His job is to shoot down - in a virtual way - the American pilots who come here to train, jamming their radar, locking on to shoot a missile. The fight's on when Sullivan climbs into his F-16 Falcon. Once we fly over those ranges, at that point it's pretty much the fight's on.' 'Where all the training and the important stuff. 'Beyond that range is actually where all the fighting happens,' he says. He points to his battlefield off in the distance, just on the other side of a snow-covered peak. Sullivan is a short, stocky and affable 30-year-old Air Force Academy graduate from Massachusetts. Even the bar stools are painted with Russian red stars. In the squadron's small bar, called a Heritage Room, bullet-riddled pieces of Soviet planes hang on the wall. Soviet and Cuban flags hang in the briefing rooms, next to a large Russian air-to-air missile.

The Cold War seems to be everywhere at this desert base no matter that the Soviet Union came to an end when Sullivan was 10 years old.

'You can see it's tracked - it almost looks like a tank, except couple of missiles onboard there,' Sullivan says, explaining that the former Soviet Union would have used those types of vehicles. In their minds, the only enemy worth playing these days is the Soviet Union.Īcross the street sits an old armored vehicle. Sullivan's squadron plays the enemy in the training exercise.

Red flag war games