Rescue Boat Crews Show Signs of Brain Injuries, but Coast Guard Isn’t Looking

“Brett Bonner saved hundreds of lives during 21 years on rescue boats in the Coast Guard. When he died, his teenage daughter Kayleigh wondered why he couldn’t save his own.

 

He was a big, gregarious man who seemed able to handle anything. But as Kayleigh grew up, she watched him slowly fall apart. First came headaches. Then sleeplessness. His memory frayed and his moods turned raw.

 

When he retired from the Coast Guard at age 40 in 2022, things only grew worse. He would rant and scream. One afternoon he dropped her grandfather with one punch. In the months after, he started setting things on fire.

 

On a winter evening in 2025, with a pile of Coast Guard files burning on the living room floor, he walked out the front door and shot himself dead.

 

Kayleigh, her mother, her younger sister and her two little brothers all saw it happen.

 

He left no note. He offered no explanation. His unraveling left his family so perplexed about how to sum up his life that they buried him without a headstone.

 

Kayleigh, who is now 18, was devastated. But after the funeral, she started to wonder.

 

Her father was a surfman — an elite rescuer whose job was to drive lifeboats through crashing waves as high as 25 feet. Maybe all those years crashing into waves had left her father with an unseen brain injury, like a linebacker who had too many tackles. And maybe he wasn’t the only one.

 

She looked for answers from the Coast Guard but found nothing. The service has never studied the hazard that waves may pose to the brain and knows little about the force of the hits or the consequences of years of exposure.

 

With no official sources to rely on, Kayleigh turned to the only source that might offer some clues: other surfmen.

 

She sent questionnaires to scores of them, using a survey of Navy crews as a template, and asked 36 questions about their service and their health. In all, 77 active and retired surfmen responded. Their answers were so stunning that they changed her whole perspective on her father.

 

They showed few surfmen had been diagnosed with a head injury by the Coast Guard, but a vast majority were struggling with the same issues as her father: headaches, memory lapses, cognitive problems, anxiety attacks, mood swings and a list of other ailments that can be symptomatic of brain injuries.

 

Some said the problems were growing worse with time.

 

“My brain has started to fail me. I feel it, I see it,” one responder in his early 50s wrote. “It is difficult to do things that used to be natural to me.”

 

“It has been a struggle for me to keep my life together,” another in his mid-40s wrote.

 

She wrote up the results for her senior-year high school research project. It earned an A, and plans to share her findings with the Coast Guard.

 

Looking for a pattern of brain injury among elite rescue crews was a remarkable thing for a grieving daughter to do. Even more remarkably, the Coast Guard had never done it on its own.

 

The problem is hardly unique to the Coast Guard, but the service has lagged well behind the other branches in recognizing it.

 

As the military develops more powerful vehicles and weapons, it has repeatedly exceeded what the human brain can handle. This has happened to artillery crews firing high-powered cannons, Navy SEALs training with shoulder-fired rockets, fighter pilots catapulted from aircraft carriers, and Navy fast-boat crews pounding across waves.

 

In all these fields, the military missed the threat for decades because the injuries accrue slowly and the symptoms — which can include nightmares, jumpiness and erratic moods — often look like normal reactions to traumatic stress.

 

Unlike other military branches, though, the Coast Guard has no regular testing for brain injuries and no formal briefings on the dangers of wave pounding, surfmen say. Its boat crews face many of the same hazards as Navy crews, but it has not participated in the Navy’s studies. The brain injury website it maintains is more than a decade out of date. Many of the links under the heading “Where to get help” are dead.

 

“The problem is being overlooked; we are not taking care of these people,” said Jay Nilles, 51, a surfman who worked alongside Mr. Bonner and also retired in 2022. “We all signed up knowing this job was dangerous, but no one ever warns you at the end you’ll have serious anxiety, paranoia, headaches — that you’ll go out to the garage to take out the trash and forget why you are there.”

 

The Coast Guard, in response to questions from The New York Times, acknowledged publicly for the first time that brain injuries caused by impacts with waves were an “emerging concern.” This summer, prompted by The Times’s reporting, the service joined a Department of Defense study trying to measure wave impacts on boat crews and began a comprehensive brain health initiative focused on preventing and detection injuries, and providing better care.

 

Kayleigh said it was hard to explore her father’s unraveling.

 

“I didn’t want to ask these questions — I was ashamed, I guess,” she said in an interview at her house, where she sat hugging her knees on a living room sofa. “For the longest time I was just annoyed at my dad for being mad all the time, and for what it put the family through. Now I realize he was just hurt.”

 

“Maybe if we understand this, we can do something differently,” she said. “Maybe we can keep other families from being in the same position.”

 

‘Like 20 car accidents a day’

 

Surfmen race to rescues in 47-foot motor lifeboats built to smash through surf and right themselves if capsized, like a rubber ducky.

 

The boats, known among crews as 47s, are designed to protect from the immediate threats of the ocean, but the crews are exposed to thousands of dangerous jolts as the 40,000-pound boats punch through waves and flop into troughs.

 

“A 20-foot wave breaking on you is like being in a car crash,” said Aaron Harris, who was a surfman for 22 years and retired in 2024. “If you are out training in big surf, that’s like 20 car accidents a day.”

 

At the end of his career, Mr. Harris started to struggle with panic attacks, insomnia, migraines and wild mood swings. After the Coast Guard he was diagnosed with a brain injury by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

 

Many of his fellow surfmen have the same problems, he said, adding, “You can’t get shaken up that many times and not have it impact your brain.”

 

Mr. Bonner spent his entire 21-year career on 47s. When he wasn’t on rescue calls, he was often out practicing in huge surf.

 

After eight years he achieved the top driving certification. Just when he did, he started to fall apart.

 

His wife, Jenna Bonner, noticed he was having trouble sleeping and often woke up thrashing with disturbing dreams.

 

At the time, he was assigned to Coast Guard Station Golden Gate near San Francisco, and his boat regularly recovered people who had jumped to their deaths from the Golden Gate Bridge. Ms. Bonner knew pulling the bodies from the water haunted her husband, and thought, maybe, that was the root problem.

 

“Stress is part of the job, but it got bad; he was drinking to cope,” Ms. Bonner said in an interview. “I was worried that it was PTSD.”

 

She urged him to get help, and he did. The Coast Guard diagnosed him in 2009 with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft. But he kept driving 47s and his symptoms grew worse.

 

In 2012 Mr. Bonner became an instructor at the National Motor Lifeboat School in Washington. Instead of training in heavy surf only occasionally, he started doing it almost daily. He would come home plagued by headaches and grew sensitive to bright lights and loud noises. All were signs of brain injury, but no one was looking.

 

In 2014 he started to have panic attacks before teaching. Once again he went for help. He was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and prescribed the antidepressant Effexor. Still, he kept driving 47s and his symptoms grew worse.

 

In 2015 he started to complain to his wife about “zaps” in his brain. In 2016, he was parked outside a store when he suddenly had a seizure. His kids tried to steady him as he flailed against the dashboard until he was bloody.

 

The Bonners wondered if the cause was a reaction to his anxiety medication, or the result of a boat rollover eight months earlier that left him with a strained back.

 

A civilian neurologist looking over his brain scans afterward noticed something else. Ms. Bonner recalled the neurologist asking her husband, “You’ve had a lot of concussions, haven’t you?”

 

Mr. Bonner shook his head. No, just one in fifth grade, he said.

 

The neurologist showed him gray blotches and other abnormalities in the scans that she said were signs of multiple concussions over a long period of time.

 

The Defense Department maintains a system of world-class brain injury treatment centers. Instead of sending him to one, the Coast Guard sent him back to work.

 

“During all of this, no one ever suggested he might have a brain injury caused by the boats,” Ms. Bonner said.

 

A pattern of anger and violence

 

All along the Pacific Coast, crews exposed to the same waves were experiencing similar problems.

 

Lesslie Sliffe Severns, a Coast Guard veteran who served in surf rescue units for seven years, said the injuries appear to be widespread.

 

She worked on 47s for only two years, but was exposed to so many hard wave hits that she had hip surgery at age 21.

 

“You do these surf drills, going through all these waves, and you feel like you have the worst hangover ever for three days,” she said.

 

After the surgery, she switched to a supply job, but watched as her friends on the boats slowly fell apart. Some started using hard drugs. One is now homeless.  Another is in incarcerated in a mental hospital for a criminal conviction.

 

Her former boss, who worked on 47s for 28 years, had a stroke at age 51. A brain scan revealed widespread blotches of dead brain tissue and small cysts that were evidence of repeated injuries.

 

Ms. Sliffe Severns now helps Coast Guard veterans file V.A. benefits claims. In the 300 she has worked with, she said, the V.A. has documented brain injuries in about a third. Mr. Bonner was one of them.

 

The V.A. does not relay that information back to the Coast Guard.

 

“It shouldn’t be some big mystery that this is happening,” Ms. Sliffe Severns said.

 

Coast Guard passed on study

 

NATO is conducting a study of the problem across 15 countries, and several Coast Guards have joined. The U.S. Coast Guard has not.

 

The Swedish doctor leading the NATO effort, Johan Ullman, started placing sensors on boat decks and on crew members in the Swedish Navy years ago to measure the impacts.

 

The results defied logic. The sensors showed that the force of each hit was several times greater on the crews’ heads than on the deck.

 

“I thought this must be a mistake — how is that possible?” he said in an interview. “Eventually we realized that the force of the heels hitting the deck travels up through the legs and spine and neck like the crack of a whip.”

 

The U.S. Navy uses models that show a similar effect. A wave hit measuring a relatively manageable six times the force of gravity on a fast boat deck can produce a sudden jolt to the head measuring 60 times the force of gravity — the force of a car crash.

 

Repeated jolts of that intensity can trigger a cycle of inflammation and cell death that can lead to permanent damage. One Navy fast-boat driver was found to have severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the progressive brain disease found in athletes who repeatedly hit their heads. Other fast-boat veterans say the problems are widespread.

 

Because the Coast Guard has never studied the problem, there is no clear evidence that time on 47s is producing brain injuries. But Dr. Ullman said there was a good chance that all small-boat crews that repeatedly hit waves were at risk.

 

“This is what we need to study,” he said. “This problem is solvable if we work to understand it.”

 

Searching for help

 

In his lucid moments, Mr. Bonner knew he needed help. He quit drinking, took anger management classes and went to group therapy. Most of the time, he was the same kind of man he had always been. But every year, his symptoms worsened.

 

He struggled to make decisions. Even ordering at a drive-through was overwhelming. He grew paranoid. He was sure his father-in-law, who lived next door, was out to get him and punched him over a minor disagreement about new closet doors.

 

The Sunday in February 2025 when Mr. Bonner died, the family had gone to church. Afterward, he talked with his wife about building a garage, but seemed unable to understand the next steps and grew angry. He grabbed her and twisted her arms painfully behind her back.

 

He started to fixate on how the house was a mess. He threw armloads of old manuals and CDs from his Coast Guard career into the family’s living room fireplace and paced around, yelling nonsensically, while the flaming pile spilled out onto the floor and the room filled with acrid smoke.

 

Ms. Bonner watched from the kitchen, worried that the house was going to burn down.

 

“I honestly don’t know what to do,” she said quietly to Kayleigh. “You can’t reason with Dad when he’s like this. I can’t call Grandpa because Dad will attack him. I can’t call the police. He’ll either kill them or they’ll kill him.”

 

She realized she was on her own. Tears welled up in her eyes.

 

The best thing, she decided, was to take the kids and the dog and leave. If the house burned down, at least they would be safe.

 

She drove them all to Sonic for dinner. On the way she prayed to God for help. She believed her husband was a good man and could learn to manage.

 

When they parked at the restaurant, she took a breath, turned to her kids and said, “Why don’t we call and see if Daddy wants something for dinner.”

 

They rang him on FaceTime and he answered on his daughter’s laptop. He was in front of the house, standing in the darkness. On the screen, his eyes seemed vacant, and his voice was flat.

 

“Turn off your camera,” he started repeating. “Turn off your camera.”

 

The kids were confused. They turned off their camera, but his was still on. He kept repeating the same phrase, “Turn off your camera.”

 

Without warning a gun appeared on the screen. There was a pop. The family watched the screen go black as the laptop fell to the ground.

 

The car filled with silence. Then one of the kids asked, “Did Daddy drop the laptop?”

 

After another silence, Ms. Bonner said, “I think Daddy shot himself.”

 

Surfmen converged from all over the country for the funeral. In low voices, some admitted their own problems. One often punched his own windshield. Another was so anxious that he struggled to work as an assistant middle school shop teacher. They all knew something was wrong, but no one knew what.” [1]

 

1. Rescue Boat Crews Show Signs of Brain Injuries, but Coast Guard Isn’t Looking. Philipps, Dave.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jul 30, 2026.