Army Training Site Brings To Life Horrors of War.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana
• Position: Zussman Village near Fort Knox, KY

At Andy Andrews' amusement park, bullets whiz, grenades and mortar shells hurtle everywhere. Killers lurk around the corner. Andrews, resting on his cane and dragging on a cigarette, directs the horror show. But this is no Disneyland, MGM or Universal Studios, although many of the pieces of this amusement park came from there, and paint balls replace real bullets. This is where U.S. Army soldiers train for urban combat missions. At the Zussman Village, 40 minutes away from Fort Knox, Ky., soldiers get to experience a fictionalized, but realistic, urban war.

Andy Andrews is the range manager at the training site. He oversees the entire operation, from set-up to cleanup. The facility prepares troops for what the Army calls MOUT, or military operations in urban terrain. "When you hear on the news that we have deployed our soldiers into a city, we have deployed them into a potential buzz-saw," said Andrews.

MOUT-type conflicts are what the Pentagon expects U.S. forces to be fighting in the foreseeable future. It's a complex environment for any military force. "Where they send us, law and order is broken down," Andrews said. "It's dirty, it's nasty."

To make it look like real war, the training site is smothered with dirt and mud, the grass grows tall and the sewer system is not maintained, "because this is how we are going to do this for real," Andrews said. "If you saw pictures from Bosnia and Kosovo, did you see mowed lawns?"

Parts of the Zussman Village have a cluttered south-eastern-European village flavor to them. In 1988, Maj. Gen. Tom Tait came up with the idea to build an urban training site at Fort Knox. Andrews said they worked on the idea for several years, before construction started in 1997.

"We went to all MOUT sites, we gathered lessons learned from MOUT deployments from Panama forward, some were even from World War II," Andrews said. "We talked a lot to our allies who have a lot of experience in MOUT. We learned from what the British have learned in Northern Ireland, Lebanon, Syria."

When the main buildings were completed in October 1999, Fort Knox opened the site to selected units. "Seriously, the city will never be done," Andrews said. The entire range spreads out on 53,000 acres, which can handle aircraft landings. The 30-acre city area is surrounded by 14,000 acres, which Andrews called "complex, nasty terrain with severe elevation changes." Another 7,000 acres are used for live firings. So far, construction costs for the site exceed $15 million. The cost of operating the site is $800,000 annually.

"We are the Army's best junk men. We take everybody's junk," said Andrews. An industrial area and a junkyard full of rusty wrecked cars greet those entering the village. The railroad at the outskirts of the village has three tracks so far, but three more are to come. The goal is to be able to conduct train-wreck exercises. A Third-World slum will also sit in the vicinity of the railroad. "Environmental problems become tactical issues," said Andrews. Behind the industrial area, there's also a simulated drug lab trailer.

In the main village, a three-story government building is complete with a basement and underground parking...