Photo Gallery VICE offers bridge between classroom and real world
Capt. Jesse Beaudin orders up trouble like most people order lunch — “I want downtown Ramadi, a side street … and an IED in a garbage bag. No, make it three 152 mm rounds.”
Beaudin is the action officer for the Virtual Interactive Combat Environment, or VICE, at the 2nd Battalion, 54th Infantry Regiment, on Sand Hill. He mans what he calls the “God station,” the control hub of a training device like no other on Fort Benning.
It’s the Wii of combat simulations, a nine-station unit that puts Soldiers in virtual environments of any kind — urban, rural, desert, woodlands, mountains, you name it — and pits them against any number of enemies and obstacles. The Soldiers at Sand Hill draw obvious parallels between VICE and video games like Counter Strike.
“That’s what it’s like,” said Pfc. Eric Bowlin, who spent a couple of hours on the VICE earlier this week. “It’s different than a game because you’re holding a weapon. It’s very real. I think it’s about the closest you could get to combat without actually being there.”
VICE is billed by the company that designed and produced it, Dynamic Animation System, Inc., as a bridge between the classroom and real life. And, Beaudin speculates, that may be the reason young Soldiers are taken with the VICE.
“These are millennial Soldiers. They grew up with Xbox and PlayStation,” he said. “This is something they’re comfortable with, and it captures their motivation to train.”
It also teaches them to work as a team, Beaudin said, and it trains them on 27 of the Infantry’s 37 warrior tasks and nine of the 11 battle drills.
The Soldiers are each assigned a weapon and a bay in the VICE, which is configured in an L-shape along two walls in the battalion’s Virtual Interactive Training Lab. The Soldiers stand and face monitors where the mission will unfold. With the toggle of a button on their weapon, they can rotate their view 360 degrees. Each will see the target from his own position and his own perspective. They use radios to communicate with one another, to call for fire or request a medic.
“Next door,” at the control station, Beaudin inputs a map of the target area, any area he chooses. It could be Baghdad or his own backyard. He “designs” a combat mission from an extensive menu. And for every scenario — take the 152 rounds lying on a side street in downtown Ramadi, for instance — there is the option to conduct the mission after dark with night vision devices.
“It’s much better for them to make a mistake here than out there in the real world,” he said. “Here, they have the opportunity to make the individual decisions and go through the processes every combat Soldier has to go through — observe, orient, decide and act. They see how their actions impact the guy to their left or right. They see what happens if they don’t follow their training.”
And if they don’t, someone gets hurt. Monday, during a VICE demonstration, one Soldier was wounded. Another left his station to put his combat life-saver skills to the test.
“See how limitless the possibilities are? The potential is amazing,” said Beaudin, who spent a year in Iraq before taking command of the battalion’s A Company nearly two years ago. “I cannot tell you what a difference it would’ve made if I’d had this before I went (to Iraq.) Just imagine having one of these in a (forward operating base) there, and I could pull up a map and tell my platoon, ‘Here’s the mission, here’s the target house, here’s where the doors are … Here’s a window. Alpha team will stack on this wall and Bravo on this one.’ It’s insane to think about how this would help during mission rehearsals.”
To be sure, Beaudin thinks it would be insane not to use the VICE. He first fell for it at the Infantry Warfighting Conference last year. When he found it was not being used anywhere in the Army, he volunteered Sand Hill — “the ultimate test bed” — to assess its potential for the military. The equipment is on loan, so to speak. Since April, when Beaudin became the man responsible for the assessment, hundreds of Soldiers and Marines have put it to the test. Among them were basic trainees, medics, truck drivers, National Guardsmen and training cadre.
Survey results show an overwhelming majority of them believe the VICE is a valuable training tool.
“Where was this when I was a private?” one drill sergeant wrote.
“I learned more in two hours on this than 14 weeks of training,” a basic training Soldier said. “Everything I heard in the classroom made sense when I got in here.”
Sgt. 1st Class Thomas Beecroft introduced E Co. Soldiers to the VICE Monday. He believes their experience on VICE will have the added benefit of familiarizing them with Iraqi environs.
“When I first came in here and they brought up a scenario, and I saw the trash on the streets and there were mosques and they had call to prayer … it brought back a lot of memories for me,” Beecroft said. “It’s real. It feels real.”
The VICE is also being tested at Fort Dix, N.J., and officials there are working closely with Beaudin to evaluate its potential for distribution Armywide.
“We’re trying to find out if it ultimately benefits the Army,” he said.
But Beaudin leaves little room for doubt about his own conclusion.
“If I were still a company commander, I’d use this from day one of basic training all the way to the end of week 14,” he said. “I believe I can train a Soldier five times, 10 times, faster with a tool like this. And there is no other tool like this. Every unit should have one.”