ANALYSIS – Is military training causing severe brain damage to our troops? It has been well reported that Robert Card, the previously kind and easy-going Army reservist-turned-gunman who killed 18 people in Maine, was having mental health issues prior to his mass shooting.
He had even been committed for two weeks to an Army mental hospital, a fact not shared with local police, or not acted upon by law enforcement.
But now, due to lab testing requested by his family, we may have a much better idea of why Card began his rapid mental decline.
And the lab findings may show that military weapons training deemed safe by the Pentagon, is not so safe after all. Especially when it is repeated often and for long periods of time.
Every day, our troops are exposed to large numbers of blasts from grenades, mortars, artillery cannons and rocket launchers in training.
According to the New York Times (NYT), a specialized laboratory that studied Card's brain found severe damage in the Army reservist's brain. The damage they found is similar to that of combat veterans with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) from repeated weapons or explosives blasts.
As ABC News noted:
Traumatic brain injury is caused by a blow to the head. Mild injury may only affect the brain temporarily, while more serious injury can result in bruising, bleeding or more serious damage, and “can cause temporary or short-term problems with normal brain function, including problems with how the person thinks, understands, moves, communicates, and acts,” according to the National Institutes of Health.
Many of our troops who have been hit by Iranian sponsored missile attacks in recent months have suffered these TBIs, even as Team Biden has downplayed them. But Card was never deployed to a combat zone.
Instead, his brain damage appeared to have been caused by his eight years as a grenade instructor in the Army Reserve.
The NYT reported that:
…after…being exposed to thousands of skull-shaking blasts on the training range, he began hearing voices and was stalked by paranoid delusions, his family said. He grew increasingly erratic and violent in the months before the October rampage in Lewiston, in which he killed 18 people and then himself.
The Pentagon lists 14 weapons that unleash blasts and overpressure significant enough to be potentially harmful to the troops employing them. Unfortunately, grenades aren't listed.
These findings are highly damaging to the military, since Card never saw combat, and had never been exposed to enemy fire or roadside bombs (IEDs). His only concussive brain blasts came from “safe” weapons training.
The Times added that: “His brain was sent to a Boston University's C.T.E. Center, a laboratory known for its pioneering work documenting chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., in athletes.”
The NYT continued:
According to the lab's report, prepared on Feb. 26 and updated on Wednesday, the white matter that forms the wiring deep in the brain had “moderately severe” damage, and in some areas was missing entirely. The delicate tissue sheaths that insulate each biological circuit lay in “disorganized clumps,” and throughout Mr. Card's brain there was scarring and inflammation suggesting repeated trauma.
This was not C.T.E., the report said. It was a characteristic pattern of damage that has been found before in military veterans who were repeatedly exposed to weapons blasts during their service.
“While it is unclear whether these pathological findings are responsible for Mr. Card's behavioral changes in the last 10 months of life, based on our previous studies it is likely that brain injury played a role in his symptoms,” the report concluded.
The implications of this are huge, and the Pentagon had better take heed. Our troops need to be better protected not just from TBIs caused by combat, but ones caused by training as well.
Meanwhile, the Card family stated: “By releasing these findings, we hope to raise awareness of traumatic brain injury among military service members, and we encourage more research and support for military service members with traumatic brain injuries.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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