Grandma used to say that there's a silver lining inside every dark cloud and maybe she was right. This month, Harper's magazine has found a big, heartwarming silver lining inside that gloomy old Global War on Terrorism. Here it is:
Our government has hired a bunch of poor souls who lost their arms and legs in accidents and has rigged them up with bags of fake blood so they can play wounded civilians in war games down at Fort Polk, La.
Not only that but Cubic, the defense contractor that produces these games, has also hired 250 Arabic-speaking immigrants at $220 a day as "Cultural Role Players" in the war games. They've also hired hundreds of local Louisianans to play random Arab civilians, plus "dozens of scriptwriters" to come up with realistic scenarios for the war games.
"The best way to describe what we're doing here," says one of the Army intelligence officers who plan the games, "is that we're producing a very complex movie with a huge number of plotlines and a very high budget."