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Dec. 15, 2024 - Stew Peters Show
01:01:24
The Silent Wounds of War: The Hidden Roll of Blast Injuries
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Time Text
What do we know about explosions, bombs, IEDs, mortars, rockets, hand grenades, heavy weapons systems such as field artillery for example?
Abrams tanks, all these large caliber weapon systems.
We know that they pack a punch.
What else do we know about TBI? We know through the longest war in our country's history that many veterans and currently serving service members struggle with TBI and its symptoms.
Just like we know that Young men who have played the game of football for many years and other contact sports also struggle with what they call CTE, which is essentially, in my opinion, TBI or the effects of TBI and brain injury.
And it's nothing good.
Well, there's been some recent developments that our illustrious government...
Along with the VA, have chosen to research in this field, in this realm.
So today we're going to talk about that.
We've got an article to go through.
Of course, I have my thoughts, as usual.
So sit back.
Don't go away.
We start now.
Hey everybody, welcome once again to another installment of the Richard Leonard welcome once again to another installment of the Richard Leonard Show.
And as I say every week, thank you.
Thank you for being here.
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Things that are going to make a difference.
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Okay.
Intro's out of the way.
Commercials, ads, they're out of the way.
Let's talk about Monday.
This last Monday, six days ago.
There was discussion in the halls of the United States Senate.
Well, not necessarily even in the halls, in a committee hearing.
United States Senators asked the powers that be about how are we, how are we as a government tracking and treating Soldiers for brain injuries.
And their more specific question was about repetitive, low-level blast injuries.
And we'll get into what that means.
But think about that for a second.
Repetitive, low-level blast injuries.
Just the nomenclature.
of the whole thing makes it sound somewhat serious.
In my opinion.
But now they're asking questions about what are we doing about this?
And it seems that there wasn't really a whole lot of answers.
So, before I get up on my soapbox, because I have some pretty strong feelings and some pretty strong thoughts about this topic after I read this article and after I did some thinking about it.
I had some pretty strong thoughts about it.
And maybe you will too.
So, I'd like to read it before I get out of my soapbox.
And talk to you about how I feel about it, because maybe I'll just pull you on into my side.
Maybe I won't have to, but let's check it out.
So this article was published this last Monday in the Military Times.
So it is titled, let's go over here, It is titled, Lawmakers Call for In-Depth VA Study on Blast Pressure Injuries.
And like I said, this was published in the Military Times.
Excuse me, it was on Tuesday, December 10th.
But the committee hearing was on Monday.
So it must have been December 9th.
Clearly.
Okay, a pair of Senate Affairs Committee members are pushing federal researchers to investigate the impact of repetitive low-level blast injuries on veterans' mental health.
On Monday, Senator Jerry Moran and Angus King introduced a Precision Brain Health Research Act, which mandates a 10-year study.
10-year study.
On the blast injuries.
The two lawmakers hope that the findings will lead to additional protections for troops using heavy artillery.
Okay, so one second here.
Like I said in the intro, our nation's longest war...
Not only our nation's longest war...
But this nation is...
It's not like we don't know war.
It's not a stranger to war.
We as a country are not strangers to international conflict of any kind.
And one thing I think is important to point out here before we continue is...
That in the United States military, it's a very well-known fact that you train as you would fight.
And so in a training environment, it's always one of the driving factors of training to make it as realistic as possible.
As many variables as you can add or subtract to training to make it as real as possible is always the goal.
And this is where the United States military, specifically in my case, in the US Army, we came up with train as you fight.
And so we talk all the time about how, well, you know, this really sucks and it's hot out here.
It's wet.
It's cold.
You know, we don't have all the necessary gear because maybe we overlooked something and didn't bring it or it wasn't available.
It was broken and we didn't get it fixed the last time we used it.
There's a whole litany of things.
That may play into either a negative or a positive training experience.
But once you're out there, you're out there.
Just like in real life.
If you mosey on over to the battlefield, and all your equipment's effed up, Or it ain't working properly.
Or you didn't take care of it the right way.
Or anything like that.
You're screwed.
You better figure out how to fix it on the fly.
You better learn how to do your job without.
Or make do with whatever it is you got.
And make it work to the best of your ability to complete the mission.
But also to ensure that everybody who is with you on that team comes home.
And I'll go out on a limb here and say that there are way more than enough, way more than necessary, Military members that get injured, maimed, or killed in training accidents than we probably ever would care to even know about.
Certainly more than we do know about.
And certainly more than we think.
And so this whole idea of train as you fight becomes super important.
This is where you foster your cohesion as a team.
This is where you figure out who can still be part of the team, where they fit in, if at all.
Do you have the right soldiers in the right jobs, in the right places?
Are they performing the right duties to their strengths?
Are there people who are stronger at other things?
Kind of like an OJT team building event type of thing.
But only the stakes are higher.
You know, in the infantry, at least how I was raised in the infantry, we're going to train hard.
And if we don't do it right, we're going to do it again.
And if we fuck that up, we're going to do it again.
And we'll do it again.
And we'll do it as many times as we need to do it until we have it right.
We'll swap out people.
We'll change positions in the stack.
We'll change weapon systems on the team.
We'll change leadership if we need to.
But we were not leaving the training area until we collapsed with exhaustion or we got it right.
And I'll tell you, the guy that trained us, Hector, would tell us all the time, you can hate me if you want.
Because there were times where he made us do it over and over and over and over again.
You can hate me if you want.
But should you ever, ever find yourself on a battlefield together, which we did, you're going to thank me.
Because as we've discussed on the show before, there are many times and many places on the battlefield where you find yourself in a situation where you just stop thinking.
You just stop thinking altogether.
You let your training take over.
Muscle memory kicks in.
Instinct.
Instinct comes into play.
And it's an amazing thing.
When you've been in that situation, the dust settles.
And then you start Monday morning quarterbacking it with your guys.
Everyone lights a cigarette or throws in half a tin of chew.
And then at the same time, eat some chow and start talking about what happened.
And I was there and you went here and I did this and then he did this and then we converged on either side and we killed him.
Or whatever.
Whatever the case may be.
But that's the importance.
It's the importance of training as you fight.
So I know that was a long way around the block to go across the street to say...
That it's, for many, it's pounded into your head.
If you don't get it right, we're going to do it again.
And then, if you mess that up, we'll do it again.
And I think that leadership, oftentimes, usually NCOs understand that you're going to have to do it a litany of times because you never get it right on the first try.
I would argue that you never really get it right by the 8th, 9th, or 10th time.
It's very rare unless you have a team of guys that have been training together for a long time and or training and fought together at one time or another together.
Then it might go a whole lot more smooth because people already know.
Well, if I go here, I already know he's going to go there and he's going to cover low.
I'm going to cover high.
I'm going to step over him.
I'm going to take that corner.
He's going to go to this corner.
We're going to meet in the middle.
We're going to go back to back or we're going to go side by side, high and low.
We're going to go to the next door.
It might be a short room, so we're going to do blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, there's all kinds of different scenarios, of course.
But we train as we fight.
Okay, so now that we understand that, let's continue.
Where did we leave off?
Oh, okay.
Recent studies have tied low-level blasts, which service members are exposed to during training and in combat, to high rates of brain and mental health conditions as well as suicide.
Okay.
Mr. Morgan said in a statement, the legislation will help us start to better understand why and how blast exposures are impacting service members and veterans.
Blast injuries occur when explosives create high-pressure waves that can damage sensitive organs like the ears and the brain.
So, I mean...
Here's the thing, right?
I mean, yeah, we're talking about this in a context of military and veterans.
And it's important, right?
Because we, as a country, we put men and women in these positions on purpose because this is their job.
This is what we pay them to do.
We pay them to learn this job.
We pay them to be superior at it.
Subject matter experts, if you will.
And they train as they fight.
And so many of these people...
When we talk about training over and over and over and over again...
Many of these people...
Never get to use...
They're training in a real-life scenario.
They never get to deploy.
They never get to go to combat.
And for some, maybe they don't want to.
And so maybe that is a positive thing for them.
Maybe they don't want to go.
And if that's the case, okay, cool.
I can get behind that.
But the fact of the matter remains...
That you are training, and so effectively, you're going.
You're doing it.
Just because you don't find yourself in a forward area shooting your cannons at real people and real buildings and real tanks doesn't mean that you're not exposed.
So these blast injuries that they speak of, many people have been exposed, hundreds of thousands if not millions.
And so these types of jobs would include like field artillery of course, mortar men as we saw on the cover photo, but I would even say The tankers.
Tankers who are in the tanks when they're shooting 155 rounds out of an Abrams cannon.
Bradley fighting vehicle crews who are shooting that 30mm cannon.
Which, by the way, I was a Bradley gunner for a little while.
It's an amazing weapon system.
Holy cow, that thing is badass.
And it can do a lot of damage.
It can do it pretty quickly.
Combat engineers.
Combat engineers deal with a lot of explosives.
Combat engineers have this thing called a Miklik.
It's on a tank and it's like this huge Bangalore that they can use to destroy obstacles or make a path.
And it's mounted on a tank and it shoots out forward.
And it's this huge, like, shape charge type thing.
Well, they shoot those things off.
EOD soldiers, explosive ordnance, their whole job is to blow shit up.
Their whole job is to blow stuff up to get rid of it.
When we were rolling up and down the highways of Iraq and found an IED on the road, those were the guys that would come out there, go to the thing, put explosives on it, and then blow it up so that it was now safe to pass and we could bring our convoys past that spot without being in danger, hopefully.
So there's a lot of different jobs to where this type of thing is applicable.
So, I mean, it affects a lot of people, I think.
Moving on.
Previous studies have found significant injuries among military personnel manning mortars, other heavy weaponry, with symptoms that include headaches, insomnia, memory loss, and depression.
Earlier this summer, in response to news reports pointing to long-term health effects from repeated blast injuries, a group of 24 lawmakers petitioned the Government Accountability Office to review Defense Department efforts to prevent and respond to the damage caused by pressure waves from firearms and explosives.
Okay, well, I missed that.
So are they saying then that small arms, so our rifles, sniper rifles, automatic machine guns, all this stuff, I mean, if you shoot it without hearing protection, it is concussive, it's loud, and it's quite forceful.
That.50 cal, man, that.50 caliber machine gun, that thing's pretty badass, but boy, is it loud.
So I don't know.
Maybe that's all part of it as well.
Defense Department leaders in August unveiled a series of new steps designed to protect troops from blast overpressure injuries related to weapons use including new restrictions on how close trainers can stand during firing range sessions and cognitive assessments for all troops by the end of 2025. So we are going to give every soldier,
every soldier in the United States military is going to get a cognitive test.
So if I had to guess, let's imagine how this is going to go.
They're going to drum up some cognitive tests.
To try to measure the difference in each individual soldier over a given amount of time.
Now, up above in the article, they said it was a 10-year study.
Well, I'm willing to bet that most of these folks that they're going to test aren't going to be in in 10 years.
maybe they will, and I'm sure a good handful of them will be.
But those are people we're assuming...
Are going to be giving all this new gear.
I'm sure that along with this legislation comes a few companies like Skillcraft or whoever the cheapest bidder is to make some kind of protection device.
Has some government contract all ready to go.
The ink is dry.
They're just waiting for the word to send it in.
So they can start making these things, whatever these things are going to be.
So let's not forget that.
I think it's safe to say that behind all of these tests and all of this committee hearings and legislations and research studies and data grabs and scrubbing of data and all this stuff, behind all of it just might be someone somewhere that's looking to make a buck.
On some government contract.
Now, we've heard some scuttlebutt that the new administration is going to put some stop to that by making these contracts competitive.
But we'll see.
We'll see how that goes.
I guess I don't have much to say about that because I don't know how the current system works.
I'm not a company that seeks out government contracts.
So I really don't know the ins and outs of that.
I'd have to research it, which I have not done yet.
Let's see here.
Traumatic brain injuries.
Hold on.
The new legislation would focus on the Department of Veterans Affairs combing through data sets of veterans to look for signs of problems and trends among individuals with similar military occupational specialties.
So we're going to find soldiers with similar MOSs and then we're going to look at all of their medical history, their data, and their cognitive tests that they're about to take.
Traumatic brain injuries are a common yet misunderstood and often undetectable injury.
We have a duty to expand our understanding of the impact of these blasts and the impact they have on mental health and protect the long-term health and well-being of our military community.
The measure is unlikely to become law this year, given that the current session of Congress will end in a few weeks, but the legislation should become the basis for VA reform next session.
And then, apparently next session, Senator Moran is set to be the chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.
So, they have a lot to say here about what they're looking for and how they plan to get it.
My question is, why now?
Why now are they choosing to look at this?
I don't know.
I think the answers are probably hidden in the star somewhere.
But I have my theory.
So we'll get to that after the break.
Stick with us.
We'll be right back.
Hey folks, welcome back.
Okay, so what is it?
Question for you.
What is it that we know about TBI? Like we asked in the intro.
What is it that we know about TBI? Because what I'm searching for here is my biggest question about this whole initiative is why now?
Because if you ask the Department of Defense, if you ask the Department of Veterans Affairs, they've made great strides in understanding the effects of TBI on members of the military.
So why now are we digging into This new form.
Maybe it's not even a new form of TBI, but this new cause of TBI. Which, to be honest, isn't even new.
But let's break it down.
I have here a list of The variety of dangers that TBI may cause.
So it just goes, it's a bulleted list, right?
Immediate complications can include things like seizures, nerve damage, blood clots, stroke, comas, and brain infections.
Now, I think that we see those in the more serious cases.
And I think the folks that have these immediate complications from blast injuries such as, you know, roadside bombs and being in buildings that were blown up, things like that.
Those guys we know.
Those are the guys that are in wheelchairs that their lives are never the same.
Possibly.
Long-term effects.
So here's where we get to more of the unseen effects, maybe.
Chronic health problems.
Disability, of course.
And an increased risk of death.
It's pretty broad.
But when we talk about chronic health problems, what do we need?
What do we mean?
I think that things like chronic headaches, brain fog, chronic fatigue, trouble sleeping, things like that, and maybe we'll see some of these things in other parts of the list.
There are these other symptoms, these other things that happen to folks over time And quite frankly, and I think, again, we'll see this later on in the list, I think that we see these come out slowly but surely over time.
I think that some of them are probably immediate or they're a little more, they come about a lot sooner than others.
But for the most part, They're not really visible.
Because one thing that we do know about the veteran population, the culture, the warrior culture, is that veterans are pretty damn good at suffering in silence.
So if we're having chronic headaches, probably not going to bitch about it a whole lot, unless it's debilitating.
But we're still probably not going to bitch about it a whole lot.
We're just going to Close ourselves off to the world, which somebody will link to depression or something like that.
And maybe that's true.
But for the most part, in my opinion, amongst the many veterans that I know, there's not a whole lot of us that are going to outright just bitch about things like chronic headaches, for example.
Let's move on.
Cognitive defects.
These things can include difficulty thinking clearly, remembering information, and problem solving.
I can tell you one thing.
As sure as I am that the sun will come up tomorrow, that if you were to ask my lovely wife if I have problems thinking clearly, And remembering information, she won't even let you finish the question.
And she'll say, yep, yep, absolutely.
And in fact, I'll tell you another thing.
If there was one thing about me, about my disabilities, if I had the option To change.
This might be at the top or very close to the top of the list.
And it might be thinking clearly and remembering information.
Because it is a source of extreme frustration for me.
Not only in my marriage, not only in my personal life, but in my professional life as well.
Remembering people's names.
Remembering directions on where to go.
And, of course, there's a lot of ways to be able to combat that by, you know, using things like your cellular telephonic device that you can set reminders and keep a calendar, but you've got to remember to do all that.
But there are ways, and with occupational therapy, things do get better.
But it is a bear sometimes to get all those things right.
Because it's not only just frustrating to me, it's frustrating to her, it's frustrating to my co-workers, it's frustrating to other people.
And it makes it even more frustrating for me because I don't have a good answer as to why Things are that way, and I'm certainly not going to be the person that says, well, you know, I got a TBI. Remember, I was blown up.
I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to accept my ass whooping or my tongue lashing, and I'm going to go about my day and try to do better.
Motor defects.
These things can include weakness, paralysis, poor balance, and difficulty planning motor movements.
I'm not quite sure what planning motor movements means.
But I think that one thing that we see a lot in veterans with these issues is probably weakness.
Weakness in the legs, just moving around and getting themselves around.
Not so much always weakness in lifting or moving things or something like that, but just moving your own body around, needing help to get out of bed, stuff like that.
And I believe that for many people, again, it's extra frustrating because you don't really understand why these things happen.
Because, to be quite honest, and maybe this has changed now, but when we were deploying to Iraq and to Afghanistan and all those things in that era of the war, I never went to Afghanistan.
I wish I would have.
I would have liked to have gone.
We weren't told about this type of thing.
We weren't trained about what traumatic brain injury might be like, and probably for good reason.
And furthermore, if we were, I don't know that it would have made a whole lot of difference, to be honest.
I don't know that it would have caused me to approach the way that I fought differently.
And the reason for that being if we go back to the first segment of the show is that we train as we fight.
And so even if on the plane ride over to Iraq we were given some literature about traumatic brain injury, or even post-traumatic stress for that matter, and it was all stuff that people were scared about or didn't know about and were nervous, I don't know for a lot of us if it would have changed the way that we fought once we got to the battlefield.
Because your muscle memory is your muscle memory.
And the way that we on our team were raised in the infantry, there's only one way to do it.
There's only one way to fight a gunfight, as a team anyway, and that's with speed and violence of action.
Speed and violence of action, but also remember that slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
So if you just don't think, you let your training take over once the bullets start flying, because if you stop and think about it, you probably will be terrified and you're going to find a hole to crawl into until the bullets stop flying, maybe.
And you just act.
And you get together with your team, and you move slow through the streets, or through the building, or through a house, or through the woods, or through the wadis, or wherever it's at.
You check your areas, you check your corners, you make sure that you got your Battle Buddy 6, you got 360 security, and you just keep moving, and it's a fluid, beautiful thing.
And before you know it, hopefully nobody is injured, wounded, or dead.
And all the dead people are on the other side.
Not our guys.
But you wonder, how did that happen?
Well, we just did it.
It's a crazy thing.
Crazy thing.
I don't know how we got there.
I don't know how we got from the list to that place.
But let's move on.
Sensory.
Sensory issues.
Changes in hearing, vision, taste, smell, and touch.
Did you know that an injury to your brain can alter any or all of your senses?
I didn't know that until recently.
In fact, I've been dealing with this vision issue since April.
It is now mid-December.
But I'm going blind.
I found out that I have this...
Is it endo or endo?
Whichever one means they don't know how it happens.
I think it's endo.
Endopathic intracranial hypertension.
Which means that my brain makes too much spinal fluid, too much cerebral fluid.
And the vessels in which carry that fluid are maxed out.
They're full.
Bulging.
It just so happens that that vessel runs close to your eyes.
And all the extra fluid that's bulging causes swelling of your optic nerve.
Which also is not good because if your optic nerve loses blood flow for even a millisecond, you lose your vision.
And so this is what I got going on.
And I can't help but wonder if it's not from My brain injury from being blown up.
They say that it's not likely, but I don't know how it can't be.
They say they've been researching this condition for 35 or 40 years and still have no idea what causes it.
They just know how to treat it.
And so here I am now taking 4,000 milligrams of some diuretic medication to drain my body of fluid which causes my hands to scab up and all kinds of crap.
And I've recently learned that the medication is not working anymore.
The swelling is getting worse.
So the only option I have for intervention is now surgical, intracranial surgery.
And I'm terrified of it.
But what do you do?
Are you just going to go blind?
I think life would be a whole lot worse.
But what I explained to my doctor was...
I don't think she was impressed.
But what I told her was...
I would rather be...
butt-ass naked in flip-flops...
Maybe a bulletproof vest with a pistol and a couple magazines walking through the streets of Baghdad circa 2005 than have this surgery.
I like my chances better.
Or at least I'm less scared of it.
Less scared of that than I am of the surgery.
And maybe that's blowing it out of proportion.
And I'm way overthinking it.
Maybe.
But it's the truth.
I gotta process it, right?
And decide whether or not I'm being a mental midget about it.
But here again...
And furthermore, this is super rare, right?
It's super rare for men of my age.
It's super rare for men in general.
But men of my age...
Usually men that get this condition are gym bros who are in their 20s who are taking too many supplements and it's causing all kinds of weird things to go on in their body.
But usually the folks that get this thing naturally are middle-aged women that have had children, I think.
You know, and they have some kind of intervention and either it goes away or it doesn't, but they can regulate it with the medication.
Well, I can no longer take any more of the medication.
I'm maxed out and I've been at the max since I started in April.
And so the only option I have left is the surgical operation.
So that's what I'll do.
I'll figure it out and I'll either have to just shut up and get it done.
Or I'll have to convince myself that I want to have this happen.
And what I don't want is to lose my vision.
So you can only use the options that are afforded to you.
And at this point, there's only one.
So I guess we know what has to be done.
So anyway...
But we didn't know that brain injuries can cause you to lose or alter all of your senses.
I didn't know that.
Maybe some others did.
Let's continue.
Communication and language issues.
Difficulty speaking, understanding speech, and reading and writing.
I haven't seen this one in my own experience. - Yeah.
I've worked with a lot of veterans that have a TBI of some sort.
Usually they can all communicate well.
Or at least well enough to fulfill whatever the goal is that we're speaking about.
I mean, I used to be an employment counselor for vets.
I used to work in the homeless veterans world.
I've done a lot of work in the veteran service community.
I worked for a member of Congress for a while.
And so, I mean, veterans in my experience that have had TBI always seem to do okay communicating.
When they choose not to communicate, it's not because they can, it's because they don't want to.
Because they're sick and tired of the system, usually.
Personality changes.
I think here's where we're going to get into the meat and potatoes of it, right?
Poor motivation, being self-centered or narcissistic, and being less aware of others.
And I can tell you that in my experience, poor motivation has certainly been prevalent in veterans I know with TBI, and even myself.
I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue, which probably assisted in the poor motivation.
But again, some of these things with occupational therapy can be addressed and helped.
If not, I mean, maybe it never goes away for folks, but it certainly can be helped.
You know, I think it just helps to find a new mission.
Find something to do that you're passionate about, that you're interested in, It'll help motivate you.
Easy as that.
Now, mental health consequences.
These can include depression, PTSD, and risk of suicide.
Which is where I think that we have, as a country, especially our government, has failed veterans in this arena.
Since we started the longest war in our country's history, we could even lump in Gulf War veterans.
We can even talk about...
Not Cuban Missile Cray.
We can even talk about Cold War veterans.
Vietnam.
Korea.
World War II, World War I veterans.
We can talk about all of them.
And my question is...
Why are we now...
In December of 2024, at the end of the legislative session, why are we now talking about the dangers of these jobs and the concussive effects that these jobs, these MOSs, have on the men and women that perform them?
And perform them to a high level.
As we said, become subject matter experts.
We never thought to research this.
We saw soldiers coming home from war.
Thank you.
Mangled.
Missing limbs.
TBIs.
Lots of them.
With all kinds of issues.
We never thought to check in on the people that are firing these weapons systems.
I mean, if you go onto YouTube or Rumble or Facebook Or anywhere that you can find videos and look up a 105 artillery cannon firing.
Just search that and watch it.
Watch the process of a field artillery team firing its cannons.
The first thing you're going to notice is that it's a thing of beauty when it's done correctly.
When everyone's moving in unison, when they're supposed to be moving and doing what they're supposed to be doing, it's almost like it has a rhythm.
And they can get those rounds downrange at pretty damn good clips.
The other thing that you'll notice if you watch it are...
Watch the environment around the cannon.
Watch the camo netting.
Watch the uniforms of the soldiers.
Watch their reactions.
Watch the dust.
Watch the cannon itself.
And you can see, you can see how violent it is.
If you watch the uniforms of the soldiers, you can see them The intense wave of wind or whatever you want to call it that pushes their uniform.
Like if it wasn't zipped up and blown it right off their bodies like that, then it's over.
What I'll tell you about it though is it's an amazing fucking feeling.
It's unlike anything.
It's unlike anything to be next to a howitzer cannon when it's firing, of any caliber.
There's a few different ones.
And the big daddy, man.
But you feel it.
You feel it all the way down in your balls Look up mortar men And watch what they go through To fire their mortars And they're dropping them, one after the other, after the other.
Thump, thump, thump, thump, one after the other.
Just getting rounds downrange.
Right?
Their whole job is combat service support.
It's a combat MOS, but really it's a combat support role.
Especially the artillery guys.
They're miles behind.
And the infantry guys are going to call them and give them a grid coordinate.
They're going to find it on the map.
They're going to dial it in.
They're going to adjust their cannons and yank on those strings.
Whoom!
Here comes your help, boys.
And 15 to 40 seconds later or something like that, hell rains down from the sky.
It's amazing.
But clearly...
Clearly it's damaging.
And the idea that we as a country have never thought.
And I'm guilty too.
The only thing I'll claim is that I'm not a doctor.
I'm not a scientist.
I'm not a researcher.
I probably should have thought of it also.
But we never thought to look at these soldiers.
After watching these videos, or if you've stood there yourself and then later been a victim of a TBI of some sort, I thought, man, those guys really take a pounding.
If you're around that gun all day and it's been firing all day, you're tired.
It takes a lot out of you.
But the main thing the list told us at the end was risk of suicide.
Well, here's what we know about veteran suicide.
They tell us the number is 22 a day.
22 veterans a day, on average, take their own lives.
They also tell us the numbers are out there, a very high percentage.
Of those 22 a day, I wanna say it's like 32%, but I could be wrong.
I don't know that for sure, but it's a pretty high percentage of men and women that served in the military that end up committing suicide successfully or unsuccessfully are those that did not deploy to a combat area.
And for a long time, For a long time, the answer we got from the VA, from the Department of Defense, from all the branches of service, from these independent scientists or study groups or whatever the hell you want to call them, were things like, well, maybe they just felt inferior.
Maybe they felt inferior.
Inadequate.
Their counterparts were deploying two, three, four times, maybe five or six, even some of them.
And these folks never got to deploy.
They didn't feel like they earned the status of veteran.
Maybe they didn't feel like they contributed.
Okay, well maybe that's partly true.
But did anybody ever stop to think that maybe...
A large part of that percentage were veterans that had scrambled brains.
The other thing that we do know about some of these guys and these MOS's is that they like to play real hard.
Destructive behavior.
Self-destructive behavior.
Which was on the list also.
Is it possible that of the 22 veterans a day that kill themselves, that some of that percentage, that large percentage, that some of that percentage, that large percentage, I believe around 30%, that didn't deploy...
there is a number in there that is probably larger than we care to imagine.
Veterans that were working in these jobs And part of the reason they had mental health struggles and ultimately decided to take themselves deep was untreated TBI. Nobody's ever talked about that before.
We've never thought to study that before.
I hope that they do something quickly.
They do something quickly to protect these soldiers.
Whatever that is.
And I'm sure that there's somebody with their hand out, like we said earlier, some government contract That's going to design some widget that they claim is going to protect soldiers.
Hopefully it isn't 3M. We saw how that went with the earplugs.
But they need it.
Something like this could reduce that number from 22 down drastically.
It is possible.
We owe it to them, whether they're here still or not.
Thank you.
We owe it to the past, the current, and the future members of our military to come up with the fucking answers.
And I hope they do it quickly.
As Christians in a Christian country, we have a right to be at minimum agnostic about the leadership being all Jewishly occupied.
We literally should be at war with fucking Israel a hundred times over and instead we're just sending them money and it's fucking craziness.
Look at the state of Israel.
Look at the state of Tel Aviv and look at the state of Philadelphia.
You tell me where this money's going.
You tell me who's benefiting from this.
I am prepared to die in the battle.
Fighting this monstrosity that would wish to enslave me and my family and steal away any rights to my property and to take away my God, go fuck yourself.
Will I submit to that?
And if you've got a foreign state, you've got dual citizens in your government, who do you think they're supporting?
God, right now, would you protect the nation of Israel and protect those of us, not just our church, but every church in the world and in this nation that's willing to put their neck on the line and say, we stand with them!
We stand with them!
- You go to Trump's cabinet, you go to Biden's cabinet, spoiled Jews. - I have a black friend spoiled Jews. - I have a black friend in school.
I have nothing against blacks.
She has nothing against me.
She understands where I'm coming from.
Excuse me, I'm a Jew, and I'd just like to say that, you know, in our Bible it says that you're like animals.
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