Shock to the System

Soldiers who manage to walk away from explosions in Iraq may actually be suffering terrible—yet invisible—brain trauma. Could blast waves be fueling a new breed of injury?

By Eric Hagerman Posted 08.22.2008 at 9:54 am 8 Comments

HIT THE DECK A roadside bomb explodes in Baghdad. Improvised explosive devices cause up to 60 percent of American military injuries in Iraq. While body armor keeps most soldiers alive, blasts may be causing hidden damage to the brain. John Moore/Getty Images

August 15, 2008— The first time Army Specialist Frederick Hussey “got blown up in Iraq,” as he says, was on Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006. Hussey was five months into his yearlong deployment as an infantry medic when a cluster of anti-tank explosives jolted his Humvee off the road some 50 miles south of Baghdad. The blast filled the cabin with acrid black smoke, but Hussey was able to jerk the wheel back and steer the truck to safety. “Everybody ended up being OK with that one,” Hussey says. “You know—shook up and all, but there was no loss of life. I would say that one just rang my bell really hard.”

Hussey stands a sturdy 5-foot-10, speaks with a Southern twang, and prides himself on being the only guy the other guys will hug—the papa bear to his fellow cavalry scouts. He worked for 13 years as a grocery-store manager after returning from the Gulf War, and then in 2004 he reenlisted, asking to be a medic because he wanted to help.

The second, third and fourth times Hussey was hit, he was riding in vehicles when they were destroyed by improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, buried in the road. During one attack, he took shrapnel to the cheek and was briefly knocked out. Another one earned him a patch that reads “IED bait” from his buddies. But each time he managed to walk away.

Number five was the worst. He and six others from his platoon were patrolling on foot near their base when an IED blew everyone off the road. “The last thing I remember was seeing my feet in the sky,” Hussey says. “I could hear them hollering for a medic, so I got up, but I kept falling over. I think that’s where my headaches and my hearing damage came from.” He was back on patrol inside of a week.

Hussey was “functioning at about 75 percent,” he says, when two weeks later a rocket-propelled grenade delivered his final blast of the war, exploding against a cement wall 20 yards away as he tried to hustle an injured soldier to safety. It knocked him down but didn’t knock him out—another close call.

Or so he thought. Within a year of his return home, Hussey was told he had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a psychological condition that can develop in the emotional aftermath of a life-threatening event. He was also diagnosed with a mild traumatic brain injury, the medical term for concussion. Only there’s nothing mild about it. His experience left him with constant headaches, nausea, garbled hearing, insomnia and alarming memory lapses. Concussion symptoms are supposed to clear up in a few weeks or months, but two years later, Hussey, 39, still has them. “At first I thought I was doing OK,” says Hussey, who is now posted at Fort Jackson, in his hometown of Columbia, South Carolina. “But as time went by, it got to where I couldn’t remember the names of guys I was deployed with. I was having difficulty concentrating. It started snowballing, and I was forgetting things and struggling to cope. It’s hard to explain, but it’s just affected everything I do.”

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8 Comments

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lpbman

08/24/08 at 12:02 pm

Are you sure that Rand survey was talking about all deployed troops? That number seems high, and I wonder if they weren't referring to front line soldiers.
Anyone have a direct reference?

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JDiez

08/25/08 at 6:56 am

Perhaps would be good to try a Faraday cage kind of system integrated inside a helmet.
That's a way to protect from EMP

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Bentfish

08/25/08 at 10:08 pm

The first commentor may have been dropped on his head as a child. I suffered a TBI in 1991 and spent the next fifteen years recovering from it. When I awoke from an induced coma, my IQ had been cut in half. I was Forrest Gump without the math. It took 15 years to get it back to 124, still a 20% loss of cognitive function. And will they even have that much to spare? I still suffer the sequeli today.
Is the army willing to put the monies needed for thousands to recover from this type of long term disability. Or are we headed to a situation like the post vietnam era. With untreated soliers living under bridges and self medicating with drugs and alcohol.

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Wake2sa

09/06/08 at 5:30 pm

The brief but extreme blast forces on the thorax and abdomen force venous and arterial blood as well as cerebral spinal fluid retrograde into the cranium like multiple caliber shotgun blasts through foramina or openings at the base of the skull. The brain, having no place to go, receives multiple traumatic squeezing forces due to the different diameters of these openings. Neuroimaging should reveal evidence of injury in keeping with these anatomic alterations along the inferior surfaces of the brain and along the course of major vascular supply and CSF spaces. I propose preventing or reducing these blast forces by wearing a blast resistant, hard shell of strong carbon composite material over the entire chest and abdomen minimizing these pressures to the brain and thereby preventing these devastating injuries.

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wafflehead

10/06/08 at 3:51 pm

i'm not sure, what is needed, but the one thing thats certain is that a much better system is needed to protect our troops!

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bpursun

10/22/08 at 11:31 am

I FOUND THAT THIS ARTICLE IS CORRECT IN THE SYPTOMS, BUT WRONG IN THE REASON. THIS IS BATTLE FATIGUE, AND THE SAME AS THE VIETNAM VETERANS SUFFERED.
THE EARLY ARTICLE IN THE SAME ISSUE IS VERY ACCURATE.
LONG PERIONS OF STRESS = PLUS A MAJOR SHOCK OF ANY KIND IS THE ISSUE.
IT PRODUCES CORTISON WHICH DAMAGES THE HIPPOCAMPUR AND THE ENTIRE PITUATARY GLAND. THIS AFFECT THE ENTIRE BODAY. THE DIAGRAM AT THE END IS EXTREMELY CORRECT IN THE RUSULT. RESEACH IT YOURSELF AND FIND OUT.

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Mike Cook

from Kent, WA

11/20/08 at 5:37 am

Way back in the 1950's and 1960's there was a German guy who had survived a grenade explosion next to his body in W.W.II and developed a theory about how a properly positioned human body can survive an explosion if the shrapnel doesn't kill the subject. The ex-soldier developed a carnival routine which I witnessed during a demolition derby half-time. He built a coffin out of cheap plywood and about a foot from the head of it was placed a stick of 50% dynamite. Then he would lay down in the coffin without even a helmet and detonate the explosive, spectacularly demolishing the coffin and leaving himself unharmed.

As an entertainment routine this act was spectacular (I believe I read about it in Popular Science before actually seeing it) but took place so quickly that the guy had to do a lot of talking and build-up in order to hold 15 minutes of the audience's attention until a climax that would only take a micro-second.

In his heavily accented English the guy admitted that he had gone deaf from doing this stunt. He also said that the closest he had come to being really hurt was when he performed the routine out on the end of a pier at a marina show in Florida. The plan was that the blast would drop him spectacularly into the water. It worked as planned but what he didn't know is that explosions create a great amount of static electricity. As soon as he contacted the water he suffered serious burns over a good part of his body.

I can't remember his name other than that it was German.

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Neuuubeh

01/09/09 at 11:26 am

So, shockwaves from explosions can damage the human body... How is this a surprise really? Receiving an abrupt blow to the head can lead to coma, but apprarently having a grenade explode a couple of meters from the head cannot be dangerous??

This kind of reminds me of the first experiments with atomic weaponry, noone thought the radiation could be "bad" - we all know how that turned out.