Army calls mortars safe; troops report signs of brain injury
After firing about 10,000 mortar rounds during four years of training, one soldier who joined the Army with near-perfect scores on the military aptitude test was struggling to read or do basic math.
Another soldier started having unexplained fits in which his internal sense of time would suddenly come unmoored, sending everything around him whirling in fast-forward.
A third, Sgt. Michael Devaul, drove home from a day of mortar training in such a daze that he pulled into a driveway, only to realize that he was not at his house but at his parents’ house an hour away. He had no idea how he got there.
“Guys are getting destroyed,” said Devaul, who has fired mortars in the Missouri National Guard for more than 10 years. “Heads pounding, not being able to think straight or walk straight. You go to the medic. They say you are just dehydrated, drink water.”
All three soldiers fired the 120 mm heavy mortar – a steel tube about the height of a man, used widely in training and combat, that unleashes enough explosive force to hurl a 31-pound bomb 4 miles. The heads of the soldiers who fire it are just inches from the blast.
The military says that those blasts are not powerful enough to cause brain injuries. But soldiers say that the Army is not seeing the evidence sitting in its own hospital waiting rooms.
In more than two dozen interviews, soldiers who served at different bases and in different eras said that over the course of firing thousands of mortar rounds in training, they developed symptoms that match those of traumatic brain injury, including headaches, insomnia, confusion, frayed memory, bad balance, racing hearts, paranoia, depression and random eruptions of rage or tears.
The military is confronting growing evidence that the blasts from firing weapons can cause brain injuries. So far, though, the Pentagon has identified a potential danger only in a few unusual circumstances, like firing powerful anti-tank weapons or an abnormally high number of artillery shells. The military still knows little about whether routine exposure to lowerstrength blasts from more common weapons like mortars can cause similar injuries.
Answering that question definitively would take a large-scale study that follows hundreds of soldiers for years, and it is impossible to draw sweeping conclusions from a handful of cases. But the soldiers interviewed by
The New York Times have experienced problems similar enough to suggest a disturbing pattern.
Most soldiers said they had fired at least 1,000 rounds a year in training, often in bursts of hundreds over a few days. When they were new at firing, they said, they felt no lasting effects. But with each subsequent training session, headaches, mental fogginess and nausea seemed to come on quicker and last longer. After years of firing, the soldiers experienced problems so severe that they interfered with daily life.
Nearly all of the soldiers interviewed for this article never saw combat, but they were nonetheless haunted by nightmares, anxiety, panic attacks and other symptoms usually attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Nearly all sought medical help from the Army or the Department of Veterans Affairs and were screened for traumatic brain injury, but did not get a diagnosis. Instead, doctors treated individual symptoms, prescribing headache medicine, antidepressants and sleeping pills.
That is in part because of how traumatic brain injuries, known as TBIs, are diagnosed. There is no imaging scan or blood test that can detect the swarms of microscopic tears that repeated blast exposure can cause in a living brain. The damage can be seen only postmortem.
So, doctors screening for TBIs ask three questions: Did the patient experience an identifiable, physically traumatic event, like a roadside bomb blast or car crash? Did the patient get knocked unconscious, see stars or experience other altered state of consciousness at the time? And is the patient still experiencing symptoms?
For a TBI diagnosis, the answer has to be yes to all three.
The problem is that people who are repeatedly exposed to weapons blasts often cannot pinpoint a specific traumatic event or altered state of consciousness, according to Stuart W. Hoffman, who directs brain injury research for the VA. With career mortar soldiers, he said, “if you’re not feeling the effects at the time, but you’re being repeatedly exposed to it, it would be difficult to diagnose that condition with today’s current standards.”
That means injuries that seem obvious to soldiers go unrecorded in official records and become invisible to commanders and policymakers at the top. As a result, weapons design, training protocols and other key aspects of military readiness may fail to account for the physical limits of human brain tissue.
An Army spokesperson, Lt. Col. Rob Lodewick, said in a statement that for decades the Army has been studying how to make weapons safer to fire and is “committed to understanding how brain health is affected, and to implementing evidencebased risk mitigation and treatment.”
Asked if the Army plans to phase out the use of the 120 mm mortar, a mobile weapon that nearly all infantry units use to rain down bombs on enemy positions, Lodewick said no.
Still, there are signs that the Army sees problems with the mortar. It is developing a cone for the muzzle to deflect blast pressure away from soldiers’ heads. And in January, the Army issued an internal safety warning, drastically limiting the number of rounds that soldiers fire in training to no more than 33 rounds a day using the weakest charge, and no more than three rounds a day using the strongest.
That warning, though, makes no mention of brain injury; the stated purpose is to protect troops’ hearing.