Here’s what I learned first, in my interrogation of Navy SEAL operator Rob Roy, the long-time military consultant for the SOCOM franchise and the real human behind the game character Wardog: I learned that his father was a steel worker, his mother did housekeeping at a hospital, and he was born in the seriously poor and seriously small town of Sunflower, Mississippi, a largely crime-free black and Hispanic farming community of about 700 souls, between Indianola and Doddsville. He grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the 1970s, which he says was “a very tough place, despite the Happy Days images.” In the wake of the Vietnam war and the violence of the civil rights movement, inner city life was marked by racism, violence, and crime, with drugs and alcohol on every street corner. “There’s this thing I call the ghetto claw,” Rob says, “that pulls you in just as hard as you’re pushing to leave. I can’t believe I made it out and became a Navy SEAL.”
I was asking all this because I don’t play shooters. And I don’t want to play shooters. And yet SOCOM II sucked me in so hard and fast that I finally had to give the disc to my wife and tell her to hide it somewhere. And it’s not just that I like blowing up stuff and killing bad guys. It’s that I respond in a curious way to the whole squad strategy aspect; I find that barking and receiving voice commands over the PlayStation 2 headset—actually talking to my fellow SEALs, and worrying about their health, and loving it when they do a dirty job well—gives me this surprisingly personal affinity for them, as if they weren’t just AI constructs. (I haven’t gone on-line yet, because I know I’ll get waxed in seconds flat; I want to get my chops together first). But the whole experience feels so human, and it made me want to understand something of real life SEALs, and especially of their relationship to the game.
For Rob, who not only consults on SOCOM, but appears on the box art, it turns out that the Navy was all about escaping the inner city. “I knew that life wasn’t for me,” he says. “I wanted to see the world.” He hadn’t even graduated from high school when he walked into a recruiter’s office. “I can remember the only thing he said was, ‘You’ll learn a lot!’ No speech…no touching words – just his no frills way of offering a ticket out.” The SEALs were more elusive in those days, with less presence in movies and the public eye, and Rob spent four years as an aircraft carrier before he even heard about them. “I was stationed in Rota, Spain, where I first met a Navy SEAL,” Rob says. “He took the time to tell me about all the physical training - running in soft sand, long ocean swims, weapons training, the explosives and the secret nature of the SEALs.”
In the first few weeks of BUD/s—Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training—115 out of 173 candidates dropped out. “It tests you physically and mentally in ways you could never prepare,” Rob says. “216 hours of no sleep. When he graduated 6 months later, in 1987, only 28 guys were left. Rob was an operational SEAL for the next eighteen years. “I have seen and done everything you could imagine,” he says, “but the job also came with certain sacrifices to family, friends and relationships. It’s hard to compare it to anything else, because it’s not your typical job. There is so much riding on the line - more so then your career, or your reputation, -- it’s your teammates’ lives and the faith of the nation.”
There is also, of course, your reputation among your teammates, which might have encouraged Rob to make the SOCOM games as realistic as possible—to encourage his fellow SEALs, as he puts it, “to appreciate and even embrace the SOCOM series.” Thus the emphasis on teamwork and stealth, the intel, and weapons selection—the importance of paying attention to detail, avoiding contact with unnecessary threats. Rob admits that the gear works better in the game than in real life, and that the intel is generally more accurate, but still, he says, “The game is as close as most people can get without joining the military. Each player experiences real combat stress, especially if one of your teammates is shot and you have to change strategy. When you’ve got the headset on and you’re playing for hours, your blood pressure starts to rise and you begin to sweat and it’s all about your men.” Rob even insists that he approaches the game the same way he’d approach a real op. “I’ve always used my skills as a real SEAL, and my battle experience, to approach game play, from using suppressed weapons to shooting the fewest bullets possible.”
Apparently, everyone else does, too. A lot of on-line SOCOM Clans, Rob says, practice the same noise discipline as real SEAL teams, limiting their chatter to precise commands. “SOCOM has implemented this into the game,” Rob says, “in order for gamers to develop the same sort of relationships without going to BUD/s. I’ve played against Clans that were as organized as any real SEAL team and got spanked.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that Rob sees SOCOM as a potential aid in recruitment, although one that attracts a different breed. “The recruits that play games are not lured by the promise of travel, college or a military career,” he says. “It’s the adventure, the adrenaline. So here’s the sale: this is who we are and this is what we do and if you’re good at this, maybe someday you can do it for real.”
If I weren’t way too old, I’d take a good long look at Rob’s journey—from Sunflower, Mississippi to Special Operations Command—and wonder if maybe the SEALs were right for me. But of course I’m not too old to join a Clan, and as soon as SOCOM III comes around—and before my wife gets ahold of the disc—I know I’ll be heading over to the on-line recruiting office.