Postcard: Playas

By Richard B. Stolley

Mesquite is a quiet street in the small, high-desert town of Playas, N.M., just north of the Mexican border. Suddenly it is alive with action. A heavily armed SWAT team races toward two adobe houses where terrorists are holed up, according to reports from a confidential informant. The troopers smash down the door of one, blow open two doors of the other and disappear inside.

Moments later, a blond woman runs out, hands in the air. It is the informant, and the terrorists have draped her in a suicide-bomber vest. Nobody knows whether it has been timed to detonate. For several minutes she stands there, face contorted with fear. Then an officer shouts, "Take the vest off slowly!" The woman slips it off and moves across the street to safety. The noise subsides, the scenario ends, and the teaching begins. This has all been a training exercise, part of four days of urban-warfare education with nearly 250 first responders--police, firefighters, EMTS, 911 operators--from all over the country taking part.

This morning's topic is suicide bombings. Instructor Ron Haskins, a former Green Beret, warns, "We want to get the terrorists when they're recruiting, planning, training, preparing, because once they start, they're going to blow themselves up in some way." The first responders tour a house set up as a suicide-bomb factory. The kitchen is littered with chemicals, including a jar of yellow liquid simulating human urine, which can be distilled into an ingredient for an explosive called urea nitrate (used in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993). Haskins explains the assault to a visiting SWAT team from the Washington state police: "If you think explosives are inside, you don't blow the door. You batter it down. You don't want to set anything off."

The course at Playas, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and run by New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, is one of five training centers in the U.S. that deal with nuclear, biological and chemical threats. New Mexico concentrates on high explosives. It has another facility, a 40-sq.-mi. range in the mountains outside Socorro, which actually blows things up. There, this class watches from half a mile away as plastic explosives rip through two offices, mangling their dummy occupants. Later, a 1988 Thunderbird with 200 lbs. of ammonium nitrate in the trunk erupts in a massive geyser of flame, raining jagged steel onto the barren hills.

Since 2001, the two antiterrorist centers in New Mexico have graduated 37,000 first responders, who have in turn passed on their training to 250,000 of their colleagues back home. The bill to the taxpayers? A relative bargain at $103 million. For its part, Playas owes its continued existence to the war on terrorism. It was built by Phelps Dodge Corp. in the 1970s to house employees of its nearby copper-smelting plant. But in 1999 the smelter closed and the town of 1,500 faced extinction. New Mexico Tech came to the rescue, buying the town and 1,200 acres around it for $5 million in 2004 and establishing the facility.

The population today is only 25 families, most of whose adult members work for the training program. They include role players in the action scenarios, like Annalisa Kvamme, a mother of five, who played the blond woman wearing the suicide-bomber vest. Living in Playas has its challenges: six children in town are bused to Animas, 20 miles away, for school. It's 37 miles to the nearest supermarket, 85 miles to a two-screen movie theater. The town has a Baptist church and a bowling alley named Copper Pins, where beer and wine will go on sale next month for the first time. Resident Laine Vowell is asked, "You don't go nuts out here?" His answer: "Not at all. We visit a lot. Sunsets are beautiful. There are baby bobcats and other wildlife right in town. The deer trim my trees. It sounds trite, but we're like one big family."

The townspeople take patriotic pride in their remote lives. "I feel very confident in this course," says Haskins. "I like what we're doing for America."

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