Virtual Iraq

Using simulation to treat a new generation of traumatized veterans.

by Sue Halpern

The program uses sights, sounds, even smells to evoke, and subdue, painful memories.

In November, 2004, when he was nineteen years old, a marine I'll call Travis Boyd found himself about to rush the roof of the tallest building in the northern end of Falluja in the midst of a firefight. Boyd, whose first assignment in Iraq was to the security detail at Abu Ghraib prison, had been patrolling the city with his thirteen-man infantry squad, rooting out insurgents and sleeping on the floors of abandoned houses, where they'd often have to remove dead bodies in order to lay out their bedrolls.

With Boyd in the lead, the marines ran up the building's four flights of stairs. When they reached the top, "the enemy cut loose at us with everything they had," he recalled. "Bullets were exploding like firecrackers all around us." Boyd paused and his team leader, whom he thought of as an older brother, ran past him to the far side of the building. Moments after he got there, he was shot dead. Within minutes, everyone else on the roof was wounded. "We had to crawl out of there," said Boyd, who was hit with shrapnel and suffered a concussion, earning a Purple Heart. "That was my worst day."

It is in the nature of soldiers to put emotions aside, and that is what Boyd did for three years. He "stayed on the line" with his squad and finished his tour of duty the following June, married his high-school girlfriend, and soon afterward began training for his second Iraq deployment, not thinking much about what he had seen or done during the first. Haditha, where he was sent in the fall of 2005, was calmer than Falluja. There were roadside bombs, but no direct attacks. Boyd was now a team leader, and he and his men patrolled the streets like police. When drivers did not respond to the soldiers' efforts to get them to stop, he said, "we'd have to light them up." He was there for seven months...

When Travis Boyd agreed to become a subject in the Virtual Iraq clinical trial, in the spring of 2007, he became one of about thirty-five active-duty and former members of the military to use the program to treat their psychological wounds. Currently, the Department of Defense is testing Virtual Iraq—one of three virtual-reality programs it has funded for P.T.S.D. treatment, and the only one aimed at "ground pounders" like Boyd—in six locations, including the Naval Medical Center San Diego, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and Weill Cornell Medical College, in New York. According to a recent study by the RAND Corporation, nearly twenty per cent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans are suffering from P.T.S.D. or major depression. Almost half won't seek treatment. If virtual-reality exposure therapy proves to be clinically validated—only preliminary results are available so far—it may be more than another tool in the therapists' kit; it may encourage those in need to seek help.

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