Smells can bring back memories, including traumatic memories — so the military may want to inoculate the troops:
“Our goal was to test whether you could pre-expose or inoculate people with these odors, and subsequently prevent the negative memory from taking,” she recounted. “That’s exactly what we showed. You could take an odor that was initially unfamiliar, expose an individual to it in a neutral context, and then when you paired that same odor with a negative experience, it no longer had a strong associative power.”
Prior to Dalton’s findings, the military trained soldiers in mock villages that were accurate recreations of what soldiers might encounter in Afghanistan or Iraq, but only to a point: these mockups failed to mimic the olfactory environment of the Middle East. “They covered everything with visual cues, and sometimes there was smoke,” said Dalton. “But bodies rotting in the sun for days at a time? Food-smells of a very foreign culture? Those were the things that were likely to be present at the time soldiers were experiencing these extreme stressors, and those were the things that were becoming tightly bound to the negative emotional state and persisting well beyond the original experience.”
Adding the mixed stenches of sewage, burning garbage, and local spices might not seem like the most crucial component of building a mock Iraqi village, but the science behind pre-exposure prevention of PTSD was strong. The military and VA took the hint. “I know they are [now] actually doing training with realistic olfactory environments,” Dalton said.
Familiarizing the armed forces with the smells of war not only helps mitigate soldiers’ future memories of traumatic events, it also prepares newly deployed soldiers for the smells of a novel environment that might otherwise distract them from their duties. In 2006, the Army and the Marines began training some of their troops with virtual-reality devices that included high-tech collars designed to emit noisome odors like melting plastic, or rotting flesh, prior to deployment.
Hot and dry canvas on a deuce and a half. Shoe polish and Brasso. Linseed oil for the wooden stock on a M-14.