There are few things in the world, if anything, that could ever prepare a person for watching a buddy’s foot get blown off by an IED. But that’s precisely the task that the British government is trying to accomplish. Before trauma medics are ever deployed to traumatic environments, it’s hoping to use the popular virtual reality gaming headset, the Oculus Rift, to give them a sense of realistic battlefield stress.

“When someone’s been hit by an explosive and the foot’s been blown off, you want to make sure the pallor on the face is correct; you want to stop the bleeding,” says Collette Johnson, a manager at Plextek, the electronics design consulting firm that worked on the project. “We wanted to make sure it was life-like, the breathing, the way you can put a tourniquet on. We needed something that made people feel like they were in the situation.”

We wanted to make sure it was life-like, the breathing, the way you can put a tourniquet on.

As a result, Plextek has co-developed a battlefield simulation that takes place in a generic, sandy town, perhaps somewhere in Afghanistan. The person wearing the VR headset will hear flying bullets while entering a building, find the casualties, triage them, and then phone the medical center to take them away. But unlike VR exposure therapy, which treats veterans who have already been to war with virtual reality reenactments, the Plextek simulation aims to simulate the stress of being there for those who haven’t yet deployed.

It’s an emerging and sensitive area of research.

There’s some evidence that realistic wartime scenarios can actually help make people more resilient before they hit the front lines, says psychologist Albert “Skip” Rizzo, who works on a number of U.S. Department of Defense research projects related to virtual reality simulations and PTSD at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. At the same time, he acknowledges, researchers have to be careful.

Rizzo’s simulations, for example, also run soldiers through horrible Iraq and Afghanistan narratives, but add a training session when the plot takes a dark turn.

“Within each episode, it’s sort of like instead of watching Band of Brothers on the couch, you’re in it,” he says. “And the event is actually drawn from the kinds of stories we hear from our PTSD population, the things that haunt them. The death of a child. Seeing women beaten. Seeing somebody laying in the road but not being able to go help them for fear that a bomb is attached to them.”