as possible the friendly fire and civilian casualties that would turn domestic and world opinion against the action. So in "America's Army," the server keeps tabs on your fealty to the military's strict rules of engagement (ROE) -- crossing them too often gets you removed from the game, thrown into a virtual depiction of Fort Leavenworth prison. (Multiplayer games are usually anarchic, free-fire zones.)

And in the single-player game of Black Hawk Down, says NovaLogic's Wes Eckhart, "In most cases, killing civilians or noncombatants will result in the player losing the mission and being forced to replay it." Not only that, many of the game's missions emphasize the U.S. effort to protect the United Nations' relief effort to the warlord-enforced famine that was devastating Somalia.

This overall shift of focus is a positive development for the genre, says MIT's Henry Jenkins. "It seems to me that they may be making some interesting steps toward achieving the 'meaningful violence' I have been advocating," he says, "heightening the emphasis on choice and consequence."

For Amerine, it's an essential element to "America's Army" working as an educational tool for gamers who'd consider a place in the military: "On the one hand, we're becoming extremely technologically advanced; nobody can be computer illiterate in the Army anymore," he says. "The other aspect to it, though, the human aspect, that's the part that we also need to make sure we never lose sight of, because we can never forget our humanity. We still need to remember we're out there using very lethal weapons; often we're in close proximity to noncombatants, to civilians, and [we must] protect their lives as well as we can while we're attempting to engage the enemy."

Fortunately, Amerine suspects that "America's Army" gamers who do end up in the recruitment office will have a reservoir of experience to draw from. "I don't think that they'll really quite appreciate a lot of the lessons until they do it for real, and then they can kind of make the mental leap to put [the gameplay and real-world experience] together."

For his own part, as he heals and continues his education, his only regret is that he's not part of the latest deployment. "All my friends, all my soldiers, they could be invading Iraq soon, and I'm going to college -- that's kinda hard to take ... I'd want to be out there sharing the risk with everybody rather than ... watching it on the news."

When asked about Hamid Karzai's recent narrow escape from an assassination attempt, he speaks of his friend the president of Afghanistan as of a fellow soldier. "He's an incredibly brave man who's truly a patriot for his country. He knew from the beginning that there'd be people trying to assassinate him ... So this really doesn't change anything -- he's still going to work hard to bring stability to his country, and he'll just keep dodging the bullets as he tries to do so."

He might soon act as an advisor to future expansions of "America's Army," so I ask him what kind of missions he'd imagine, if the designers were to implement, say, laser-guided airstrikes.

"You can lase a target from several kilometers away," he says. "So one thing might be you have an observation post, you have a laser setup, where you're trying to lase the enemy, and you're trying to protect your position as enemy forces are coming right up on you."

It occurs to me that such a mission would resemble what Amerine did in his finest hour, when he turned a beam of light on the would-be butchers of women and children, and brought down the thunder.

When Sayyid Qutb came to America, he reportedly admired the country's scientific and technological achievements, but seethed with contempt for its obsession with "entertainment, or what they call in their language, 'fun.'" But perhaps Western culture is poised for the ultimate in ironic revenge -- America's Army heralds the day when computer gaming's synthesis of entertainment and technology will become the greatest threat to the terrorist menace, as it continues its struggle to carry out the jihad of Qutb and bin Laden's fevered longings.

"We're going to continue to be out hunting for terrorists," Amerine promises me, "and doing what we can to support the Arab world." When I thank him for what he did in Afghanistan -- helping uproot the al-Qaida network, liberating a brutalized people, stuff like that -- Amerine answers cheerily, "I really had fun doing it."

In his early 30s, Amerine is among the first generation of soldiers to grow up with computer games. It's not hard to have confidence in the soldiers who'll come after him, kids in their early teens who are already giving him a hard fight, online. You can see them in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all -- heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture, defended on all fronts by the best of the digital generation.

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