End Zone

"What's your name, young man?"

"Robert Reynolds," I said, slipping into my southern accent.

29

One night the major and I played a crude form of war game in his motel room. He sat facing me, about four feet away, a small table between us. On the table were pencils, pads, maps, and a chart that I was having a great deal of trouble trying to read upside down. The major said that one of the big problems with war games, whether they were being played at the Pentagon, at NORAD or Fort Belvoir, at a university or think tank, was the obvious awareness on the part of all participants that this wasn't the real thing. (What we were playing, he added, was barely the simulated thing; we had no computer, intelligence reports, projection screens, and only a few numerical estimates of troop units, missile inventories, production capacities.) The gaming environment, as he called it, could never elicit the kind of emotions generated in times of actual stress; therefore gaming was probably just a secondrate guide (hopefully not too misleading) to what might be expected from governments when the armies were poised and lithe missiles were rising from their silos. As I sat there, listening, I wondered why we were meeting in a motel. It seemed to me that the major's house should have been ready for occupancy by this time and that his family should have joined him. However, it did not seem appropriate to comment.

He looked through the material in front of him, then glanced around the room before spotting what he wanted, a world atlas. It was on the bed, about eight feet away. He asked me to get it for him.

"Now this scenario is premised on futuribles," he said. "The basic situation as I've set it up for us is definitely in the area of what we know to be projected crisis situations. It could happen. Tensions. Possible accidents. Unrelated hostilities. Or maybe not so unrelated. Precedents: one act of aggression tending to legalize another. Then finally a showdown between two major powers. That's the basic situation, the starting point or premise as I'll conceptualize it for you in a minute. What happens after that is up to us. Now, before I forget, the two major powers are just who you might expect them to be except I've changed their names slightly, just to make them a little less appealing or distasteful to our emotions, as the case may be. COMRUS is one and AMAC is the other. It's not supposed to fool anybody and it just gives you a glimpse of what we might be able to do in the future in terms of totally our own situations, not depending on existing bodies or preconceptions. So it's just to neutralize our emotions a little bit. In fact I haven't bothered to change much else, just a designation here and there since I'm just begi

The major outlined the crisis.

It begins in the Sea of Japan. An AMAC destroyer of the Seventh Fleet, on maneuvers, is strafed by two NORKOR MIGs. Damage is light; there are no casualties. Two days later a Polaris submarine in the East Siberian Sea is reported missing. In Germany three highranking agents defect to the West; unmarked planes drop leaflets over East Berlin, over Prague, over Budapest. There are a dozen explosions of suspicious origin at military bases throughout Spain and Turkey. An unma

The major went through this scenario very slowly. He referred to his maps at least ten times, showing me the precise locations of certain countries, cities, military bases. Often he paused during these map readings as if waiting for me to comment, perhaps on the subtle geographic patterns he had devised for the various conflicts. I had trouble finding any particular pattern but I could tell quite easily how much tune and work he had put into the project. It seemed almost sad. I was hardly a competent enemy. I had no experience in this sort of thing. I had been plagued by joyous visions of apocalypse but I was not at all familiar with the professional manipulations, both diplomatic and military, which might normally precede any kind of largescale destruction. All I could do was try to react intelligently, if that word can be used, to whatever the major did with his divisions, his air force, his warships, his missiles. I wasn't feeling very involved. In fact I considered the scenario somewhat boring despite all the frenzy and tension. At this point the major set down the rules for the second and final part of the game, the part in which I would participate, and he also invited me to share an elaborate chart he had prepared, using information taken from a study by some military research institute. Before we started, he said he was working on a totally simulated world situation-seven major nations of his own making, seventeen major cities, an unspecified (secret) number of military installations, fairly complete demographic, economic, social, religious, racial and meteorological characteristics for each nation. He would have it ready for us in two or three weeks; it would be a much more pure form of gaming than the one we were using now.

At length we began. It took only twelve major steps or moves to complete the game and yet we were at it for more than three hours. It was the strangest thing I had ever taken part in. There were insights, moves, minor revelations that we savored together. Silences between moves were extremely grave. Talk was brief and pointed. Small personal victories (of tactics, of imagination) were genuinely satisfying. Mythic images raged in my mind.