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 lower-strength 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.