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

submitted by MeganDelacroix🤡🌎 detainee from (archive.ph)

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[–]fugwb 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

This sounds a lot like what the NFL players that get concussions go through. Only a helluva lot worse.

[–]chakokat 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Is it any wonder that the U.S. armed forces can’t meet recruitment goals? They break you body and soul and then kick you to the curb so they don’t have to pay for ongoing medical care.

Instead, in case after case, 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.

[–]MeganDelacroix🤡🌎 detainee[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's flatly evil, and diametrically opposed to everything I believed growing up about the duties and responsibilities of an officer. The betrayal and abandonment that is the reality of the US military is unforgivable - which is a word I almost never use, but I do so here advisedly.

[–]chakokat 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

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 to, as one retired general said at the time, “pound the bejesus out of them.” The strategy worked: Islamic State positions were all but eradicated, and hardly any American 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 American 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.

[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

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.”

This sounds very similar to what was called being "shell shocked" in previous wars and it still happens. I remember reading accounts from Ukrainian soldiers about how overwhelming it was psychologically to be under constant artillery bombardment.

[–]MeganDelacroix🤡🌎 detainee[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yeah, and this bit was wild.

The 35-foot-long guns had modern, precisely designed titanium parts and a digital targeting system, but when it came to protecting the crew the design had changed little in a century. Gun crews still worked within arm’s reach of the barrel and fired the gun by pulling a simple cord.

[–]penelopepnortneyBecome ungovernable 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Guess some things never change, the health and well-being of humans, even the ones fighting their wars for them, are as irrelevant to them as ever.

[–]MeganDelacroix🤡🌎 detainee[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

When 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, 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 named 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!”