THE RECRUITS
“Hey! Let’s go help!” But they are
silenced by the sergeant, who warns
them that this may be an ambush.
“That guy may be innocent,”
the sergeant says, “Or he may
have a pound of C4 [explosive] on
him. Maybe he’s just lyin’ there
waitin’ for us to get near, and he
or one of his buddies in that village hits the switch and boom!
You’re dead — or if you’re lucky,
you’re laying in the ditch with no
arms or legs ... I’ve seen it happen.
Sometimes, life sucks.”
The soldiers call for a robot to
investigate, but while they wait,
a friendly and wise mentor appears on the screen. “I’m Capt.
Branch. My job is to turn up at
key moments to help you develop
the resilience you will experience
in and around combat,” he says
in an avuncular tone. “Today you
stood by and did nothing while a
man bled to death on the roadway.
How’d that feel? Wrong? Frustrating? Overwhelming? It sucked,
didn’t it? This kind of twisted crap
happens all the time here. Your
natural impulses are going to be
challenged at every turn.”
The scenarios are intended not
to provide specific answers, but
to introduce troops to morally
ambiguous situations and to get
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them thinking and talking about
how to deal with them. But the
bottom line is that morality, in
war, is different.
“What you’ve learned from
every good and decent person in
your life is sometimes going to
have to go on the back burner,”
says the Capt. Branch character.
Their ability to make split-second
moral assessments, a function
of the prefrontal cortex of the brain,
may not be fully developed,
researchers say, a fact that may be
familiar to any parent of teenagers.
“The right thing to do, in San
Diego or Charlotte ... could get
you killed here.”
Whether or not the VR scenarios help troops prepare for combat is unclear. But some answers
may come from a pilot project
Rizzo is running with a Colorado
National Guard special operations team scheduled to deploy to
Afghanistan later this year. The
project is underwritten by the
U.S. Army Research Lab, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) and the Infinite
Hero Foundation, which supports