SECURITY U
At the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, class is in session for post-9/11 security forces and 6,000 new Border Patrol agents.
By Jeff Berg
"Drop the weapon!" the brawny man yells as he swiftly unbuckles his seatbelt with one hand and pulls a sidearm from his holster with the other.
"Drop the weapon!' he bellows again, this time just that much louder and with more force.
The other man fails to respond to the command and is shot numerous times in his body, twice in the head, but still charges forward.
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Simulations are used to create
realistic training scenarios. (Photo by Jeff Berg) |
Several more body shots, and then the scenario ends.
It is like a scene from a bad action movie, sans blood.
The shooter is Senior Instructor Pat O'Rielley, a Carlsbad resident and former state policeman who is now employed at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), located in Artesia. This FLETC campus is one of four nationwide operated by the federal government, and is responsible for the training of any number of law enforcement officers from 82, yes, 82 government agencies, as "Partner Organizations" that have armed men and women on their staff to enforce the law. About the only federal agency with law-enforcement officers that is not involved is the US Postal Service, which trains its Postal Police Officers and Inspectors at a different facility.
Just over two years ago, the Border Patrol consolidated all of its training activities at the Artesia site. The FLETC campus expects to graduate 6,000 new Border Patrol agents in 2007-08, at a training cost of $14,000 per agent.
The shooting scenario is one of the training exercises offered to commercial pilots who want to be licensed to carry a pistol in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft. O'Rielley's nemesis has been stopped, finally, and the next computer image on the big screen behind the mock cockpit shows where O'Rielley's laser-beam pistol hit the would-be hijacker. The virtual bad guy took six or seven well-placed bullets before being dropped.
Just prior to this exercise, O'Rielley had been talking to us—me and staff writer Susan Smith of the Artesia Daily Press—about a birthday gift his wife had given him. "I came into the room, and she had taken the bolt out (for safety) and was sighting the rifle out the window. I had to wonder if she had bought it for me or for herself," he says, chuckling.
O'Rielley explains that the gun, which is perfectly legal to own, weighs 25 pounds and can hit a target nearly two miles away.
Not being a gun owner, I wonder why, but get an inkling of an idea a bit later on. And I bet O'Rielley would probably wonder why I watch several hundred movies a year, too.
The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center has been in Artesia since 1989, but never had much traffic, so to speak, until Sept.12, 2001. The campus was built up around the former College of Artesia, a one-time bastion of liberal arts and hippie wannabes that was inexplicably built in the desert in the mid-1960s. It was here that I was first introduced to New Mexico at length, as I attended the tiny unaccredited school for part of the 1969 school year. The College of Artesia closed in 1971.
When my grandmother and mother hauled my sorry carcass to Artesia from suburban Chicago in the fall of 1969, it was an extended trip through parts of other western states, including South Dakota, Wyoming and Colorado. Grams kept travel diaries of such trips, two of which are now among my most prized possessions. In this one she notes our arrival in Artesia, where I had never been before, and she penned, "Arrived in Artesia, 10.00 A.M. Jeff not enthused."
But more on that later.
This current incarnation for the campus follows a stint as the Artesia Christian College, which operated from 1975-1985. The campus, built on the edge of the town, then consisted of a wagon-wheel type set of dorms, two sets of classroom buildings, with administration and an auditorium housed in a rounded building that was also used for instruction. The other building housed the student union and food services, and was used as such for FLETC until recently when the feds opened a new building to feed the hungry masses of trainees.
Now, as my guide, Linda Roberts, the facility's policy and project analyst, tells me, the number of buildings and modular structuress on the 220-acre site has become "TMTC"—"Too Many To Count."
The site has indoor and outdoor firearms training ranges, numerous classrooms, language labs, a skeet range, a lounge where the student union for the college once was, a convenience store, post office and numerous gyms and physical fitness areas for training and relaxation. A new aquatic center is also under construction, which will allow for even more training opportunities for the agencies involved. A mock courtroom with real lawyers is also housed on site.
In places FLETC almost seems like a theme park. One corner of the facility has been built to help replicate almost every possible scenario imaginable for a confrontation between officers and evildoers. False-front stores, abandoned buildings, full-size barns and even railroad boxcars dot the landscape used for training. If nothing else, FLETC is detailed and complete. (At this time, there are no plans to use the town of Playas as part of the FLETC training ground. As you may recall, Playas, a one-time company mining town located in the southwest corner of the state, was recently purchased for tutoring lawmen and women.)
The FLETC campuses also provide training for state, local and international law agencies. In 2005, FLETC graduated nearly 50,000 students from its various centers; 4,200 of these graduates hailed from a FLETC-Artesia program. About 20 percent of all the students who attend FLETC programs don't graduate for one reason or another.
FLETC also has oversight and program-management responsibilities for several International Law Enforcement Academies (ILEA), based in Botswana, Gaborone and San Salvador, and provides expertise for ILEAs in Thailand and Hungary.
It all falls under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FLETC's administrative and budgetary activities.
Some of the programs taught in Artesia include training for special agents in criminal investigation, mixed basic police training and natural resources police training. Advanced training is also offered in cyber-terrorism including Internet forensics, international banking and money laundering, not to mention "critical infrastructure protection," seaport security and of course anti-terrorism classes for state and local agencies.
FLETC has been around since 1970. One has to wonder just how many bad guys there are in the world. That thought, along with the number of possible crimes that can be committed, enters my head often as I tour the site with Roberts and Smith.
My tour begins at a building that houses the visitor's check-in station. The staff is casual, but they are aware of my impending arrival, and even though I expect a security check similar to the type that one gets at the airport now, it is not forthcoming. I am given a visitor's badge and wait for Roberts and Smith to arrive.
As I look out the spotless windows of the little office, a small squad of men and women trots by in cadence, on the double, with one of them carrying a green unit guidon. I believe they must be Border Patrol officers; some of the agencies are color coded, with green being that of the Border Patrol. It all has the look and feel, rightly so, of a military boot camp.
As with most federal facilities, many jobs are contracted out; FLETC-Artesia is no exception. As I wait, any number of employees arrive and receive badges that will permit them access to the facility. Oddly, even the security of FLETC is contracted out. I neglect to ask who trains the officers that protect the officers. There are also contracted employees brought in for role-playing.
Linda Roberts arrives just after Smith, and we are soon off to see everyone's tax dollars at work.
One of our first stops is at a large new building that houses a number of the gymnasium-type facilities. We peek into some massive weight-training rooms and cardiovascular workout rooms—mostly idle at this time of day—and then stop to watch a class of Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Police Officer candidates. These students, all American Indians, are learning how to stop a rascal from taking their sidearms. This is called Weapon Retention Training. Each student is equipped with a fake handgun, and the potential criminal, played by another student, is trying to disarm the officer from behind. Each is unsuccessful, as the "good guys" win this round by using a specialized move to throw the suspect off-balance and away from the officer, allowing him or her to draw and point his or her weapon. As the officers reach for their sidearms, they instruct the bad dude in a loud voice to stop, punctuating the end of the sentence with a loudly polite "SIR" as they do so.
After a stop at the new aquatic center, we drive past the east side of the small dorms that once housed me and 150 or so other non-honor roll students, nearly 40 years ago.
An even bigger whiff of nostalgia occurs when we stop for a moment at the building that once was the cafeteria and student union for the College of Artesia. It was here where I received daily love letters from my first-wife-to-be, dripping with sentiments of how I was loved and missed, along with tidbits of what was happening on the home front. I read these only after thrashing through the rest of the mail for a check from Dad.
It was also in this building that I had my first real taste of Mexican food, other than canned tamales, assuming those can even be classified as food. Each and every Friday, the friendly and appetite-encouraging staff of the cafeteria would fix catfish and Mexican food—all you could eat. I learned to love Friday dinners, though sadly, now the thought of eating just one more enchilada takes an act of courage on my part.
The current c-store carries all of the items that one would find at a "civilian" store, along with T-shirts and caps acknowledging any number of the various agencies that train here.
Roberts stops briefly at one of the new classroom buildings, again with state-of-the-art equipment. Most of them are empty at this time of day, but the silence is eerie in an odd way. It feels a bit like there is an odd sort of tension in these rooms, something that I don't feel anywhere else on the grounds.
These buildings and others will house the language labs that are becoming more vital, I am told, as crime certainly extends to all cultures.
"We'll head out to the firing ranges now," Roberts says as we step back out into the warm early-autumn desert day.
Linda Roberts has been with FLETC since 1997, coming to Artesia after working for the Air Force at Kelly AFB in Texas. "I was the program manager for the T-56 engine that is used for C-130 planes," she says. Roberts was born and raised in nearby Dexter, NM. Her mother happened to see an ad for her current job, Roberts responded, and she has been in Artesia since.
Smith, my fellow tourist, returned to the Southwest after a stint in Michigan, and now covers FLETC as part of her regular beat for the Artesia newspaper. As we drive the four or so miles to the shooting ranges, I ask the two Artesians how they like life in this town of 13,000. Both seem to like the lifestyle offered here, but grimace a bit at the price of housing, which has gone up considerably due to the mild boom FLETC has brought to town. Activity especially increased with the training of pilots and air marshals after 9-11, and now the onslaught of Border Patrol trainees.
I had arrived the afternoon before my appointment at FLETC, in order to see how the place had changed since I had left, so many years ago. The smallish downtown has been beautifully and artfully restored by some of the resident oil companies, which have been a huge part of Artesia's economy for many years. One of the companies' headquarters takes up a full city block in the four blocks or so downtown area. A small refinery anchors the east end of the downtown area, just across US Hwy. 285. As I strolled the area, I noted that I was almost the only person on the street.
Artesia is home to 50 churches, and the Christian lifestyle appeared very prominent: Some type of faith-based group runs a pleasant coffee shop, and other storefronts have biblical passages or references painted on them.
Few cars were parked downtown, and several of the stores were closed, the rest closing promptly at five o'clock. The old movie theater, where I saw any number of "spaghetti" westerns in 1969, has been revamped and now houses two screens, but the restoration eliminated the classic interior of the movie house and the sound is dreadful. Also gone is the balcony where we used to sit and watch Lee Van Cleef mow down any number of movie bad guys. The theater still sells fat green dill pickles, another novelty that I encountered in my first experience living in the West. The small smokeshop that carried a good quantity of paperback books in 1969 is also gone. It was here that I invited author Louis L'Amour to be my second "roommate" in college, fully ignoring the textbooks that sat gathering dust on my dorm room desk or under the massive tumbleweed that we kept in the room, decorated with beer can pop-tops and cigarette butts.
Roberts and Smith speak with a gentle glowing pride about the Artesia Bulldogs, the local high-school football team, who play in the "Bulldog Bowl." As in 1969, it would be most convenient for burglars to gather whatever they sought during a Bulldog game. Everyone went to the games then; everyone goes to the games now. Houses stand empty and inviting for four full quarters of football.
I grill Smith and Roberts about how the community feels about this new wave of outsiders invading this isolated outpost on the dull eastern plains of New Mexico. Do the FLETC students in 2006 encounter the same hostility that the small band of college students encountered from local residents in 1969? Is it possible that a car full of locals today would force a car full of students off the road as they returned from a screening of Easy Rider in Roswell, and beat several of them to a pulp for no apparent reason?
Possibly. Roberts and Smith both tend to agree that FLETC causes some sniffing and nose wrinkling among the locals, even though it employs 300-500 local residents. Including those contract security folks.
The two women agree that Artesia remains somewhat insular, something I have suspected since my visit the day before to the local chamber of commerce, which is housed in the immaculately restored train depot just north of downtown. I found it odd that neither the chamber nor the visitor's center had any information about the College of Artesia (which a number of students called Yucca U) or even the Artesia Christian College. A later visit to the little museum—where few of the objects have anything to do with Artesia—and history center revealed only two old event programs. The city library did have some interesting items, including class catalogs, several yearbooks and a scrapbook kept by one of the former trustees for the school.
And as I ponder my past experiences and recall my memories of Artesia, I realize that—except for FLETC—this is a place where time has almost stood still.
We arrive at the second part of FLETC, the place where guns are toted, but handled with the utmost safety and concern. It has, again, a slightly surreal feel, as most everyone is packing a pistol, and it is hard to tell which guns are real and which are not.
Nearby are several driving courses that are utilized to train officers in all aspects of defensive-driving maneuvers. Roberts pulls up near the courses, and we watch as several Border Patrol vehicles go through the moves. Training includes instruction in high pursuit and emergency vehicle operation. There is a newly completed four-wheel-drive course. Instruction covers "skid pans," using a spot that creates skidding conditions. Roberts explains that some of the vehicles are equipped with a "sneaky brake" in the trunk, with which an instructor via a radio-controlled device can put the car into an unexpected (indeed!) skid. "It helps to train them on how to control the vehicle," she says. "Believe it or not, some of our students have never driven before they come here."
It is also here that three engine-less 727 passenger jet airliners sit. These planes, which were skillfully landed at the minuscule Artesia airport by retired commercial pilots, since the FAA refused to allow active pilots to fly the jets, were later tugged over to their current resting place. Their engines and other parts were removed, and the planes now are used for flight deck officer training and for federal air marshal instruction.
Roberts says, "Once the pilots are trained, they have the smallest federal jurisdiction in the world—the cockpit of an airliner."
The pilot's fiefdom comes only after he or she voluntarily takes the nearly weeklong course in firearms and situational training. Pilots who take the classes do so at their own expense, including transportation to FLETC plus room and board.
The planes are used for role-playing. Roberts allows Smith and me to board one of the planes, which is equipped with wooden-looking passengers, much like the ones you actually travel with, except there are no screaming babies or 500-pound sumo wrestler types, and these folks aren't likely to grab their cell phones to tell the world that "the plane just landed."
Having never been in the cockpit of an airliner before, I am amazed at how small and cramped the area is, and vow not to complain about my seat on any commercial flight in the future. Dials, buttons and switches dominate the landscape, of course, but in this cockpit, there are also a number of spent pistol cartridges from the blanks used by the pilots and their instructors.
It is terrifying to even think that someone would try to invade this tiny space.
Smith and I "deplane," and Roberts offers me the chance to partake in one of the training exercises, used for Federal Flight Deck Officer (FFDO) instruction.
O'Rielley, who had responded to Roberts' call for help in setting up the demonstration, in turn calls John Folkner, another FLETC instructor, who sets up and operates the "judgment pistol situations." And in fact that is Folkner's official title: Lead Instructor, Judgmental Pistol Situations. Since this training involves pilots, one would think that Folkner is one himself, but he is not. His expertise, and plenty of it, revolves around this training.
Essentially it is a role-playing situation. As Folkner and O'Rielley explain it, the training is to help the pilot students judge their reaction to a situation where an armed or unstable passenger is, shall we say, partaking in anti-social behavior on a commercial flight.
"We don't particularly care if the student misses number 14 on the written test," Folkner says, "because the bad guys don't get that either."
Folkner programs the computer system to begin the different set-ups, as O'Rielley adjusts himself in the cockpit seat. Admittedly, he has demonstrated this so many times that he will know each of the scenarios by heart, but it is his mannerisms and sense of purpose that draw a lot of attention.
One scenario involves a man with a large knife breaking into the cockpit. Another shows a desperado holding a woman and a baby hostage; O'Rielley expertly plugs this guy two or three times in the forehead, not even grazing the hostages. Still another features an inebriated black man (some students see a white man, since the alcohol-laced "passenger" on the screen is wearing a bright white shirt, Folkner tells us) who is loudly looking for the bathroom and instead enters the cockpit. Each exercise requires split-second timing both mentally and physically. It is nearly impossible for a fluid motion in such a dire emergency—to get out of a small seat, unravel yourself from the control panel, and smoothly draw a pistol at the same time. It is even more difficult if a pilot has to step out of the cockpit, since he or she is not allowed to take the weapon along, as one of the other scenes demonstrates.
After O'Rielley calmly and accurately dispatches any number of would-be hijackers to a trip down the river Styx, Smith and Folkner encourage me to try it.
I decline O'Rielley's holster, and the weight of the retrofitted pistol in my hand probably seems 10 times more than it actually is. I have not held a gun for many years—and it is an odd feeling to do so now.
Strapped in, Folkner selects a situation and it flashes on the screen behind me. I am able to undo my seatbelt in the co-pilot seat, and while banging my knee as I try to twist out of the seat, here is what I turn around to see:
A man is walking up and down the aisle where the passengers are seated. He is yelling and agitated. (Real live people were used for this filmed role-playing.) As instructed by my trainers, my first attempts are to be to de-escalate the situation with clear and loud verbal commands.
I freeze. It is like I cannot believe this is happening. I open my mouth to yell a command but nothing comes out. Suddenly the man lunges with a large knife (did I mention he had one?) at a passenger and stabs the man sitting in the seat. And then the bad guy stabs another passenger as he walks up the aisle toward the flight deck. He is still yelling, but I don't know what. Finally, I am able to croak something like, "Sir, drop the weapon"—but for all I know I could have said, "a large thin crust with extra cheese." But by now two things have happened, as Folkner later tells me: I should have already fired the gun at the intruder, since he is now a major threat, and chances are the plane is going to crash. My reaction time is way too slow.
When I do react, almost without thinking, after the man continues to practice his carving skills on other passengers, I shoot the man. And shoot him again and again. And still he comes at me.
The scene ends. Folkner pulls up a still picture to show me where I have hit the man with my laser bullets. Not bad for someone who hasn't fired a gun in such a long time: Two head shots, a couple of body wounds and several clear misses that will certainly have the airline lawyers on the phones moments after we land, assuming we did. The errant "shots" have gone elsewhere in the cabin.
"Not bad, shooting from the hip," Folkner says. There is no humor in this training. I look at the gun and realize I had not taken the appropriate gun-control stance—arms length, two hands.
What I have done, in less than a minute's time, is make my heart race so fast that it feels like the time I first fell in lust. I've managed to make myself so sweaty in the very air-conditioned room that I wonder if I remembered to put on deodorant this morning. (I did. It didn't help.)
Before the exercise I'd told Folkner I "didn't want to shoot anybody," and he responded that was good, and that would make me a good student. Gunslinger hopefuls need not apply.
The stress and tension of those few moments are something I had never experienced before. Even now, as I write this, I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in that situation in real life. I can hardly think of anything more emotionally intense.
The other thing I learn is to keep shooting. "Your number-one concern is closing the cockpit door, and making sure that the intruder is no longer a threat," Folkner says. "If you can't land the plane, no one, including you, is going home. And everyone wants to go home."
I had always doubted the validity of complaints by the public about a suspect in a crime who is shot a number of times—using what we may think is excessive force. I equate that to the grandstand umpires at baseball games who can call a strike or ball from the left-field bleachers. How do you know what was going on? Would you say, "please sir, stop that" if you or a loved one were being threatened—or, if you had a gun, would you make sure that the threat was over?
Roberts, Smith and I hop back into the car to return to the visitor's office of FLETC-Artesia. As we drive by the former administration building of the College of Artesia, I try to pick out the tree that was planted there during a national moratorium held in October 1969, denouncing the war in Vietnam. There are several smallish trees in the courtyard, and I do not recall exactly where or what species of tree a number of quiet back-east students planted that very warm New Mexico afternoon. I remember standing on the balcony of the second story of the dorm watching the ceremony as Led Zeppelin blared from the tinny stereo in our tumbleweed-appointed dormitory room.
Today is also graduation day for a new cadre of Border Patrol officers. They are smartly dressed, and camera flashes go off around me, as their friends and family members proudly join their loved ones for the celebration. It is hard to deal with the swing of emotions that accompany my return to Artesia.
What was once a place of peaceful higher learning, where I came to do the groundwork for my fantasy veterinarian practice, has become a sprawling fortress for men and women to learn how to protect themselves and us from those who may want to do us harm.
Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right. You can't go home again.
Jeff Berg suffers from frequent lamentations in Las Cruces.