#limaria

Hemphill's file shell (Limaria hemphilli)

Flame shell (Limaria hians)

Earlier this year I spent some time in Donovia.  Unless you're familiar with the US Army's Operational Environment and Opposing Force (OPFOR) program, or have read the Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE) manual, or can recite Army Regulation 350-2 provisions off-book, then you've never heard of it.

AR 350-2 dictates that unclassified training simulations must use fictitious countries to represent opposing forces.  As an act of compliance, the DATE manual is essentially an RPG campaign guide for the Army, wherein the geography, demographics, histories, and politics of five different made-up countries are laid out in 824 pages of meticulous detail.

My Donovia was located at the McKenna Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) training site at Fort Benning, Georgia - two hours from Atlanta.  The Donovian population complained about the brutal heat in remarkably good English, and with remarkably southern US accents.  They were role-players hired to sell wooden onions, plastic tomatoes, and rubber racks of lamb at the fake marketplace.  Two men playing belligerent drunkards clung to empty, unbranded vodka bottles as they stumbled through the concrete streets of the McKenna complex.  Later, they'd compete with a desperate woman holding a sick baby doll for the attention of an Army patrol squad.

The need for changing the country names for unclassified simulations seems obvious - let not the Iranians discover via Tumblr (...) that the US is specifically training for combat missions in Iran.  However, you might expect a few more liberties to be taken beyond simply changing "Iranian" to "Arianian".

Aside from the names of the countries, all other features of the stand-in countries are almost entirely unchanged.  City names, demographics, histories, and politics are identical to their real-life analogs. For example, the Army's brainstorming sessions for naming the capital of Donovia produced a city called "Moscow".

My Donovian experience oscillated between tedium and hyper-stimulation.  We got bored enough between scenarios to invent Donovian words and phrases.  We made our company's motion-capture-controlled avatars (as shown projected on the wall above) do the Whip/Nae Nae.  We used a rubber replica of a severed arm to showcase our maturity level as seasoned simulation professionals:

Swimming file clam (Limaria sp.) by wildsingapore on Flickr.