Getting ready for the real Iraq

When he drove to work that morning, Bassam Kalasho informed the newly arrived Army colonel, he found the road full of American checkpoints and his office surrounded by American soldiers.

“It looks like you took over,’’ he said, his voice growing louder with every word.

Sometimes he gets so worked up, he said later, he forgets that his “office’’ is on an Army base in California and that he is only pretending to be an Iraqi provincial governor.

At the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, in the vastness of the Mojave Desert, fiction has a way of blurring into reality. When the Muslim call to prayer sounds across the sandy wilderness, villages fill with sights and sounds of distant lands. Robed men congregate in coffee shops. Vendors weave through narrow alleys, hawking fruit, flowers, and cups of sugary tea. And helicopters streak across a pale sky.

This is one of the last stops for US military brigades headed to Iraq. During two weeks of intensive role-playing, they practice dealing with bomb blasts, gunfights, angry demonstrations, corrupt officials, and sectarian rifts. All of them fake.

The soldiers who run the huge Hollywood-style production compare it to a reality TV show or a multimillion-dollar game of laser tag. But for about 250 Iraqi immigrants, hired by the Army to play elected officials, security officers, and traditional leaders, it is something more: a piece of home.

Many of them fill the center’s showcase village: Medina Wasl - Arabic for Junction City.

“I’ve been doing this so long, I’m a Medina Wasl citizen now,’’ Kalasho, 54, said with a throaty chuckle.

He has a wife and son in San Diego, but for two weeks of most months, he lives in one of the converted shipping containers that make up Medina Wasl’s homes and businesses. The main actors are given pages of information to learn about their characters, including their religious, tribal, and political affiliations. Many seem to embrace their roles as extensions of themselves.

The work pays between $2,000 and $5,000 per two-week rotation, more than most jobs immigrants can find. But Kalasho, now a US citizen, said he has other motivation.

“I took the job not just because I am an American and I want to do something for my country but because I want to help Iraq too,’’ he said. The troops “come here, they make all their mistakes here, and they don’t make them there.’’

Kalasho said he did not expect that he too would learn from the experience. Once, he said, he would have defended Saddam Hussein for protecting Iraq’s minority Christians. Meeting Shi’ites and ethnic Kurds at Fort Irwin who had experienced Hussein’s brutality changed his opinion.

For two decades before US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003, Fort Irwin’s wide-open spaces were used to stage major tank battles, preparing troops for conventional warfare. But in Iraq, US troops found themselves fighting insurgents who struck stealthily, then melted back into the population. And US troops, unfamiliar with local languages and culture, alienated Iraqi communities.

One of the Army’s solutions was to re-create a 1,000-square-kilometer stretch of Iraq at Fort Irwin. Members of the 11th Armored Cavalry - which plays the “opposing force’’ in the training exercises - traded in their Soviet-style uniforms for tunics and head scarves, stopped shaving, and started studying bomb-making techniques.