ABSTRACT
The toughest part of my journey was finding the enemy. There was no shortage of “Blue,” “Red,” and “Brown” teams, or “opposing forces,” “regional powers,” even a “reemergent global threat” to contend with. But actual names and faces were hard to come by. To be sure, the Pentagon reached deep into its archive of historical, film, comic-book, and free-floating enemies to come up with menacing, foreign threats, like the “Krasnovians,” “Sumarians,” and “Hamchuks” who roamed the Mojave Desert in green jumpsuits and black berets; the unkempt “Sowenians,” “Vilslakians,” and “Juralandians” who clashed in the hills of Hohenfels that bordered on the countries of “Fredonia” and “Ruritania”; and the grungy Boolean and Furzian refugees who stirred up trouble in the “Country of Orange,” located somewhere in the San Francisco Bay area. But without fail, whenever I asked for a real name, a real country, I got the party line: this is just a scenario, an exercise, an
experiment. We don’t do countries, as one air force spokesman put it when queried during a recent space war game.
