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Injuries from explosions – bombs, IEDs, grenades – are sadly so common in the U.S. military, that it has a whole office for research into these injuries.
The Blast Injury Research Coordinating Office, which was created in 2007, hosts frequent international conferences on these injuries, which impact tens of thousands of service members and veterans.
The research it has conducted and commissioned has found that exposure to blasts, especially in combat zones, can have many long-lasting effects. Beyond physical injuries that are often sustained in these explosions, service members frequently experience hearing loss and traumatic brain injuries, the latter of which is getting increased attention from the Defense Department.
It is also becoming increasingly clear that exposure to blasts has neurological impacts, some of which may not be apparent until much later.
The New York Times reported this week that blast exposure could have played a role in the deteriorating mental health of Robert R. Card II, the shooter who left 18 people dead and 13 injured in Lewiston in October. Samples from his brain are being studied by a laboratory, at Boston University, that specializes in problems associated with brain trauma.
Card was a member of the Army Reserve where he was a petroleum supply specialist. But, he also worked as a weapons instructor, specifically teaching his Army colleagues how to throw grenades.
The soldiers from his unit told the Times he could easily have been exposed to more than 10,000 blasts in all.
It is far too early to draw clear lines to what caused Card’s deadly rampage, but with what is already known about the consequences of blast exposure, it is clear that much more research needs to be done, especially into the non-combat, but frequent, exposure that military members like Card have experienced. This research can help inform changes that should be made to minimize the impacts for service members who endure frequent blast impacts.
If a better understanding of these impacts can help prevent more families from experiencing a tragedy like what happened in Lewiston, then the military has a responsibility to pursue that additional research.
Although the military has rightly heightened its awareness of and attention to the consequences of blast exposure to those who were impacted by explosions in combat zones, it is less clear that there have been investigations into how these blasts may harm those exposed in non-combat situations, like weapons training.
A 2020 assessment done by the Rand Corporation for the Department of Defense found that much needed information about military occupational blast (MOB) exposure was lacking. “There are no identified guidelines or models from which to determine what constitutes a safe level of repeated MOB exposure for the low levels often incurred in training or analogous settings,” the report said.
Rand and other researchers have made it clear that more assessments are needed. Here’s an assessment from a Veterans Administration press release about such research last year:
“The most important thing we can contribute to the study of blast is an understanding of who is at risk for poor outcomes following blast exposure, or potentially due to their history of blast exposure,” Jared Rowland, a member of VA’s Mid-Atlantic MIRECC (Mental Illness Research Education and Clinical Center) said in a February 2022 press release about a recent study of these impacts. “The reason for trying to understand how blast exposure is related to outcomes, such as psychiatric symptoms, is to prevent them from happening and to have effective treatments when they do.”
The Card case may be one more example of why this research is so important – to prevent future blast injuries and to more effectively treat the ones that already exist.