By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 13, 2005; Page C01

FORT SILL, Okla.

Capt. James Sink is leading a group of 100 soldiers. His unit has just finished combat operations and finds itself in charge of a town.

What should he do?

"Move carefully, set up outside of town for a day, get the lay of the land" is one choice. "Roll through heavy to signal that you're in charge" is another.

Sink doesn't hesitate. "Roll through heavy. Take control. Get ahead," says the 27-year-old officer. He's sure of this.

Capt. Neal Fisher isn't. "There's a downside to that," counters Fisher, 33. "They're moving straight into a new town pretty quick. How are your soldiers reacting?"

This is Room 23. Here in the basement of Snow Hall, in the wintry-brown hills of Lawton, 90 miles southwest of Oklahoma City, nine captains are in a heated discussion. Some are off to Iraq in a few months. Part of their preparation is this 19-week captain's career course. For three hours on a recent Monday morning, they grapple with real-life scenarios from Iraq, with the help of a computer program called Gator Six.

Gator Six is more dazzling than a PowerPoint presentation, yet not quite a video game.

It's a collection of 260 video clips on two CDs that, in essence, serve as an interactive film of the Iraq war. It represents a small shift in how the military girds its leaders. It's divided into three phases: pre-deployment (How do you say goodbye to your spouse?); rolling into combat (Do you leave a broken-down ammo truck on the side of the road?); and transition to a post-conflict environment (Do you involve the local interpreter in your planning?).

There are different possible outcomes for most of the scenarios: Take this road instead of that one, for example, and you'll lose precious time.

For today's technologically savvy U.S. captain -- versed in video games, instant messaging, e-mail -- Gator Six is an ideal "sim," military-speak for simulation.

Sims are a part of life now. Everybody's playing some kind of simulated reality, from popular culture to mapping political outcomes to still dreaming of virtual sex. Think of the potential pilots training with flight simulators. Think of the 11-year-old fifth-grader who spends her entire weekend playing The Sims online.

Gator Six was created with captains -- the Army's middle managers -- in mind. Still, officials at Fort Sill, the Army's field artillery center, say the sim is being shown up and down the chain: from majors to second lieutenants.

The military has been using sims since before World War II, with some of the early flight simulations pioneered in the 1930s. Right up to the post-Cold War era, the Air Force and the Navy were sim geeks. Troops needed to be trained in operating equipment, and sims were mostly vehicle-centric -- the big tanks, the big helicopters, the big submarines.

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Then came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Today's soldiers still need to operate the Bradleys and Humvees, but they also need to maintain stability, restore infrastructure, promote the merits of democracy after elections. To a surprising degree, military officials say, complex decisions are falling on low-level officers. As Iraq has brutally shown, fighting a war on the ground also means struggling to win the peace. It's easy to teach soldiers how to fire a weapon, these officials say, but how do you teach them to win the confidence of a neighborhood?

This is a sim of judgment calls. There is no right or wrong answer. There's only a particular situation -- as a captain, what will you do about it?

Gator Six was designed with the help of 20 veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Dave Henderson, deputy director of the Directorate of Training and Doctrine at Fort Sill, commissioned a Potomac company, Will Interactive, to develop it. Henderson is regarded as the sim god of the base. "Gator Six teaches captains not what to think but how to think," he says. "That's a critical distinction."

With a price tag of about $750,000, Gator Six offers a complex look at the life of the fictional Capt. Todd Martin -- who in real life is Tim Olson, a Washington actor and massage therapist.

The captains, already fans of Madden NFL, quickly warmed to the sim. "I like the thought process that went into it. The reality is, every decision you make has an impact in the final outcome," Fisher says during the class's 15-minute break.

Sink agrees. "The training that we're used to hasn't prepared us for the situations that are on Gator Six."

The two captains are still in disagreement about which strategy is better: Roll through heavy? Or move in carefully?

Fisher maintains his stance to "move into town carefully." But the consequence of that, the sim captain discovers, is that you appear defensive.

Sink, for his part, sticks to "rolling through heavy," with the convoy tightly pushing through town. But the risks with that, the sim captain finds out, are linked to readiness -- do you know what you're "rolling" into?

Two hours later, over a lunch of hamburgers and french fries, Maj. Rob Marshall, senior instructor of the course, says, "Gator Six is focused on the cerebral, internal side of being a captain." Because these officers are given time to discuss each decision, "it gives us the chance to put these guys into scenarios where they do some introspection and figure out, okay, how do I make a good decision?"

Will Interactive's Jeff Hall worked on Gator Six as its director and lead writer -- and set designer. The kitchen of his Rockville home was used in a few scenes dealing with a soldier's family life. Hall worked with John Williamson, a Pentagon consultant who served in the Army for 22 years.

"People look at this conflict in Iraq and think the results will be driven by big people in big places making big decisions," says Hall, who spent hours interviewing the 20 war veterans. "But, actually, where the individual Iraqi places his or her allegiance largely depends on that 19-year-old soldier walking down the street with an assault rifle."

What the Pentagon actually spends on sims is hard to nail down -- estimates range from $4 billion to $6 billion. The market research firm Frost & Sullivan says the military will spend upward of $4.97 billion on simulation and training equipment this year.

The military, says Paul W. Mayberry, deputy undersecretary of defense for readiness, is in a "transition mode."

"These days," he says, "young captains are having to transition from young fighters to young diplomats in a blink of an eye."

What were the streets of Baghdad like? It's an old question for Capt. Brian Anderson, who has a ready answer.

"Picture the Beltway, on Friday at about 4:30 p.m., driving on a highway, with the traffic. Picture that. Except now, have traffic going in both directions in the same lanes, and give everybody guns and grenades. That's what it was like trying to navigate through that city," says Anderson, who stands 5-foot-8 but talks like he's 6-foot-5. It's called presence. He's sitting in his living room in Edmond, Okla., about 90 minutes north of Fort Sill, his 32-inch TV on mute. It's on the Military Channel, which is showing something about a unit of Marines on training.

"Every single person around you may or may not be a threat, and it would just absolutely wear on you, and one of the things about being a captain is you don't just worry about yourself, you worry about everybody else. There were days when I was like, hey, if I get hit, that's fine, just don't let something happen to one of my soldiers."

From March to September 2003, Anderson led a unit of 87 soldiers during the initial march from Kuwait to Baghdad. He was part of the 2nd Battalion, 18th Field Artillery Battery. He actually is Gator Six -- a radio term identifying him as the leader of the Gator battery. Gator Six's experiences informed Gator Six the sim.

"These are the kind of scenarios that you won't find in a manual," says Anderson, 33. He teaches at the Department of Military Science at the University of Central Oklahoma, a three-minute drive from home. He's got two daughters -- Lauren is 6, Brooke is 2. His wife, Cindy, is putting the girls to bed.

"The whole purpose of this sim is to get captains to think something other than tactics. We could do our tactical missions in our sleep -- how to set up a perimeter, how to fire artillery, how to shoot rifles. It's all the other stuff that they don't teach you."

For a few months, Anderson worked closely with Will Interactive's Hall in Potomac -- free of charge. "What can I say?" he explains. "I just believe in it."

Filming Gator Six took four weeks, with most of the scenes shot at Fort Sill, starring actors from the Washington area. Anderson was there for most of it. Iraq hasn't left him and, as such, he hasn't left Iraq. He keeps in touch with at least 10 of his soldiers -- earlier this month he flew to Georgia to be a groomsman in the wedding of one of his gunners.

He recounts one of the Gator Six scenarios taken from his own experiences in Iraq: Two of your mechanics wear XXXL chemical suits and all you have are XXL suits. Do you deploy your two XXXL guys with XXL suits?

"During that time, we thought we were dealing with chemical attacks," says Anderson. His boss, the battalion commander, ordered the mechanics to be deployed. The mechanics themselves wanted to go.

"I was the one losing sleep over it," Anderson says -- especially because the two are married with children.

He recounts two other scenes in Gator Six: In one, the fictional captain bends down and puts a handkerchief on the face of one of his dead soldiers. In another scene, the casualties are much worse, and the captain stands in front of a row of dead soldiers.

"I wanted the captains to see that if they don't do things right, then they might have to walk the line and see their dead soldiers there. They're the ones who have to explain to the soldier's family what happened. They're the ones who have to live with it," says Anderson, who enlisted in the Army at 18 and turned 19 at boot camp -- at Fort Sill. "I also wanted the captains to see that even if you do everything right, even if you plan and rehearse, soldiers can still die."

Toward the end of the morning class, this scenario is played out:

How do you handle the local Iraqi newspaper printing a story that says you ran over a child when you "in fact came across an injured girl and took her to the hospital?"

Do you shut the paper down? Do you threaten the newspaper editor? Do you offer the editor access? These are the three choices given.

Neal Fisher leans back in his chair, takes a sip from his water bottle, plays the scenario in his head. Here, in class, he has about 15 minutes to think it through -- out there, on the ground, 15 minutes might be five minutes too long.

Fisher, who resembles a compact version of comedic actor David Alan Grier, comes from a military family: Mom was a clerk in the Army Reserve, Dad was a Marine corporal. He was born in Queens, lived in the River Terrace neighborhood of Northeast Washington in his teens, graduated from Eastern Senior High School in 1988. He enlisted in 1999 "to make extra money."

Finally, Fisher says, "Offer the editor access." Later, when the class is over, he explains. "How can you preach of freedom in general and specifically limit freedom of the press?"

Like Anderson, Fisher is a gamer. Both are into military-themed games. Anderson plays Call of Duty on his PlayStation 2; Fisher plays Command & Conquer on his PC. ("My wife, Dana," Fisher says, "usually beats me on Madden NFL.")

"I don't think anybody is looking at Gator Six as a set of directions. It's not a playbook. It's more of a tool that helps you think about certain situations that you don't necessarily think about prior to getting into those situations," Fisher says. "You have to understand that we're artillery men and that we're being asked to do a lot of jobs that are not traditionally our jobs. It's not just strict artillery work.

"We're fighting a different kind of war," says the father of two boys, Colin, 4, and Jared, 2.

Fisher is set to be deployed to Iraq by the end of August.