"You feel like you're going to die: Your heart's beating out of your chest, your blood pressure's going up and you want to just get away from it all," Army Col. Michael J. Roy, a medical internist and director of Military Internal Medicine who oversees Virtual Iraq, said of the treatment. "But you can make it through it. And you realize you're going to be OK."

The traditional form of PTSD treatment is known as "imaginal" therapy. In an average session, patients may be asked to close their eyes and provide a first-person account of their traumatic recollection as thoroughly as memory allows: what they saw, smelled, and heard. But instincts often bar subjects from willingly revisiting these terrifying moments in vivid detail.

"It works well for those who can do that, but one of the cardinal features of PTSD is avoiding the trauma," Roy said. "So you're asking somebody who wants to avoid any reminder, 'Tell me everything you can about what happened.'

"If you can do that, great -- there's a good chance you're going to be cured. But are you going to be able to do it? Are you going to put up with it and keep coming back? A lot of people don't."

Though it's still in the early test phases, Roy and a team of therapists at Walter Reed hope to show the medical community that virtual reality exposure therapy can be more effective than its
classic counterpart.

So what is the starkest contrast between the methodologies of imaginal therapy and Virtual Iraq?

"We're deliberately creating some anxiety," Roy said. "To once again witness a battle buddy getting shot, or smell the residue of a roadside bomb dredges up memories more quickly and in greater detail than merely talking.

"You really do need to create some degree of stress or anxiety for this approach to work," Roy said. "It basically helps to remind the subject of what they felt, and then they remember all kinds of elements that were either suppressed or hard for them
to describe."

Virtual Iraq works somewhat like a backhoe, pulling buried memories to the surface by their roots. But the therapy is far from an instrument of penetrating force. On the contrary, one of the computers acts as a physiological feedback loop, safeguarding against experiences that are too emotionally high-charged.

From the back of this machine runs cables that stick to the patient, monitoring blood pressure, heart rate, and levels of perspiration and respiration. The virtual landscape builds piecemeal,

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