Armada Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the US Army’s most valuable recruiting tools for over a decade now. An army recruiter had even let us spend a half-hour playing it at school, just after we’d finished taking the mandatory ASVAB test—the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. I remembered thinking it was pretty weird that we were being encouraged to play a videogame simulation of warfare, right after being tested on our aptitude for it.
    I continued to flip through the faded pages of my father’s notebook, marveling at the time and energy he’d spent researching and puzzling over the details of the elaborate conspiracy he’d believed he was uncovering. Lists of names, dates, movie titles, and half-formed theories were scribbled across every page. But, I realized now, my ten-year-old self had been too hasty in dismissing it as gibberish. There was at least a hint of method lurking behind his seeming madness.
    It looked as though the existence of Bradley Trainer and Marine Doom were two of the key pieces of “evidence” behind his vague, half-formed conspiracy theory, along with the classic science fiction novel Ender’s Game, and two old movies, The Last Starfighter and Iron Eagle . My father had highlighted the release dates of these items on his timeline, and later on in the notebook he’d devoted several pages to describing and dissecting their storylines—as if they held crucial clues about the grand mystery he was trying to solve.
    I smiled down at the list. I’d never even heard of Iron Eagle until I saw it mentioned in my father’s journal and watched the VHS copy of it I found among this things. The film had instantly become one of my go-to guilty-pleasure movies. The hero of Iron Eagle is an Air Force brat named Doug Masters who learns to pilot an F-16 by cutting class to sneak into the base flight simulator—really just an incredibly expensive videogame. Doug is a natural pilot, but only if he’s rocking out to his favorite tunes. When his dad gets shot down overseas and taken captive, Doug steals two F-16s and flies over to rescue him, with a little help from Lou Gossett Jr., his Walkman, Twisted Sister, and Queen.
    The result was a cinematic masterpiece—although sadly, it appeared to be recognized as such by me alone. Cruz and Diehl had both vowed never to sit through another screening of it. Muffit was still always happy to curl up and watch it with me though, and our repeated viewings of the film, along with the Snoopy vs. the Red Baron album my mother insisted on playing every Christmas, had served as the inspiration for my Armada pilot call sign: IronBeagle. (When I posted in the Armada player forums, my avatar was an image of Snoopy in his World War I flying ace getup.)
    I glanced back at his timeline once again. My father had drawn circles around the entries for Iron Eagle, Ender’s Game, and The Last Starfighter; then he’d added lines connecting them all to each other—and now for the first time I finally understood why. All three stories were about a kid who trained for real-life combat by playing a videogame simulation of it.
    I kept flipping pages until I came to the journal’s second-to-last entry. In the center of an empty page my father had written the following question:
    What if they’re using videogames to train us to fight without us even knowing it? Like Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, when he made Daniel-san paint his house, sand his deck, and wax all of his cars—he was training him and he didn’t even realize it!
    Wax on, wax off—but on a global scale!
    The journal’s final entry was an undated, rambling, half-illegible, four-page-long essay in which my father attempted to summarize the threads of his half-formed conspiracy theory and link them together.
    â€œThe entire videogame industry is secretly under the control of the US military,” he wrote. “They may have even invented the videogame industry!