declivity, a sniper's paradise. Inside the simulator, the tank commander
of Alpha Unit 24 began to lacerate the enemy column, rolling back behind
the safety of the virtual ridge, reloading his cannon, then surging up
again to swiftly nail another victim with his laser target reticule. It is
a terrible thing to snipe with a laser-guided 120-mm cannon. Alpha 24 was
methodically tearing the enemy column apart. Within some 30 seconds four
enemy vehicles were reduced to burning hulks.
The robotic enemy column seemed stunned by Alpha 24's lethal
jack-in-the-box tactic. They milled around in confusion, unable to get a
clear shot. Then the American artillery kicked in, bracketing the column
in lethal fire. With their position absolutely untenable, the column
charged the sniping tank. Alpha 24 killed two more tanks before being
outflanked and forced to retreat.
Bravo Platoon was standing firm in the north, but it had been outfoxed. No
one was coming their way. Instead, two more enemy columns suddenly
appeared in the far south, in Charlie Platoon's turf. Seen through the
Threat commander's Macintosh map, the jittering red icons resembled angry
ants.
Charlie Platoon as a whole was caught unawares. Despite their wire-guided
TOW missiles, Charlie Platoon's Bradley Fighting Vehicles were no match
for the Threat heavy armor. Charlie Platoon was swiftly overwhelmed,
howling through the radio network for backup that was too slow, and too
far away.
Charlie Platoon's survivors called in air-support as they struggled to
reach the relative safety of Baseline Amber. In answer, two automatic
Apache attack helicopters emerged from the blue nothingness of SIMNET's
cyberspace sky. They fired air-to-surface missiles and swiftly roasted a
pair of enemy tanks; but the other T-72 tanks potted both the choppers on
the wing. The Apaches fell in crumpled digital heaps of flaming polygons.
As the engagement proceeded, dead men began to show up in the CATTC video
classroom. Inside the simulators, their vision blocks had gone suddenly
blank with the onset of virtual death. Here in CATTC's virtual Valhalla,
however, a large Electrohome video display unit showed a comprehensive
overhead map of the entire battlefield. Group by group, the dead tank
crews filed into the classroom and gazed upon the battlefield from a
heavenly perspective.
Slouching in their seats and perching their forage caps on their knees,
they began to talk. They weren't talking about pixels, polygons,
baud-rates, Ethernet lines, or network architecture. If they'd felt any
gosh-wow respect for these high-tech aspects of their experience, those
perceptions had clearly vanished early on. They were talking exclusively
about fields of fire, and fall-back positions, and radio traffic and
indirect artillery strikes. They weren't discussing "virtual reality" or
anything akin to it. These soldiers were talking war.
