Nation: Games, but Grim

The first U.S. Marines to land on the shores of Lancelot are met by cheering natives. Lancelot's sovereignty is imperiled by guerrilla bands that have infiltrated from the neighboring country of Merlin, and the U.S. has sent the Marines to the rescue. The natives throng around their American saviors, tug at the Marines' packs, playfully grab their guns. In their enthusiasm, some of the Lancelotians seize field telephone wire and get it hopelessly snarled; others, trying to help land a truck, succeed only in pushing the vehicle deeper into the surf.

Now the situation really gets ugly. Here come several hundred other Lan celotians marching behind loudspeaker trucks. In their own tongue—a kind of pidgin Spanish—they shout anti-American slogans. They hurl fistfuls of sand in the Marines' faces, threaten them, push them and form human barricades. They are then joined in their hostility by the natives who originally had welcomed the Marines. "Form wedges! Form wedges, goddammit!" cries a harassed Marine sergeant. Finally, the Marines disperse the mob and start pushing inland.

Meanwhile, at the Lancelotian capital of Camelot, Brigadier General E. Hunter Hurst, in charge of the Marine brigade, lands in a helicopter, is met at the airport by the U.S. Ambassador to Lancelot, who quickly briefs the general on the situation while anti-Ameri can mobs close in on them. Fortunately, the ambassador and the general make it to a car that whisks them away into town . . .

These scenes were enacted with grim realism last week in the fictional land of Lancelot—actually a segment of the Southern California coast at the Ma rine Corps' Camp Pendleton. It was all part of Silver Lance, the most massive and elaborate war game staged by the U.S. armed forces in the two decades since World War II.

The exercise, which began Feb. 23 and ends this week, employed an armada of 60 ships, including three aircraft carriers, 520 Marine and Navy planes and helicopters, 3,200 motor vehicles; 66 tanks, 96 artillery pieces, 20,000 sailors and 25,000 marines, among whom were 5,000 playing the part of Lancelotian natives—men and women—and infiltrators from Merlin.

There were also such aids to verisimilitude as battle dressings that spurted blood-red fluid so vividly that some strapping young marines paled at the sight and hurriedly departed from the scene.

Outrageous Demands. Silver Lance is the creation of Marine Lieut. General Victor H. Krulak, 52, a toughened specialist in guerrilla and counterinsurgency warfare. Krulak and his staff began planning the exercises in September, finished with a four-inch-thick "script" that covered the histories of the make-believe countries, the developing political situations there, and the events that led to the Lancelotians' request for U.S. military aid. Also in the script: 2,000 "incidents," or problems, with which Krulak wanted his people encumbered, such as the pesky natives on the beach, a Lancelotian request for school textbooks, a native woman who wanted the Marines to arrange a baptism, scores of requests for food and medical aid, and a village chieftain who refused to deal with anyone less than the U.S. commander himself. That commander, General Hurst, had been given little notion beforehand of the devilish difficulties that Krulak had set up for him.