Virtual war, real healing

The Humvee plows along a desert road. The engine rumbles underfoot and Blackhawk choppers whirl overhead. A sandstorm blows in, and insurgents pop up and start to shoot with sickening blasts that shatter the windshield. Is that the smell of burning rubber?

Those sensations of war are being fed into a special helmet, goggles and earphones. They are conjured by a computerized virtual reality developed in part by gaming engineers and psychologists at USC and being tested, among other places, at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego. The goal is to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

Universities, private firms and the federal government are pouring millions of dollars into creating and testing such virtual Iraqs to help ease the psychological disorder that, according to a 2004 study by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, affects more than 15% of combat personnel returning from Iraq.

Sufferers may have anxiety, nightmares, flashbacks, emotional numbness, extreme jumpiness and physical pain. Unable to return to combat or civilian jobs, some receive disability payments for years or for life.

With a therapist's supervision, the virtual Iraqs are designed to vividly, yet safely, allow those veterans to confront war experiences in ways that go beyond traditional counseling and drug therapy. The computer programs, even with the somewhat cartoonish digital depictions of combat, seek to relieve trauma by repeatedly revisiting its origins and not letting fear fester. Lt. Cmdr. Robert McLay, a Navy psychiatrist who is a research leader on virtual-reality treatment of PTSD in San Diego, explained that more customary forms of exposure therapy for trauma may require visits to actual locations, such as returning a rape victim to the scene of the assault. "You don't want to send someone who is traumatized back to Iraq," he said. "This allows us to bring someone back, but within the situation here."

And, he said, some PTSD sufferers are unable or unwilling to recall things in counseling sessions without stimuli, such as the digital images of a combat hospital, a recorded Islamic prayer melody or the smell of cordite explosives misted into a psychologist's office.