  By MARGARET WERTHEIM Correction Appended In a dusty valley in southern Lebanon, "Sgt. John Smith" of the Special Forces scans the scene in front of him. Ahead is a village known as Talle. His immediate mission: to find out who the local headman is and make his way to that house. All discussions with the villagers will have to be conducted in Arabic, and Sergeant Smith must comport himself with the utmost awareness of local customs so as not to arouse hostility. If successful, he will be paving the way for the rest of his unit to begin reconstruction work in the village. Sergeant Smith is not a real soldier, but the leading character in a video game being developed at the University of Southern California's School of Engineering as a tool for teaching soldiers to speak Arabic. Both the game's environment and the characters who populate it have a high degree of realism, in an effort to simulate the kinds of situations troops will face in the Middle East.
Talle is modeled on an actual Lebanese village, while the game's characters are driven by artificial-intelligence software that enables them to behave autonomously and react realistically to Sergeant Smith. The Tactical Language Project, as it is called, is being developed at U.S.C. 's Center for Research in Technology for Education, in cooperation with the Special Operations Command. From July 12 to 16, real Special Forces soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina will test the game and put Sergeant Smith through his paces. The user plays Sergeant Smith, while the other characters are virtual constructs. Using a laptop, the user speaks for the sergeant, in Arabic, through a microphone headset and controls the character's actions by typing keyboard instructions.
The project is part of a major initiative, financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, to explore new ways of training troops by making use of the large installed base of existing technology, especially laptops. "I'd like to be able to send something like this to every soldier stationed in a foreign country," said Dr. Ralph Chatham, the Darpa project manager. The philosophy is to deliver what Dr. Chatham calls "tactical language," linguistic skills sufficient to the task at hand. Dr. Lewis Johnson, the director of the Center for Research in Technology for Education, or Carte, said, "The basic assumption is that there's certain situations you need to face - such as establishing a rapport with the people you meet and finding out where the headman lives - and how do you cope effectively with those situations.
" The agency hopes the training will enable soldiers to navigate more easily and safely through the Arab world. In its current version, the game teaches Lebanese Arabic. The U.S.C. team is also working on an Iraqi Arabic version. Darpa hopes to have at least some preliminary version to the military by the fall, Dr. Chatham said.
Dr. Johnson, a linguist and an artificial intelligence expert, noted that for English speakers, Arabic is a relatively difficult language, containing sounds that they find hard to distinguish. Moreover, Arabic dialects differ considerably by region. "People who are taught literary Arabic typically have a lot of difficulty on the street," he said. --I need this game. My skills need some work. Andrew B. 
