A Secret War, Strange New Wounds and Silence From the Pentagon.

"When then-Lance Cpl. Javier Ortiz came home from a secret mission in Syria, the ghost of a dead girl appeared to him in his kitchen. She was pale and covered in chalky dust, as if hit by an explosion, and her eyes stared at him with a glare as dark and heavy as oil.

The 21-year-old Marine was part of an artillery gun crew that fought against the Islamic State group, and he knew that his unit’s huge cannons had killed hundreds of enemy fighters. The ghost, he was sure, was their revenge.

A shiver went through him. He backed into another room in his apartment near Camp Pendleton in California and flicked on the lights, certain that he was imagining things. She was still there.

A few days later, in the barracks not far away, a 22-year-old Marine, Lance Cpl. Austin Powell, pounded on his neighbor’s door in tears and stammered, “There’s something in my room! I’m hearing something in my room!”

His neighbor, Lance Cpl. Brady Zipoy, 20, searched the room but found nothing.

“It’s all right; I’ve been having problems, too,” Zipoy said, tapping his head. The day before, he bent down to tie his boots and was floored by a sudden avalanche of emotion so overwhelming and bizarre that he had no words for it. “We’ll go see the doc,” he told his friend. “We’ll get help.”

All through their unit — Alpha Battery, 1st Battalion, 11th Marines — troops came home feeling cursed. And the same thing was happening in other Marine and Army artillery units.

An investigation by The New York Times found that many of the troops sent to bombard the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017 returned to the United States plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression and, in a few cases, hallucinations. Once-reliable Marines turned unpredictable and strange. Some are now homeless. A striking number eventually died by suicide, or tried to.

Interviews with more than 40 gun crew veterans and their families in 16 states found that the military repeatedly struggled to determine what was wrong after the troops returned from Syria and Iraq.

All the gun crews filled out questionnaires to screen for post-traumatic stress disorder and took tests to detect signs of traumatic brain injuries from enemy explosions. But the crews had been miles away from the front lines when they fired their long-range cannons, and most never saw direct fighting or suffered the kinds of combat injuries that the tests were designed to look for.

A few gun crew members were eventually given diagnoses of PTSD, but to the crews, that didn’t make much sense. They hadn’t, in most cases, even seen the enemy.

The only thing remarkable about their deployments was the sheer number of artillery rounds they had fired.

The United States had made a strategic decision to avoid sending large numbers of ground troops to fight the Islamic State, and instead relied on airstrikes and a handful of powerful artillery batteries. The strategy worked: Islamic State positions were all but eradicated, and hardly any U.S. troops were killed.

But it meant that a small number of troops had to fire tens of thousands of high-explosive shells — far more rounds per crew member, experts say, than any U.S. artillery battery had fired at least since the Vietnam War.

Military guidelines say that firing all those rounds is safe. What happened to the crews suggests that those guidelines were wrong.

The cannon blasts were strong enough to hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and each unleashed a shock wave that shot through the crew members’ bodies, vibrating bone, punching lungs and hearts, and whipping at cruise-missile speeds through the most delicate organ of all: the brain.

More than a year after Marines started experiencing problems, the Marine Corps leadership tried to piece together what was happening by ordering a study of one of the hardest-hit units, Fox Battery, 2nd Battalion, 10th Marines.

The research was limited to reviewing the troops’ medical records. No Marines were examined or interviewed. Even so, the report, published in 2019, made a startling finding: The gun crews were being hurt by their own weapons.

More than half the Marines in the battery had eventually received diagnoses of traumatic brain injuries, according to a briefing prepared for Marine Corps headquarters. The report warned that the experience in Syria showed that firing a high number of rounds, day after day, could incapacitate crews “faster than combat replacements can be trained to replace them.”

The military did not seem to be taking the threat seriously, the briefing cautioned: Safety training — both for gun crews and medical personnel — was so deficient, it said, that the risks of repeated blast exposure “are seemingly ignored.”

Despite the concerns raised in the report, no one appears to have warned the commanders responsible for the gun crews. And no one told the hundreds of troops who had fired the rounds.

Instead, the military treated the crews’ combat injuries as routine psychiatric disorders, if they treated them at all. Troops were told they had attention deficit disorder or depression. Many were given potent psychotropic drugs that made it hard to function and failed to provide much relief.

Others who started acting strangely after the deployments were simply dismissed as problems, punished for misconduct and forced out of the military in punitive ways that cut them off from the veterans’ health care benefits that they now desperately need.

The Marine Corps has never commented publicly on the findings of the study. It declined to say who ordered it or why and would not make the staff members who conducted it available for interviews. Officers who were in charge of the artillery batteries declined to comment for this article or did not respond to interview requests.

The silence has left the affected veterans to try to figure out for themselves what is happening.

Many never have.

Powell, who was hearing things in his room, left the Marines and became a tow truck driver in Kentucky, but he kept having paralyzing panic attacks on the road. In 2018, a year and a half after returning from Syria, he shot himself.

His neighbor in the barracks, Zipoy, moved back to his parents’ house in Minnesota and started college. In 2020, he began hearing voices and seeing hidden messages in street signs. A few days later, in the grips of a psychotic delusion, he entered a house he had never been in before and killed a man he had never met.

When the police arrived, they found him wandering barefoot in the driveway. As they handcuffed him, he asked, “Are you going to take me to the moon?”

He was found not guilty of murder by reason of mental illness in 2021 and was committed to a locked ward of the Minnesota Security Hospital. He is still there today.

“Oh, my God, I was out of my mind. There was no understanding of what was happening,” he recalled in a recent interview from the hospital.

“I’m angry, because I tried to get help in the Marines,” he said. “I knew something was wrong, but everybody just kind of blew it off.”

Unseen Risks

Firing weapons is as fundamental to military service as tackling is to football. And research has started to reveal that, as with hits in football, repeated blast exposure from firing heavy weapons like cannons, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets and even large-caliber machine guns may cause irreparable injury to the brain. It is a sprawling problem that the military is just starting to come to grips with.

The science is still in its infancy, but evidence suggests that while individual blasts rippling through brain tissue may not cause obvious, lasting injury, repeated exposure appears to create scarring that eventually could cause neural connections to fail, according to Gary Kamimori, a senior Army blast researcher who retired recently after a career studying the problem.

“Think of it like a rubber band,” he said. “Stretch a rubber band a hundred times, and it bounces back, but there are micro-tears forming. The hundred-and-first time, it breaks.”

Those blasts might never cause a person to see stars or experience other signs of concussion, but over time, they may lead to sleeplessness, depression, anxiety and other symptoms that in many ways resemble PTSD, according to Dr. Daniel Perl, a neuropathologist who runs a Defense Department tissue bank that preserves dead veterans’ brains for research.

“It’s common to mistake a blast injury in the brain for something else, because when you walk into a clinic, it looks like a lot of other things,” Perl said.

His lab has examined samples from hundreds of deceased veterans who were exposed to enemy explosions and blasts from firing weapons during their military careers. The researchers found a unique and consistent pattern of microscopic scarring.

Finding that pattern in living veterans is another matter. There is currently no brain scan or blood test that can detect the minute injuries, Perl said; the damage can be seen only under microscopes once a service member has died. So there is no definitive way to tell whether a living person is injured. Even if there were, there is no therapy to fix it.

The lab hasn’t examined any brains from artillery units sent to fight the Islamic State, but Perl said that he would not be surprised if many of them were affected. “You have a blast wave traveling at the speed of sound through the most complex and intricate organ in the body,” he said. “Wouldn’t you think there would be some damage?”

The military for generations set maximum safe blast-exposure levels for eardrums and lungs but never for brains. Anything that didn’t leave troops dazed was generally considered safe. But that has recently changed.

Over the past decade, veterans suffering from brain injurylike symptoms after years of firing weapons pressured Congress to rethink the potential dangers, and lawmakers passed a number of bills from 2018 to 2022 ordering the Pentagon to start a sprawling “Warfighter Brain Health Initiative” to try to measure blast exposure and develop protocols to protect troops.

In response to questions from the Times, both the Army and Marine Corps acknowledged that some gun crew members were injured by blasts during the fight against the Islamic State. In part because of that experience, the branches say they now have programs to track and limit crews’ exposure.

But a Marine officer currently in charge of an artillery battery questioned whether that was accurate. He said recently that he has never seen or heard of the new safety guidelines and that nothing was being done to document his troops’ blast exposure.

The officer, who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said he was experiencing splitting headaches and small seizures but was worried that his injuries would not be acknowledged because there was no documentation that he was ever exposed to anything dangerous.

In short, he said, there is little in military regulations now that might stop what happened to the artillery troops in Syria and Iraq from happening again.

Damage at a Nano Scale

The Defense Department has spent more than $1 billion in the past decade to research traumatic brain injury, but it still knows very little about what might have happened to the artillery crews. Nearly all of the research has focused on big explosions from roadside bombs and other enemy attacks, not the blast waves from the routine firing of weapons.

Still, as that research progressed and studies tried to define the threshold at which an explosion caused brain damage, a growing amount of data suggested that the level was much lower than expected — so low, in fact, that it wasn’t much different from what troops experienced when they pulled the cord on an artillery cannon.

In 2016, while the U.S. military was exposing gun crews in Iraq and Syria to repeated artillery blasts, a research team was doing something similar to lab mice at the University of Missouri.

In a series of tests, the team placed mice a few feet from a lump of C4 explosive that was sized to produce a blast just above the military’s official safety level.

After the blast, the mice were returned to their cages and started scampering around, apparently unaffected.

“We were very disappointed. We didn’t see anything abnormal,” said Dr. Zezong Gu, who led the research.

But the picture changed over the next few days. Mice instinctively build nests, and researchers use the quality of their nests as a bench mark of well-being. The blasted mice built only ramshackle nests, often leaving them unfinished.

In later experiments, blasted mice were put through mazes. They made more wrong turns than healthy mice and sometimes froze, refusing to explore the mazes at all.

The team then dissected the animals’ brains. At first, they found almost no damage.

“Everything looked fine until we looked at a nano scale,” Gu said.

Under an electron microscope, a ravaged neural landscape came into focus. Sheaths of myelin, vital for insulating the biological wiring of the brain, hung in tatters. In key parts of the brain that control emotion and executive function, large numbers of mitochondria — the tiny powerhouses that provide energy for each cell — were dead.

“It was remarkable. The damage was very widespread,” Gu said. “And that was just from one explosion.”

Of course, the brains of mice and humans are very different. Dr. Scott Cota, a Navy captain and brain injury expert, said it was unclear whether the same damage would occur in human brains. Researchers can’t expose humans to damaging blasts and then dissect them the way they can mice, he said. And techniques are not yet available to detect microscopic trauma in living brains.

“It’s very hard to study,” Cota said. “And unfortunately, we can only do it post-mortem at this point.”

The artillery gun crews present a rare and valuable chance to understand how blasts affect the brain, but no researchers are tracking them. It’s not clear if anyone in a position to learn from them is even aware that this unique group of combat veterans exists.

Most of the crew members have drifted out of the military to corners of the country where they continue to quietly grapple with headaches, depression and confusion that they don’t understand.

Alex Sabol loaded charges in Iraq. He was honorably discharged and given a monthly veterans’ pension. His family pays for a private psychotherapist. Even so, he has struggled.

After the deployment, he felt as if his moods had gone feral. The Army gave him a diagnosis of anxiety, depression, attention-deficit disorder and PTSD.

He is now in college. He tries to eat well and exercise.

But he has terrifying mood swings. Last year, he started punching himself. In autumn, he found himself in tears in his kitchen, in a pushup position hovering over a butcher knife, unsure why he had an overwhelming urge to plunge it into his heart.

This spring, he tried to hang himself. His girlfriend cut him down. She has since moved out.

“I’m scared to death,” he said. “I don’t want to die. And I don’t get why I get into those horrible places.”" [1]

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1. A Secret War, Strange New Wounds and Silence From the Pentagon. Philipps, Dave; Callahan, Matthew.  New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast); New York, N.Y.. 05 Nov 2023.