Then he gave therapists a menu of ways—visual, aural, tactile, even olfactory—to customize them. Maybe the gunner in the turret is wearing night-vision goggles—the landscape goes grainy and green. A sandstorm could be raging the driver can turn on the windshield wipers and beat it back ; a dog could be barking; the inside of the vehicle could be rank.
What do you think about adding the smell of burning hair? He had flown in the night before to install the latest software upgrade, which he was introducing to the therapist, a slight young woman in her thirties. Let me blow up this car. It just breaks the presence. The insurgents just pop up. You have to learn where they are, too. The first time I put on a head-mounted display and headphones and entered Virtual Iraq had been in this same room, at Walter Reed, a few months earlier, after Rizzo presented preliminary results from a study site to a small gathering of military officials.
Of the five subjects who had completed treatment, four no longer met the diagnostic criteria for P. A fifth soldier showed no gain.
To these he would add, a few months later, the results for ten others, eight of whom had got better. Of the six research sites, San Diego was the first to have preliminary results. After talking more generally about the features of Virtual Iraq, Rizzo invited everyone present to the fourth-floor psychiatric wing to try it out. Although I had seen Virtual Iraq in one dimension on a computer monitor, encountering it in three dimensions, with my eyes blinkered by the headset and my ears getting a direct audio feed, was different.
It still felt like make-believe, but I was fully engaged. Rizzo placed a dummy M4 rifle in my hands, and guided my fingers to a video controller fixed to the barrel. By design, patients who use Virtual Iraq do not fire weapons; the M4 is a mood-setting device, for verisimilitude. One toggle moved me forward, another moved me back, and a third sped me up or slowed me down. Because the display tracked with the orientation of my head, whichever way I moved determined not only what I saw but where I went.
Inside were two insurgents, one on his knees, with his hands tied behind his back, the other dead on the ground.
A baby was crying. I moved on. It was so realistic that when a virtual insurgent popped up across the virtual street from the virtual building in which I was standing, his bullets made successive holes in the virtual wall behind me and seemed to shower plaster dust through the air. The Virtual Iraq design team, two artists and a programmer, worked out of FlatWorld, and it was their system, with the most recent improvements and additions, that I was using.
This time, Rizzo sat me in a chair placed over a bass shaker, which is also known as a tactile transducer, a device that transmits the feel of sound. I slipped on the display and the headphones, and Rizzo pressed some keys on his computer and made me the driver of a Humvee, with a soldier in desert fatigues sitting next to me and another in the back.
Because the gunner was in the turret, when I looked in the rearview mirror I saw only his boots and his pant legs. As soon as I started up the vehicle, the floor under me began to vibrate and my ears filled with the hum of tires on pavement.
Suddenly, a gunman appeared on the overpass above me and started to shoot. Off to my right, a car burst into flames. Half a second later, the explosion entered my body through my feet and ears. I had never been to Iraq. I had never been to war. The scene did not conjure any memories for me, traumatic or otherwise. I had seen, though, what might happen if it triggered an emotional response, when an actor named Ed Aristone, who had been cast in a movie about the Iraq conflict and wanted to get a sense of what combat was like, put on the head-mounted display at FlatWorld and found himself in the midst of a war.
Rizzo cued up car bombs, shouting soldiers, ambient city sounds, blinding smoke, inert bloody bodies, the call to prayer, a child running across the street, the cough of an AK, snipers, a nighttime gale—all ten plagues and their cousins at once. Aristone started to sweat.
His heart was racing. His hands were numb. He was having a hard time holding the rifle. His face went white. He bit his lips. You have to understand the patient. You have to know which stimuli to select. You have to know when to ramp up the challenges. Someone comes in and all they can do is sit in the Humvee, maybe with the sound of wind, and may have to spend a session or two just in that position.
For P. Patients are often unable to work or even leave their homes. On one support website for suffering soldiers and their families the girlfriend of a victim wrote: "I'm so desperate This situation is destroying me. A course of the experimental therapy might begin with the patient standing next to a Humvee truck in the virtual world - which is based on the computer game Full Spectrum Warrior.
Once they are comfortable the therapist might ask them to get in, start the engine and drive away. We do this in a very measured and progressive fashion based on what the client can handle. Sounds and smells seem to evoke the most powerful memories.
Sounds such as bombs are accompanied by vibrations from a sub-woofer speaker under the seat. Different smells are used including gunpowder, cordite, burning rubber, Iraqi spices, barbecued lamb and body odour.
Researchers are looking into replicating the smells of blood and burnt flesh. Prior to battle, some U. Indeed, Tamte had previously developed such training systems for the military. This culture helped create individuals like U. And although U. Of course, this further dehumanizes civilians. At the end of the day, after marching through the animated rubble-strewn streets of Fallujah, the gamers will be able to put down their controllers and kiss their loved ones good night before crawling into their own beds.
Their lives are not a game. Ahmed Twaij is an independent Middle East analyst and an advisor to the Iraqi nongovernmental organization Sanad for Peacebuilding. He is also a photojournalist and has worked with a number of international humanitarian and human rights organizations. Twitter: twaiji.
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