I was a soldier participating in a relatively new psychological warfare test that was rapidly becoming some kind of field standard. I stood on the bottom floor of what looked like an indoor three- or four-story pink-painted mall. There were escalators and shop fronts, walkways with glass and metal railings. I could not tell if it was day or night.
I wasn’t alone here; a handful of other soldiers participating readied themselves, each in their own corner of the mall. I looked up at a few of the shops in the mall — some of them had been replaced with what looked like a large glass case beneath a cloth. There were maybe only three of these cases in the mall, on the way to the exit.
I understood the test as I had seen it before. The cloths would drop, revealing what was in the cases: a 1:1 sized Native American doll, with long, dyed cornsilk hair in a traditional white dress. The dolls were about four feet tall, propped up on a metal stand and not moving or even particularly scary to look at. No, the entire point of this exercise was the buildup to the exercise.
As I said, I had seen (possibly participated in) this sort of test in the past, and I knew how difficult it was going to be. I rattled on about how you just had to push on through, ignore what else was happening, and get to the exit. The other soldiers weren’t afraid, but I honestly was.
A loudspeaker counted down. After one, the cloths dropped off the exhibits and revealed what I already knew was in the glass cases. I made my way past the first doll with some difficulty, and I tried to steel myself for the next one around the corner, knowing how the test worked but not how I’d react: they moved one of the dolls outside its case, so that it was actually standing at the end of a long corridor in the mall. I would have to walk past it.
The other soldiers moved through with no difficulty whatsoever. After all, they were not alive; they weren’t even doing anything. I realized as I must have before that this wasn’t a test for them but a test for me. But it didn’t matter that I understood; it only mattered that I was crumpled in a shaking mess on the mall walkway floor.
