By Sarah Robinson

Special to the Florida State Times

In an age of instant horror, the forces of healing have just taken a quantum leap. The command post is Florida State University, and the wizard behind the controls is Dr. Charles Figley, director of the FSU Psychosocial Stress Research Program.

Within hours of the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, Figley had taken the lead in organizing a global response from the trauma therapy community.

"I was in the right place at the right time," Figley said. "We can do something because we are connected to the network."

"The network" is a group of some 900 mental-health professionals who treat trauma victims. They are members of the Trauma Forum, a group that communicates by computer through the Internet. Figley founded the Trauma Forum just a year ago.

Within 48 hours of the bombing, Figley had formed the Trauma Assistance Network to ease the mental, emotional and spiritual devastation of the attack.

Hundreds of trauma specialists from all over the world now wait to be assigned to crisis-intervention teams that will go to Oklahoma on missions of mercy. Over the next year Figley will form and dispatch teams in response to specific requests for help from the relief efforts already in place.

Each team will be custom designed to meet the needs of the population it serves. One team, for example, has been formed to work with traumatized people who speak Spanish as a first language.

Figley envisions teams consisting of one to five counselors with on-site access to all the accumulated wisdom of the traumatology profession at their fingertips. Team members in the field will have hand-held personal communicators, which will allow them to call for on-the-spot help if they need it.

It might work like this: A team member sitting in the kitchen of a traumatized family learns that the youngest child already had been hurt in a fire before the bombing. Within minutes the team member can get specialized advice on how to deal with double trauma. His expert could be advising him from anywhere in the world.

Different teams will assist such diverse groups as children, rescue workers, medical personnel, grieving families, law enforcement officials, firefighters and even the American Search Dogs. Numerous teams will train and debrief the counselors, clergy and other helping professionals at the heart of the recovery effort, which is expected to last a year or more.

Symptoms of traumatic stress include intrusive thoughts, nightmares, sleeplessness, anger or depression, headaches, stomach problems and difficulty concentrating.

"Healing is a natural process," Figley said. "But in order to regain peace of mind, trauma victims must be able to recognize, acknowledge and talk about their anxieties, fears and grief." Otherwise, the stress can get shut off from the rest of the system, and the effects of it never go away.

The people in the building at the time of the blast and their families are only a small fraction of those who will need help in the aftermath of what Figley has called "the most disastrous terrorist act in our history." Some traumatic stress is likely to be experienced by everyone in the nation.

In previous disasters, Figley has sometimes seen relief efforts fizzle out long before the crisis is adequately managed, so he is planning his strategy very carefully.

"Mark my words," he said in April, "there will be a greater need (for mental-health services) in September than there is now."

Figley should know. For 20 years he has helped to heal people affected by such events as the War in Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, the Gulf War, the invasion of Afghanistan, earthquakes, Hurricane Andrew and -- closer to home -- the no-name storms and flooding in North Florida in 1993 and 1994.

In some people's lives, it has made all the difference.

Figley recalls being in the Soviet Union in 1988 with a team of traumatologists who had assembled to train mental health professionals working with "Afghanzis," Soviet veterans returning from the war in Afghanistan.

One evening on the way back to Moscow after a picnic in the country, one of the hosts of the mission, himself an Afghanzi, fell apart. Without warning, the 22-year-old man sitting next to Figley on the bus began to cry uncontrollably. Figley held him in his arms.

As the sobbing subsided, Figley got someone else on the bus to interpret the man's outpouring of pain. Back just six weeks from the war, the young man hated himself and felt that his life was no longer worth living. He was considering suicide.

Figley set up a session with him and an interpreter for the next day. Within three hours, the man was able to affirm the goodness of his life and take positive action. He organized the Afghanzi Club, small support groups for the veterans, so they could admit their pain, talk about it and heal.

In hundreds of other people's lives, Figley's work has been a decisive healing factor, but they don't know it. That's because Figley realized early on that he could be most effective in this field by doing research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and by training others in its treatment, rather than treating individuals one-on-one.

He has written three books on stress-related syndromes: Stress Disorders Among Vietnam Veterans (1978); Strangers at Home: Vietnam Veterans Since the War (1980), and Helping Traumatized Families (1989, released the day after the earthquake in San Francisco). He has a fourth coming out this year, Compassion Fatigue.

As a traumatologist, Figley has experienced considerably more than his allotted 15 minutes of fame. He has been invited to the White House and has appeared on "Oprah," "Donahue" and "Nightline," as well as the evening newscasts of all three networks. He has been in People magazine twice and has been quoted numerous times in such publications as the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, Time and U.S. News & World Report.

On the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, he declined a request from CBS News to come to New York and appear that night. He didn't want to leave his work on Internet, so he recommended a colleague in New York instead.

Eight days after the Oklahoma City bombing, Figley's network had been given a public name, Operation Healing, and a slogan, "Be a part of the healing." Already the National Veterans Foundation, the founding philanthropic organizers of Operation Healing, was raising money and amassing thousands of teddy bears to send to the children of Oklahoma City.