Army blast exposure probed in gunman’s rampage

Card’s brain to be examined for traumatic injury

After a 40-year-old Army Reservist named Robert Card went on a shooting spree in Lewiston, Maine, in October, his community grasped for answers.

Eighteen people were killed. Neighborhoods were locked down for days as the police hunted for Card. Then, after he was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, his family and fellow soldiers revealed that he had become delusional, paranoid, and potentially violent, and that the police had not acted on their warnings about him for months.

Why he unraveled remains a mystery. But authorities have started to explore one possible answer: Card’s brain may have been damaged by his time in the

Army.

In recent weeks, the state medical examiner has sent part of Card’s brain to a Boston University lab that analyzes brains for maladies caused by repeated hits to the head, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. And Army investigators have asked members of Card’s battalion if his work in the military could have affected his mental state, two soldiers who served with him said.

Publicly, the Army has said almost nothing about Card’s time in uniform — only that he was trained as a petroleum supply specialist and never deployed to combat. But soldiers who spoke to The New York Times said that description left out something crucial: Card worked every summer for years as an instructor at an Army hand grenade training range, where he was rocked by thousands of brain-jarring explosions.

For generations, the military assumed that the blast waves that troops experienced from firing weapons or throwing grenades in training posed no danger to them. It is only in the past few years that increasing evidence of harm from repeated exposure, along with mandates from Congress, has driven the

Defense Department to start trying to track, study, and understand the impact of blast exposure.

Card was a sergeant first class assigned to the Army Reserve’s Third Battalion, 304th Regiment, a training unit based in Maine that runs a two-week summer field course for cadets from the Military Academy at West Point, teaching them how to use rifles, machine guns, antitank weapons, and grenades. Card joined the unit in 2014, the Army said.

One senior member of the platoon who worked with Card for years, and asked not to be named because the Army told soldiers not to speak to the media about him, said that as an instructor, Card worked with grenade launchers, AT4 antitank weapons, and machine guns, but he spent the vast majority of his time on the hand grenade range.

Each summer, all 1,200 West Point cadets have to throw at least one M67 grenade. Most throw two. Card was nearly always one of the instructors with the cadets in the grenade pits. The soldiers from his unit said he could easily have been exposed to more than 10,000 blasts in all.

The Army did not respond to repeated requests for details about Card’s work in uniform.

“The concussion from the grenade is brutal, brutal — it will shake your heart,” the senior platoon member said. “We have a berm at the range that protects from shrapnel, but it doesn’t protect from the blast. Some guys got a lot. Probably too much.”

By age 39, Card was wearing hearing aids.

The senior soldier said that he, too, had hearing trouble, along with headaches and vertigo, and had not slept well in years — all conditions often associated with blast injuries. He added that another longtime soldier in the unit had to be pulled off the grenade training range in 2022 because of mental health concerns. That soldier is currently in a psychiatric hospital, a member of his family said.

“Is it related? I don’t know,” the senior soldier said. “But I know he was right there in the grenade pits with Card.”

Researchers have found a unique pattern of damage in the brains of a number of deceased veterans who were exposed to blasts, but there is no way to detect that damage in living troops. And even if it could be detected, there is no way to predict when the damage might cause a psychiatric disorder, or who might be prone to violence.

Even though so much remains unknown, members of Card’s platoon said they were concerned that simple steps were not being taken to protect soldiers from blasts.

Blast injuries can cause behavioral changes including insomnia, anxiety, mood swings, and substance abuse. Some studies suggest that traumatic brain injuries increase the risk of psychosis, but the evidence is limited.

WORKED ON HAND GRENADE TRAINING

RANGE Soldiers said Robert Card could easily have been exposed to more than 10,000 blasts.