By Gidget Fuentes - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Aug 14, 2010
Marines at training facilities across the Corps will soon know the sights, smells and sounds of Afghanistan without leaving the U.S.
Strategic Operations Inc., a San Diego-based Hollywood production company, has been hired to upgrade ranges and consult on the construction of new ones, in an effort to make training more realistic and better acclimate Marines to environments they will encounter once deployed.
The Infantry Immersion Trainer at Camp Pendleton, Calif., which is expanding with the sizable addition of a large village, will in August get the first installation of the “atmospheric” enhancements, said Kit Lavell, Strategic Operations’ executive vice president and a former Marine Corps pilot who flew combat missions in Vietnam.
With atmospheric upgrades, a training facility is decorated with furnishings, carpets, realistic-looking foods, dishes and clothing of the real environment, “anything you can imagine being inside an Afghan village,” Lavell said. A village market smells of food and smoke. Village streets echo with the ambient sounds of conversations and prayers.
While specific dates and locations for upgrades were not provided, the three-year contract will include improvements aboard Camp Lejeune, N.C.; Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va.; The Mountain Warfare Training Center, Calif.; Marine Corps Bases Japan; and Marine Corps Base Hawaii.
Existing training ranges built to resemble villages, with concrete buildings or shipping containers, will get a detailed makeover, using what Hollywood producer and Strategic Operations president Stu Segall refers to as “set decorating.”
“It benefits the Marines because we totally immerse them in the environment, and it produces a stress inoculation effect … that prepares the war fighter to experience the conditions of the battlefield,” Lavell said. “Marines are going to experience the realism of the environment, much more so than in the past.”
The rise in realistic training to provide so-called “stress inoculation” is showing promise in efforts to ease the effects of combat and build resiliency, according to an ongoing study by the Naval Health Research Center.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and as the military prepared to invade Iraq, Segall turned part of his Hollywood studio lot, near Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, into a training facility for law enforcement agencies and military. The studio became popular with Pendleton units preparing to deploy to Iraq.
In the years since, Segall and his Strategic Operations has taken its “hyper-realistic” training away from the 20-acre studio lot to California military bases, including Camp Pendleton, Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms and the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin, and east to training bases including Fort Pickett, Va., and Fort Polk, La.
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