Poor Uncle Earl. I was aware he had a heart condition, but I didn’t expect his heart to crap out so quickly. I probably wouldn’t have let him drive. He seemed totally fine and then, bam, he’s slumped over the steering wheel as the car we’re in starts barrelling towards a clump of trees. Aw, crap.
That’s when the training kicks in. I grab the wheel to straighten the car, lift my leg to straddle the armrest and use my body to pin poor Uncle Earl to the door so he doesn’t cause us to crash. He’s completely comatose at this point so I knock his leg to the side and begin driving the car from the passenger seat. It’s taken less than 10 seconds, but so much has happened in those 10 seconds I can feel my heartbeat rising as I bring the car to a stop.
I did fine. I grabbed the bottom of the steering wheel, which is preferred in case you move the wrong way because you’re less likely to upset the car. I could have done better. Specifically, I could have done more to bolster poor Uncle Earl’s lifeless body.
Thankfully, this is a simulation and I’m on a closed course. This is called “Driver Down” training, and the idea of Uncle Earl’s heart crapping out is easier to deal with than what it’s meant to simulate, which is a Diplomatic Security Service agent or other bodyguard getting shot and incapacitated while I, a random diplomat of Foreign Service Officer, am in the passenger seat.
While Parker was learning how to be a DSS agent, I was also down in Virginia, learning what the diplomats learn.
“It’s more a confidence thing for them, knowing they can do it,” says my instructor/driver/Uncle Earl stand-in Payton Wilson. It could easily happen like it was described above, but it could also happen under hostile circumstances. “Maybe [the driver] took a round or is in shock, you get blown up, the car still works but they’re in shock and they don’t do anything. You have to take over.”
I expected Payton to wait a few yards before dying on me, but Payton enjoys the element of surprise and crapped out on me almost immediately.
A Facility That Exists In The Shadow Of Benghazi
The Foreign Affairs Security Training Center, or FASTC (the government loves acronyms), isn’t just the collection of on- and off-road tracks that Parker showed you. We all had lunch together looking at a collection of shipping containers that are regularly filled with smoke in order to train ambassadors, staff, and anyone else who might be in an embassy how to safely get out of a building on fire. It’s called a smokehouse and there are two of them.
This isn’t a coincidence.
On September 11th, 2012, the American Embassy in Benghazi, Libya was attacked by an Islamic militant group. Four Americans were killed, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Information Officer Sean Smith, and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. An unknown number of Libyan guards were also killed. Ambassador Stevens was the first American Ambassador to be killed in an attack in more than three decades.
The State Department’s own report on the attack discusses in detail the use of “fire as a weapon” and concludes that both Stevens and Smith were killed due to smoke inhalation. The report also recommends revised training around dealing with smoke and fire.
In addition to the shipping containers that fill with smoke, there’s a full-sized embassy on the grounds of FASTC that looks, at least superficially, like the compound in Benghazi.
For various reasons, Benghazi is the attack we all think of, but Foreign Service Officers experience attempted robberies, kidnapping, and other serious incidents on a fairly routine basis. Before and after Benghazi, diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan faced numerous threats, which is to say nothing of the East African Embassy Bombings of 1998 that killed more than 224 people, including 12 Americans.
While being an agent in the Diplomatic Security Service requires a certain amount of tactical experience and physical fitness, the main requirement of being a Foreign Service Officer is the willingness to put oneself in harm’s way to further the interests of this country.
My instructor, like everyone else at FASTC, is dedicated to doing everything possible to prepare anyone who comes through the gates at Fort Barfoot for whatever might happen.
‘Other Sport Beckons’ Doesn’t Apply To Diplomats
The DSS is a highly selective agency, and there are times when would-be agents simply can’t become agents because they cannot master the necessary driving skills. In these situations, the instructors use an acronym: OSB, which stands for Other Sport Beckons.
This doesn’t mean the instructors won’t try hard to help anyone who shows up to get better, but it’s one of those jobs where you have to be good at a lot of things. While the DSS has the largest global presence of any U.S. law enforcement agency, a typical posting might only have a couple of DSS agents to support local security, Marine Security guards, and the household staff.
“You assume a lot of responsibility very quickly,” explains Supervisory Special Agent Benjamin Rathsack, the Division Chief for Functional Training Operations. “[Agents have] a limited amount of assets, a limited amount of individuals… [they’re] Swiss Army knives doing the best they can with the assets that they have in a culture that could be foreign and getting the job done and doing it as safety as possible.”
The instructors can’t fail the Secretary of State, however (who went through training a few months before we did), so they have to do the best job possible to make the training stick when it comes to diplomatic personnel.
“Even folks that will not necessarily be driving overseas, they still learn to do it just in case something happens,” Mark Perkins, Unit Chief at FASTC. “So they need to go through the training so they know what to do in a bad situation.”
I’m a mediocre driver with poor reflexes, but I love to drive and have had a lot of track time and a reasonable amount of instruction. So for this training, I tried to imagine that I came from a family of diplomats (in the foreign service there are no nepobabies, but there are diplobrats). I grew up in D.C., went to a boarding school like Exeter, and then went to college at Cambridge. I know roughly how to use a car, but I’m used to being driven everywhere.
I try to be the person that Payton, my driving instructor who also happens to be a Baja 1000 class winner, sees on a regular basis. I don’t have to try very hard at first because being myself is enough of a challenge for any instructor I have, mostly because I don’t shut up.
For All The Seriousness, It’s Hard To Pretend This Isn’t Fun
I watched Parker go through the irregularly spaced slalom and Parker, being a race car driver, took it very seriously. His goal was to improve. My goal was to learn what a diplomat might learn so that I could write this piece.
At least that’s how it started. Almost all of the vehicles used for this basic training are Dodge Chargers with V6 engines. By the time the FASTC facility was ready for training, Ford was in the process of discontinuing the Taurus-based police Interceptor and Chevy had already ditched the resurrected Caprice. Mark will buy just about any Crown Vic-based Interceptor he can find, but those are getting older and rarer.
The Chargers work for a few reasons. They are a basic sedan available in RWD or AWD. They are relatively easy to fix and modify. And they can be had with a column shifter.
Parker learned how to drive in a V6 Charger but, for evaluation purposes, FASTC has a few V8s. Payton and I had the V8. Pretty quickly I’m actively trying to be faster. I can’t help it.
The big lesson of this drill is to teach drivers to understand how to balance the main inputs (brakes, gas, steering) and how to use your eyes. For all my supposed experience, I still learn a ton and can feel myself improving. This continues to the wet skidpad, which has a curb in the middle of it for some reason.
Side note: The facility is amazing. It is probably the most varied and maybe the largest driver training facility in the world until someone can prove me wrong. But it’s still a government facility, built by government contractors, on a government budget. There are some weird choices.
There’s the curb in the skipdad, there’s almost no runoff in some areas and big trees (that can’t be removed for environmental reasons), and there’s no parking garage so there are just fields of RHD Landcruisers and armored Suburbans everywhere.
The wet skidpad is fun and I quickly abandon my diplobrat persona and ask Payton to help me drift better, which he does expertly by controlling the throttle while I steer.
Crashing Cars For Safety
My wife did not love the idea of this class. She knows that I sometimes do wild things like fly in military helicopters with the doors open or drive off-road fire trucks in the desert. We have a Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell policy until the event is over, but watching the video of me crashing cars was still upsetting to her. My daughter thought it was hilarious.
While the training that agents and diplomats get does differ–no diplomat needs to learn how to do a J-turn or PIT someone–everyone learns how to crash through a roadblock.
“A lot of times when these folks are overseas they have to travel by themselves, often far away from the cities, to meet with people. In doing so, they might find themselves in a situation where somebody blocks the road and tries to do them harm. So they have to be able to get out of that situation,” explains Mark.
For all I theoretically know about cars, I didn’t know how to crash a car correctly. I assumed that it had something to do with what part of my car I used to crash into their car, and that’s true. If you have the choice, you want to hit a car in its lightest part, which is going to be the trunk (unless it’s a 911).
You do this by lining up either your frame rail or your passenger’s frame rail with the part of the aggressor car you’re trying to hit. That makes instant sense to me when it’s explained.
The where made sense, but the how didn’t until I saw Parker do it. The trick is to slow down until you get near the car and then accelerate into it. This gives you maximum leverage and torque to move the obstacle but without a huge collision that could damage your car’s radiator or otherwise disable the vehicle.
That doesn’t mean you don’t feel it. Payton says he normally doesn’t do the collisions anymore because his neck has had enough of it. Even hitting the fabricated target car your body can’t just shrug off the forces. Curiously, hitting the Volvo S70 that Parker picked out was a lot easier.
Our friend/videographer Erica Lourd took a lap and didn’t slow down as much and just straight-up nailed the target car. It was loud. Here’s what a concussion did to a GoPro:
It might seem like overkill, but for every story we know of involving a diplomat or FCO who faced danger and was injured, there are dozens more where we didn’t hear about it because the training kicked in and everyone lived.
“We’ve got a lot of videos of real things that have happened,” Payton tells me. “One of the coolest ones was an armored Suburban that got hit by a roadside bomb. It blew the whole rear of the car off, basically. The driver had the wherewithal, four-wheel-drive, to just keep rolling. Calm. Cool. Collected… this guy just got blown up and he was like ‘we’re good.’”