Vietnam Veterans Relive War, Let Go

DECATUR, Ga. —  When Randy Kemerley first tried virtual reality therapy last year, this is what he saw:

A jungle clearing. Lush green trees rising in the distance on white trunks. A helicopter whirring by.

It was virtual Vietnam.

“So unreal it was almost comical,” he said. “I couldn’t see how this was going to work.”

Kemerley, now a 51-year-old painting contractor from Atlanta, had served with the Army in Vietnam in 1967-1968. He knew what it was like.

Since he returned stateside, he had been haunted by a sound: The choppa-choppa-choppa of helicopters.

“A helicopter would go over the house, and it would take me back to Vietnam,” he said. He would go on a jag, telling war story after war story for the rest of the day, hollering, angry, trapped in emotional turmoil for days to weeks.

Every few days he’d bump into another cue, like the smell of diesel fuel, and that would set him off again.

He tried drugs and alcohol to escape his memories. He was jumpy; he couldn’t sleep well. He stayed away from people. Diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder.

His therapist at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center near Atlanta told him about an experiment there using virtual reality to treat the disorder. Now Kemerley is one of 18 veterans who have participated in the ongoing study.

“We’re at the baby-steps, explorations stage,” said psychologist David Ready, who is overseeing the research.

So far, it looks like the virtual Vietnam experience can help veterans reduce symptoms like flashbacks, with the effect lasting even six months after the treatment ends, he said.

The goal of the therapy, he said, is to “take hot memories and turn them into bad memories.”

Nobody will ever look back fondly on seeing a buddy blown up. But there’s a line between flashing back to a moment of terror and feeling as if it’s happening again, and just recalling it as a distant, sad event. That’s the line Ready is trying to get the veterans to cross.

Virtual reality is just a tool to enhance an existing, low-tech therapy in which veterans imagine particular troublesome events over and over, filling in the details, establishing context.

“You turn and face the dragon, and you grab it by the neck,” Ready said.

Virtual reality appears to help a veteran stick with the terrifying task of focusing on the horror.

Veterans can enter either of two virtual Vietnam environments. One puts them in a landing zone. By manipulating a joystick, they can move through a swamp, hearing sounds. Helicopters land and take off, flying out of sight. Jungle sounds are fractured by the rat-a-tat-tat of AK47s and M-16s. A bomb explodes; they feel the thump. When they step on a land mine, everything suddenly goes white.

In the other scenario, the vets ride over the jungle in a helicopter, feeling its vibration, hearing radio chatter and seeing tracer bullets fly in the trees.

Both scenarios are too general to reproduce the two or three traumatic incidents the veteran is supposed to focus on over and over. But they effectively set the stage.

“All I’m doing is providing the sights and sounds of Vietnam,” in the sequence that best mimics each veteran’s traumatic experiences, Ready said. “You don’t have to recreate the whole thing, just enough stimuli to get them in touch with the memory. They do the rest.”

Kemerley discovered virtual reality was a powerful tool. “The gunfire would get to me, to the point where I would lock up and not be able to talk,” he said. “I was remembering it so well, and the sound was so identical. . . . I was feeling the fear, wondering where they are, what direction they were coming from.”

Each veteran enters virtual Vietnam for 30 to 45 minutes twice a week for four to six weeks. Each night during that period, the veterans listen to a recording of the experience.

“Doc,” one veteran told Ready, “you’re a nice guy, but coming to you is like going to the dentist and getting a tooth drilled over and over again.”

For Kemerly, the sound of helicopters no longer seizes his mind. It still makes him think of the war, but he quickly realizes it could just be some executive in a hurry.