Are virtual scenes like these being inserted into TV news as real events?
In This Afghanistan, Bombs Don't Kill
A Company Uses Hollywood-Style Sets and Special Effects to Help Soldiers Prepare for War; Real Amputees Play Roles
10 March 2010—SAN DIEGO—It was a sunny California afternoon, and an Afghan war scene raged on the expansive grounds here of a little-known company called Strategic Operations Inc.
A rocket-propelled grenade whistled out of a second-story window and smashed into the wall of an Afghan house, sending shrapnel flying. An Afghan police pickup truck exploded, kicking up a column of mottled smoke. Insurgents exchanged machine-gun fire with U.S. troops.
The battle seemed dangerous, but that was just an illusion. The mayhem was all for show, part of Strategic Operations' elaborate use of Hollywood-style special effects to replicate the look and feel of the war in Afghanistan to help train U.S. forces preparing to deploy there.
Business is booming for Strategic Operations, which has found an unusual way of profiting from the U.S. escalation of the Afghan war. Many of the reinforcements President Barack Obama is dispatching to Afghanistan are likely to spend time on a Strategic Operations set.
The Army and Marine Corps pay Strategic Operations to build and maintain mock Afghan cities—complete with mosques, restaurants and houses—at large military training facilities. The fake villages are then populated with real Afghans, who play the parts of insurgents, tribal leaders and Afghan soldiers. Real amputees play injured U.S. soldiers.
[Above: Armed Afghan role player Basim Al-Shamary prepares for a military exercise. —Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal]
"If you want to play cowboys and Indians, you hire an Indian to play an Indian," says Marine Staff Sgt. Chad Marquette, who works with Strategic Operations on Afghan-themed training exercises at a Marine base in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains.
The company goes to great lengths to make their fake battles feel authentic. A military contact recently emailed photos of the dead animals that litter the scenes of roadside bombings in Afghanistan. Strategic Operations' prop makers—who got their start working in TV and movie production—immediately began fashioning fake dog and donkey corpses.
Strategic Operations is based in a nondescript industrial park on the northern fringes of San Diego. The tan-colored mosques and houses in the mock Afghan village there look out over nearby office buildings belonging to large government contractors like Raytheon and General Dynamics.
During a recent visit, Stu Segall, the company's owner, walked into a cavernous storage room filled with foam kebabs, loaves of bread and other props that will be used in the mock Afghan villages. In the distance, a prop master sprayed red and white paint on a row of fake lamb carcasses.
"We had to use an actual goat head to get this right," Mr. Segall says, picking up the mold of a very real-looking animal head. "It smelled something awful."
Strategic Operations was the brainchild of Mr. Segall, a former movie and TV producer, and Kit Lavell, a decorated Navy pilot who once flew combat missions over Vietnam. Some low-budget television series are still filmed in Mr. Segall's San Diego studio complex, but he and Mr. Lavell devote almost all their time to Strategic Operations.
[Above: Crew members from the Strategic Operations center install decorations inside an Afghan home within a mock Afghan compound. —Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal]
They make for an odd couple. Mr. Segall worked on adult films in California's San Fernando Valley in the 1970s, rarely uses a computer, and curses regularly. Mr. Lavell is a soft-spoken man whose office is dotted with pictures of his children and grandchildren.
Mr. Lavell estimates that Strategic Operations has trained more than 250,000 soldiers and Marines in the past five years, and expects that number to increase sharply in 2010. The six-year-old company, which has 80 full-time employees, has been profitable for years, and Mr. Lavell says its revenues doubled in 2009 because of increased military demand for its services.
During a recent Army training exercise, amputee actor Heather Lewis was sitting in the back of a Humvee dressed as a female soldier when the vehicle went over a simulated car bomb. When a real soldier from the unit reached into the smoke-filled truck to pull her to safety, Ms. Lewis's prosthetic leg came off, sending fake blood spurting into the air.
"He just went 'uhh!' and dropped me," says Ms. Lewis, a Strategic Operations employee who lost her leg to cancer as a child.
The company operates like a movie production. It employs a core group of 80 full-time employees, as well as roughly 216 part-time ones. Depending on the project, it can quickly hire hundreds of other actors, prop makers and explosive technicians on a contract basis. In August 2007, for instance, it sent 650 part-time workers—including 400 actors—to an Iraq-themed training exercise at a nearby military airfield.
[Above: Scenic painter Marcus Silva works on a mock Afghan compound at Strategic Operations Inc. in San Diego on March 5. —Michal Czerwonka for The Wall Street Journal]
When they aren't pretending to be at war, many of the company's actors drive taxi cabs and work at restaurants. Iraq-born Imad al-Jabi wore a white dishdasha and played the role of an insurgent during a recent Iraq simulation at Strategic Operations' San Diego headquarters. "The rest of the time I work in a pizza shop," he says with a shrug.
After more than five years of fake war, the company's Hollywood-trained make-up artists are capable of recreating a staggering number of grisly battlefield wounds, from burns to pieces of shrapnel that appear to jut out from actors' eyeballs.
"After a while, you start to feel like you've been through medical school," says Carol Helm, who runs Strategic Operations' eight-person make-up department.
The company devotes just as much time to its fake weapons, like the rocket-propelled grenades that appear to fly right at their targets.
In reality, the grenades are souped-up fireworks that travel safely along invisible wires. The "shrapnel" that flies through the air after one of the grenades detonates is Peruvian cork, which disintegrates on contact with human flesh or a hard surface.
When the simulations go off as planned, soldiers and Marines get to experience realistic re-creations of life in the war zones.
During a "Mountain Warrior" training exercise last fall at the Marines Mountain Warfare Training Center near Lake Tahoe, Afghan immigrant actor Kajalilullah Gul played a village elder while his colleage Zabiullah Zaheer played the mullah of a friendly village.
Mr. Gul, a former translator for the U.S. army in Afghanistan, moved to California in 2008 and has worked as a role-player ever since for a Strategic subcontractor, Tatitlek Support Services Inc. He gets paid roughly $17 an hour, plus benefits.
Mr. Zaheer's script said to remain friendly unless the Marines did something culturally insensitive, like questioning one of the female Afghans without the permission of their fake husbands or fathers.
Mr. Lavell, the former Navy pilot, says he is never bothered when Marines or soldiers mess up during one of the company's war simulations.
"Its better that they make the mistakes with us before they go off into the real world," he says. "The whole point is to learn, and that's better done here than there."
Write to Yochi J. Dreazen at yochi.dreazen@wsj.com and Jim Carlton at jim.carlton@wsj.co
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