Brain Under Fire: The Invisible War Inside Our Veterans
Stew Peters details his rare idiopathic intracranial hypertension, linking it to low-level blast injuries and burn pit toxins that breach the blood-brain barrier during his 2005–2007 Iraq service. He recounts a roadside bomb melting copper discs through his Humvee's ballistic glass, causing facial trauma, while doctors found an unexplained venous clot. Peters warns that these combined exposures may trigger a silent epidemic of dementia and Parkinson's among aging veterans, urging immediate research akin to Agent Orange studies before widespread neurological collapse occurs. [Automatically generated summary]
Recently on the show, we talked about low-level blast injuries and how soldiers in our nation's military are exposed all the time, depending on the job, of course, to low-level blast injuries, things such as big machinery, the moving of big machinery and materials, loud engines, but more most importantly, weapon systems.
And not just rifles, not just machine guns, but tanks, other infantry fighting vehicles, aircraft, big weapon systems, all of them.
All of them are, according to studies that we've uncovered, all of them are dangerous.
And in conjunction with toxic exposure of burn pits, for example, the question I had was, if these two things are true for a person, they've had multiple low-level blast injuries throughout their deployment or their career, mixed in with toxic exposure from burn pits.
Is it extra dangerous?
Is it extra harmful to our soldiers?
And should we be researching this more?
I think the answer to that is yes, and we'll discuss why.
So stick with us.
Don't go away.
We start now.
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Okay.
So full clarity here.
I myself have been having some issues, issues with my brain, my cognitive functioning, my memory, my speech, things of this nature.
It all started about almost two years ago now when I went into the eye doctor.
I went into the eye doctor because I had this floater, right?
It was a floater almost like when you get your picture taken in the flash just kind of lingers in your eye.
I had that in my left eye and it covered my whole vision in my whole left eye.
In fact, at night when I lay down, when I closed my eyes, it was brighter with my eyes closed and with them open because this starburst was in my vision.
Emergency Brain Clot Treatment00:14:53
So I went to the eye doctor.
They did all their scans and eye drops and poking and prodding and pressure testing and all that shit.
And the doctor at one point came back in.
He was on a cell phone and he had told me, Well, we're calling you an ambulance to come and get you.
You need to get to the hospital right now.
And so my first reaction, because that was the first I heard of this emergent situation, was to tell him, sir, very politely hang up your fucking phone.
I'm not getting in an ambulance.
Not doing that.
First of all, tell me what's wrong.
I'd like to hear that first.
And then we'll discuss how emergent this is.
Right?
I'm not, I wasn't trying to say that you, hey, you're wrong, but don't come in and tell me you're calling me an ambulance and I don't know what's going on.
It makes me uncomfortable.
So we had that discussion.
And then it was agreed that I can certainly drive myself to the hospital.
It was only about four miles away or less.
And I will go.
I'll go to the emergency room.
If it's that big of an emergency, of course I'm going to go.
And so I do.
I got in my car.
I drive down to the emergency room where he had instructed me to go.
He had also told me that they're waiting there for me.
When you get in there, they know you're coming.
Just make sure you give them your name and your info, blah, blah, blah.
And they're going to take care of you.
It's very imperative that you go, though, he said.
I don't want you to blow this off and just say you're going and go home.
This could be a real problem.
You could be blind.
So that added a whole nother level of anxiousness about the situation.
And so, of course, I high tailed it over.
I high tailed it over to the hospital.
I went into the ER.
I gave them my name and all of my information.
And that was about the time my wife showed up to be there with me because I wasn't quite sure what was happening.
And we sat there for about seven hours before we were seen.
So I don't know how emergent this situation was, but we sat there.
And if you can imagine what an emergency room in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota is like, after knowing what's happening around this place in the last however long, just complete fucking debauchery and chaos.
It was a pretty colorful time to be sitting in the emergency room.
At one point, there was a gentleman in there, believed to be homeless, who was sprawled out amongst five or six seats, sleeping, and he smelt like shit and BO and allegedly shit his pants while he was sitting in the waiting room.
And there's all these people in here, some people with their kids.
It was just a mess.
So we get back there and they tell me that I have this condition called IIH, which is endopathic intracranial hypertension.
And what this is, is your brain produces too much spinal fluid, too much cerebral fluid.
And it swells up your venous system, your vein system inside your skull.
All the blood flow and all these other chemicals, not chemicals, but all these other liquids and things that need to flow around your brain, get to and from your skull, your brain just produces too much.
And so what was happening was the venous system in my brain was swelled up and it was also swelling up.
The pressure was swelling up my optic nerves, which is why I was getting the starbursts and these types of things, which is also why it made it extremely dangerous, apparently, because what I didn't know at the time is that if your optic nerves lose blood flow for even a second, your blindness kicks in just like that, apparently.
That's what I was told.
So to me, it seemed pretty serious.
So that day I had gone from getting up, making my coffee, and doing my shit before my appointment, getting down there to then sitting in the emergency room.
Now, mind you, I got there at about 1 or 1.30 in the afternoon.
My wife and I didn't get home until 7 or 7.30 the next morning.
So through all this time, while I was at the hospital, I had a spinal tap so they could relieve the fluid.
There was so much fluid in my system, they had to relieve it.
It was in a danger at dangerous levels, apparently.
Vision loss was imminent, allegedly.
So they did that.
I had to do a very, very extensive MRI.
Me and MRIs don't mix.
I'm a pretty wide fella, and so MRI tubes are pretty uncomfortable.
So you mix that with the cage they fasten around your head so you can't move.
It is not a good situation for somebody who doesn't like to be confined or in small places.
It was quite an experience.
There were some threats made.
There was some apologies given.
And then there was some medication to relax given.
And then we got through it.
But nonetheless, we went through all of this.
We're there for all those hours.
And shortly after, I had to go and see a neuro-ophthalmologist, in which I was told there are three options to cure or treat this condition.
Now, before we get into that, I'd like you to know that according to the medical professionals that I was seeking for help, I was told that I am a very rare case.
In fact, when it was all said and done, we learned that I was like one in five to six hundred thousand cases.
Usually, IIH, as it was explained to me, happens in middle-aged women, usually maybe that have had one or multiple children.
Maybe that doesn't even matter.
I don't see how that matters, but this is what they said.
And in men of my age, at the time I was 41 years old, it's very rare.
Usually in men in general, this condition is very rare.
It's most common in young men who are taking performance-enhancing substances, you know, athletes and bodybuilders and CrossFit folks, things like that.
Apparently, there's all of these things you can take to enhance your body.
I don't know that it's steroids, but there's all kinds of supplements and stuff.
So usually they will see this in some of those men at times.
And so there's just, there were so many things that were told.
And then at the end of them, they would say, yeah, but it's very rare in people in your situation.
And so then I was told about these three options to treat this.
One was to put a shunt in my brain, which is, as I understood it, they make a hole in your skull.
They put this drain.
It's attached to your brain.
And the tube runs internally in your body down to your abdomen somewhere where this fluid would then drain into your abdomen and your body would absorb it and get rid of it.
So I imagine you just pee it out.
I didn't like that option.
I was not very comfortable at all with having my skull cut open.
The second option was an optic nerve sheath venestration or ventilation or something like that.
I think she said venestration, if that's the right word.
What this procedure is, is they knock you out and they pull your eye out of your head to expose your optic nerve and the sheath around it, which apparently is extremely delicate.
It's very easily damaged just by touch.
And so this is a very delicate surgery, but apparently is done regularly enough that it's usually successful.
But as they're telling me about this procedure, and well, yeah, you know what, we just, you know, we put you out, we get you on your side, we pull your eyeball out of your eye to expose your optic nerve and the sheath around it.
And then they very carefully make very tiny microscopic incisions.
And so that this fluid that was surrounding my optic nerves would just leak out, right?
And it would drain internally into my body, apparently into my abdomen or something.
And then I will absorb it and pee it out.
I was 1,000% not on board with that situation.
And so then we went to option three, which was a procedure where they install stents in your brain.
They go, they enter your body through your femoral artery and your inner thigh, and they fish this device and camera all the way through your venous system into your brain.
And once they get in there, they insert the stents to widen the passage, allow the fluid to flow, hence relieving the pressure, and my eyes would be saved.
And so what I will say is that for almost a whole year, I decided to take a diuretic medication called Diamox.
And what this does is flushes moisture out of your body, gets rid of fluid.
And I was taking 16 of these pills a day.
I want to say it was like 9,600 milligrams or something like that, some astronomical amount.
And I was pissing like a Russian steed, right?
Every five minutes I had to pee, which was a good thing.
And one of the good things I will say about the medication was that it got me back into drinking a lot of water.
I was always thirsty.
And for some reason, water just tastes better.
The only thing that tastes better than water was Coke and the pop.
So I started drinking a whole lot more water, but I was peeing a lot.
But this medication made you sore.
It made you the best way to explain it is when my wife and I got COVID, we felt like we had been hit by a bus, body aches, joint pain, just tired and lethargic and just feel like shit, right?
I mean, it wasn't pleasant.
I don't know that it was super fucking deadly, but it wasn't pleasant at all.
Well, that's kind of what you felt like on this, on this, on these pills, this medication called Diamox.
So I was taking that plus a blood thinner, plus an aspirin.
And so after a year, The swelling started to increase again.
And so the doctor had said, The only thing we can do for you is one of these three operations.
The thing about endopathic intercranial hypertension is that they don't know what causes it.
I believe that's what the term endopathic refers to.
They don't know how it happens to you, but they know how to treat it.
What I will say is that the treatment options that were afforded to me are only four: the three operations and the medication called Diamox to drain your body of fluid, hence keeping the pressure in your skull down.
Well, we did some more research.
I had a couple doctors or one doctor at the VA that really helped me kind of dig into this and what else might I be able to do other than these operations.
And one of the things they told me was significant weight loss.
So we went down that road and I've done that.
But also, almost a year ago, exactly to the day of you watching this show, or at least it being aired, I had the second of two stents installed in my brain at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
And while they were in there, I had the first one March 6th of 25, and I had the second one on March 26th of 25.
When he was in there the first time installing the stent, he came across what he related or relayed to me as a pretty decent sized blood clot in my venous system that doesn't move blood, it moves cerebral fluid.
But there was this blood clot sitting in the middle of my vein in the middle of my head, just at the top back here.
And so the first stent went in from behind my ear and it wraps around to the middle of my head.
The second one runs down the back center.
When he went in and did the first one, he put it in and then he went a little further to see where the second one to scout out the position of the second one.
That's where these blood clots were, or the one, the one big one.
So he did cut it out of there.
He took it out and had said to me, it seems to be in a very peculiar place within your brain.
Apparently, when you have these types of things in your brain, such as blood clots, the location of where they find them matters.
It should be able to tell them a little bit more about where to look as to what caused this blood clot and where it might have came from.
However, in my situation, where it was at was very peculiar.
It was unexplainable.
Not quite sure while it's there.
We don't ever really see any there, is what he told me.
So, okay, well, thanks for taking it out of there.
I guess I'll be back.
I'll be back at the end of the month to have you do the second one.
Unexplainable Medical Symptoms00:09:11
And we did it.
And what I do have to say, real quick, is that the people down at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, in Rochester, Minnesota, if any of you folks ever need any kind of super expert medical care and your insurance covers treatment at Mayo Clinic, it is worth the trip.
If you have serious things, these folks are the best.
I'll tell you what happened.
I checked in at 8 o'clock in the morning.
Now, mind you, Mayo Clinic from my house is about an hour and 15-minute drive.
I checked in at 8 o'clock.
Not only did my wife, my father and I brave probably the most egregious snowstorm of that winter last year to drive down.
We drove through this blizzard to get there, but I was home in bed by 2.30 in the afternoon.
So in that short time, they laid me out.
They knocked me out.
They shoved tools up my femoral artery.
fished it all the way to my brain, left the stent in there, pulled it out, talked to me about what happened.
And mind you, I was awake the whole time that they did this.
They drug you up.
They put you out for about three to five minutes when they actually install the stent because apparently that can be, I don't know that it's painful.
I don't think you feel pain in your brain when it's being physically manipulated, although it's not good for you.
But it's disorienting and all kinds of stuff.
So they put you out for it.
And then I was home by 2.30, just after lunchtime.
It was an amazing, it's an amazing experience.
They really care about you, but when it's time to go, it's time to fucking go.
They had no qualms about telling me, okay, well, you've been in recovery for 58 minutes.
Feel free to get up and blah, blah, blah.
And you're free to go.
All right.
Well, you're just fishing in my brain.
And an hour later, I'm getting dressed and going out to lunch with my parents and my wife, which I didn't eat because I was sleeping, but they ate.
And so we go through all of this.
And maybe this is a way drawn out story and it's too much information, but there's a point here.
The point is that after all of that happened, I was looking for answers.
I was told that this is super rare.
I was told it never happens to men of your age.
I was told that this blood clot we found in your brain is extremely peculiar.
We're not quite sure why it's there.
We don't ever really find them there.
It's pretty weird.
It's kind of funny that we found it there.
So I started thinking about it.
Well, why was it there?
What happened?
Is it due to maybe it's an old football injury?
Maybe it's an old military injury, roadside bombs, anything.
I mean, is there an idea of what might cause this?
And there just hasn't been any answers.
I've been through blood testing and seen all kinds of different doctors and specialists and cognitive testing and all this stuff.
And so the results always say, well, everything seems to be working all right.
But I don't feel like everything's working all right.
I have situations where I could be talking face to face with somebody and just completely lose my place.
If you're a regular watcher of the show, you might have picked up on it in the last five or six months where I could be staring at the camera and telling you what I want to tell you and then nothing.
And it's just gone.
So it's concerning.
Things like waking up and being confused about where you're at.
And I can wake up and I can look over at my wife and be confused about who she is for, I don't know, 10, 15 seconds or something like that.
And then you kind of just snap out of it.
And so I've been asking for these answers.
And what I've come to think about is maybe I didn't have IIH.
Maybe I didn't have intracranial hypertension.
Maybe the backup in the fluid was from something else, but it looked like IIH.
Is that possible?
And so when I saw another doctor, I asked, well, is this possible?
Is it possible that there's something else going on that would mimic intracranial hypertension, such as a big fucking blood clot?
In the middle of the vein running down the center of my head?
Is it possible that a blood clot sitting in the center of that vein can cause enough resistance for the system to back up and swell up my venous system, which is going to swell up my optic nerves and cut my vision out in fucking split seconds?
Is that a possibility?
Well, I suppose it is, Mr. Leonard.
I suppose that could be possible.
Oh, okay.
So why don't we, what are we going to, what are we going to research?
Who do we see next about that?
And then I have these times of maybe clarity, but I have these thoughts that, well, does it even really matter?
Does it even really matter why these things are happening to me?
Like, is me knowing what caused it going to help me to combat it, to fight it better?
Will I have a better position to fight from?
And the answer is maybe not.
Maybe I won't.
But for whatever reason, I can't really put my finger on it, but for whatever reason, I just can't let it fucking go.
I just want to know.
And so I'm going to keep asking questions and I'm going to keep reading and I'm going to keep watching videos and reading studies and talking to my battle buddies that I served with.
Part of the reason that I'm doing this show on this topic is because I did.
I did reach out to some of my battle buddies, friends of mine, their family.
And they did.
They did come up with some things.
We've had some discussion.
And hopefully we can have more because I believe that this is a problem that a lot more veterans are suffering from.
And they're confused because I am super confused.
And maybe this IIH was the blessing in disguise.
Maybe it wasn't intercranial hypertension and there's a massive blood clot sitting in my fucking vein.
And so maybe that's why it's clogged up.
Well, if it's peculiar, well, what's happening?
And then I've come to find out that allegedly there is a list of some sort, some way, somehow, up at the big VA somewhere that they're compiling of these conditions that veterans are having.
And they're able to see them and they're able to do studies and scans and try medication and try treatments or whatever.
And many times, seemingly unsuccessful.
I mean, what are doctors supposed to do when they test you and they send you through all this poking and prodding and all this shit to gather as much information as they can to tell you about what's going on with you and then come up with nothing?
But then the patients are saying, wait a minute, it's not nothing.
It's not nothing because I forget where I'm at.
I forget my thoughts in mid-sentence.
It's not nothing.
So apparently, there is a lot of I don't know what's going on with you happening to veterans.
And they're compiling this list.
And a lot of these things that they're compiling, allegedly, the answer is: well, you know, this could really be toxic exposure.
Did you live by a burn pit?
Were you here?
VA Toxic Exposure Lists00:08:28
Were you there?
Yes, yes, and yes.
Okay.
Well, apparently, for a lot of these different cases of random rare things, one of the only common denominators is burn pits.
Well, that confused me, right?
And I'm not a very smart man when it comes to medical stuff, right?
I just tell them what's going on.
They tell me what to do.
I do it if it works.
I'll keep doing it the next time if necessary.
If it doesn't work, I'm going to find a different way and find something that works.
So what are we to do?
Right?
And see, there it is, right there.
I just completely forgot what I was saying.
So I rambled off some other bullshit.
Anyway, it's a really good time to take a break.
I'm going to go back, gather my thoughts, and I'm going to tell you about what I was going to tell you when we come back.
So stick with us.
Don't go away.
We'll be right back.
Hey, folks, real quick before we get back to the show.
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What these researchers found was that vaccinated children had 4.29 times the rate of asthma, 3.03 times the rate of atopic disease, 5.96 times the rate of autoimmune disease, and 5.53 times the rate of neurodevelopmental disorders.
A number of different diagnoses, including diabetes and ADHD and a number of them, in the unvaccinated group, there was zero.
In other words, all these chronic diseases that we're accepting, the reality is maybe 99% of them don't have to exist in children.
That's not the way God made us.
They looked at over 47,000 Medicaid claims between 1999 and 2011.
Those who are vaccinated versus unvaccinated, I could say an odds ratio would be like 2.81.
2.81 to 1.
So that would be 181% increase.
Epilepsy seizures, 252%.
Luring disorders, 581%.
If you look at all these different diagnoses, they're all higher.
For example, I'll just give you one example.
Luring disorders in the full term is 581%.
In the preterm, the ones who are vaccinated, 884% increase.
Every single vaccine has an excipient that is a human toxin.
Human toxin.
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Hey folks, welcome back.
All right.
So I went back.
I gathered my thoughts.
I was talking to you about the common denominator, this list that the VA apparently is compiling somewhere somehow.
Rat Studies on Blast Injuries00:15:05
And for a lot of these rare, random things, the only common denominator is burn pit exposure, toxic exposure.
And so I decided that I was going to reach out, reach out to the people in which I served with.
And I did that, as I explained.
One person sent me, well, it was one person, two people each sent me one thing, but they're married, right?
We served together.
They're now married.
And so they were trying to help me out and find some information.
And so one person was able to find some information about a study, I believe it was back in like 2007 to 2009, somewhere in there, where they tested rats and the effects on their brains with low-level blast exposure.
And they found some pretty interesting results.
What they found was that this low-level blast exposure, which are things like weapon systems, firing weapons, guns, loud, anything that's loud and concussive, right?
So a lot of these big diesel engines on our equipment, they're very loud and they are concussive as they do their thing and the engines turn over.
They're pretty loud.
There's tanks, there's artillery cannons, there's grenades, there's rocket launchers, there's all kinds of shit, right?
There's all kinds of things in the military that are big and loud and destructive, right?
That's what we do.
That's what the military does.
They destroy shit.
And then the military also has people that come in after the fact to help rebuild the stuff.
We don't, we try not to, at least the intent is to try to leave the place better than we found it, even after we've destroyed it through combat.
And so what they found in these, in these rats were that it caused significant cognitive impairment, but not for a very long time.
Like the cognitive impairment that they observed only lasted hours, several hours.
I think it was like 36 hours-ish, something like that.
The other thing is that they say these repeated low-level concussions, they damage the blood-brain barrier.
And so, the way that I understood this was: if you think of your brain like a jello mold, right?
Let's say it's cherry jello or strawberry jello, just this big mold of strawberry gel.
It's wiggly and pliable and things like that, right?
Like jello is.
And then, if you think of your blood-brain barrier as this protective layer, right?
The best analogy I came up with in my mind, and this might sound like the fat kid analogy, right?
Is when I was young, my mother, my grandmother, and one of my aunts all were big pudding makers, right?
There was always pudding being made.
And if you were a kid that ate pudding, you will remember that sometimes on chocolate pudding, you get that like layer over the top, right?
It's it's a kind of a protective layer of the rest of your pudding.
Kids think it's gross, they peel it off, they get rid of it, and then they eat their bowl of pudding.
Well, if you were to take a big, large chocolate pudding skin and drape it gently over this jello mold that simulates your brain, that's kind of the best analogy I could come up with with an explanation for common terms for the blood-brain barrier.
It's a protective layer, like a membrane of sorts that wraps around your brain to protect it, keep the things that it needs together and tight and working properly.
And so, the idea behind these low-level blast exposures are: if you were to, for example, take this brain with this jello with the pudding skin, and you were to sit and just tap it over and over, right?
Just keep tapping it.
This is what they explain as low-level blast exposures, similar to firing an automatic weapon, a machine gun, right?
Let's just say, for example, you're an infantry soldier and your team and any given mission is we need to go take this house, right?
Our target is in this house.
We need to take this house, we need to clear it, we need to find the target or the person.
We need to extract them and bring him back to the rear because the intel guys want to question them.
I don't know, just something, right?
Well, in any infantry operation, there are tactics, right?
There are rules of sorts of how to operate efficiently and properly.
And so, let's just say for conversation's sake, we have a support by fire team.
What the support by fire team is, they are at a given set point, usually automatic riflemen, machine gunners, and have a clear line of sight to the target.
And when we initiate this attack, the support by fire team is just going to start suppressing fire on the target property, right?
And that gives us time to keep the attention off our assault team who may be moving around to swing to the side to flank the enemy, assault through, annihilate the enemy, grab the target, get him out, and then we all move out together, right?
Just a real hasty plan, just for conversation's sake.
And let's say that this whole thing takes 10 minutes, just 10 minutes to initiate, move around, flank, assault through, take out the enemy, grab a target, and bounce.
Well, as an automatic rifleman, let's just say that you shoot 300 rounds in this engagement, in this plan to go in and kidnap this target, right?
Because we're all superheroes.
Well, if you shoot 300 rounds, that's 300 taps, 300 times, right, in just a very short time.
And I don't, and I assume that the duration of time is not as important as the number of taps that happens.
And what do we know about things that are held together by a sheath or a casing of sorts and repeatedly start tapping and disrupting the contents of this casing around this membrane?
So if we're tapping on the pudding skin repeatedly over time, not only is the pudding skin going to deteriorate, get weaker, get thinner, but the jello underneath it is going to start to deteriorate, come apart, get weaker.
This is kind of how they explain low-level blast injuries that they did on rats and how it correlates to what might be happening to soldiers, might be happening to construction workers, might be happening.
It's not just soldiers.
It's not just military people.
There are a lot of people that work in jobs that are constantly around concussive things, right?
And we kind of just chalk it up to, well, that's part of the job, right?
It's what I do.
It's what I'm good at.
It's what I know.
It's what I'm sticking with.
And we don't know until recently that this has to be damaging.
So then I thought, well, okay, we have this information about the testing done on the rats.
What about this burn pit piece?
Right?
Because the idea was if these two things are mixed together, how bad could that be for us?
Because there were hundreds and thousands of soldiers that were exposed to burn pits.
And there were also an extraordinary number of soldiers that were exposed to low-level blast injuries.
Mechanics, artillerymen, tankers, infantrymen, anybody, anybody that's around this stuff.
What we learned through the burn pit exposure, which has been a thing for a lot longer, so we know a lot more information about it.
What we learned from that information as it relates to what I was researching is that the inhalation of all of these toxic chemicals also weaken and damage your blood-brain barrier.
Okay, so now this is interesting.
Now we have two things that are pretty prominent in everyday life of a soldier that was deployed during Operation Iraqi Freedom or Enduring Freedom or Noble Eagle or whatever, whatever the conflict in the Middle East over the last 26 years is what we're talking about.
All of these things, all of these things are contributing factors.
So when we're inhaling these pollutants from the burn pits, we're damaging our blood-brain barrier.
And also, it contributes to inflammation, intracranial inflammation.
And also, so does the low-level blast injuries.
And so both of these things separate, according to the research, are damaging, but able to be treated.
They're not good for us, but there is a way apparently to have treatment, have occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy.
There's help to learn how to live with it, new techniques, new tools to put into your tool belt to deal with these issues that you may be experiencing.
But when we have all of this evidence and we have all of this research, what good does it do us?
Right?
And so, this is the conundrum that I find myself in with my situation.
I really want to know.
I really want to know why I got these blood clots in my brain.
It would just be, it'd be awesome to be able to understand what's happening.
But now we have found out that not only were the chemicals weakening our ability to protect ourselves without even knowing it.
We didn't even know.
I think we all had assumptions.
I think we all had some kind of assumptions that this may not be healthy, that we're sleeping in smog and it smells like burning bodies and shit and tires and chemicals.
It's probably not healthy for us.
But of course, nobody said anything, right?
They didn't say, well, you know, maybe we should move you or anything like that.
It didn't happen.
The other thing, on top of all of this, that I think is interesting is that I was also asked a question by a doctor about electronic warfare devices that we may have used.
And so this brings in a whole nother level of complexity, right?
We had systems, devices installed on our vehicles to help defeat IEDs.
At the time, between 05 and 07, when we went to Iraq the first time, there were a lot of roadside bombs.
There were a lot of IEDs.
In fact, there was a lot of research being done about the effects of IEDs, how they were defeating our armor, the things that they were using to be able to just decimate soldiers who are behind five inches of armor in these Humvees and these vehicles.
Well, what they were using were copper discs.
Seems really simple.
They would make these roadside bombs called EFPs, explosive, explosively formed projectiles or explosive form projectiles.
So they would build these roadside bombs, and inside of these bombs, they would somehow put copper disks in them.
And when these bombs exploded at super high temperatures, and of course, super high concussive force, it would instantly liquefy this copper.
It would melt it.
And what do we know about liquid metal?
Well, then it cuts through other metal.
Pretty good.
And so, seems like a simple idea, seems like a simple theory or whatever tactic, but it worked.
It worked, and it killed a lot of soldiers, and it hurt even more.
The saving grace I believe that I had in the one big IED that went off on our truck was that some genius that was roaming around Iraq in 2005 and 2006 had an idea to take ballistic windshields and install them wherever they could figure to fit them.
And what they did was they put ballistic windshields on top of our turrets so that we could still stand in our turrets.
I was a gunner in a Humvee, so we could stand in our turrets.
Ballistic Glass in Humvees00:14:01
Because if you sit down behind the shield and you sit down behind the three walls that are built of armor to protect you, you can't see the road.
You can't do your job from a sitting position.
You can't see enough and you won't see anything fast enough to be able to get your truck and your team and the people you are responsible for stopped in time so that they don't hit it.
So sitting down, even though it was required by military leadership, wasn't the most effective way to do the job.
It wasn't the best way to make sure that we all got home that night.
And so somebody who was extremely smart figured out, well, we'll put ballistic glass.
There were a lot of Humvees and a lot of vehicles that were being destroyed by roadside bombs, but they were able to salvage windshields out of them.
And it just so happened that they stacked on top of a turret perfectly.
You could create the three walls of a turret, another eight inches to, I don't know, it was higher than eight inches, maybe it was two or three feet even high of ballistic glass.
Now all of a sudden, when you're standing in your turret, you're not exposed from your just above your belly button to your head because all of that would stick above the armor of the turret.
Now I got more space.
I can be behind ballistic glass.
I can see through it.
I can see the road.
I can do my job a whole lot better.
I can ensure that my battle buddies are going to be as safe as possible.
I'm going to ensure that the civilians that are driving the semis that we're escorting are safe as possible.
And we're all going to get to where we need to go as safe as possible.
And when the roadside bomb hit our truck and this EFP, this explosive form projectile that shot loads of copper at our truck out of this massive explosion.
And I guess I don't even know.
I don't even know if it was massive because the second it went off, I was sleeping.
The people behind us said it was a pretty large explosion.
It was massive.
I'll tell you it was massive because it fucked me up.
It kicked my ass.
And so when this IED went off and it shot hot copper at our truck and our driver, Evan, did exactly what he was supposed to do and be on the opposite side of the road from where we were told in our intelligence report.
This is an IED hotspot.
So in this section, in this part of the road, and make sure that you're straddling the left shoulder.
We believe that the IEDs are going to be on the right side of the road.
And the idea was if we're further to the left, the explosion would go up over the top of our truck, hence making us safer.
Well, Evan did the exact thing he was supposed to do.
The post-blast analysis apparently showed that the way that the IED was aimed was a little bit different than usual.
They had figured out a new tactic, a new TTP.
And so the very bottom circle, the very bottom radius of the blast is what got me.
But right where my face, the next morning, the next morning, when we were able to go see our truck, they had done their post-blast analysis.
They had went through the maintenance tent to make sure it would still run because we still had a mission to complete the next morning.
Right where my head was in that turret, right here, right almost dead even with my temple, sticking through the ballistic glass by maybe a quarter of an inch was a piece of copper.
I was a quarter of an inch from having my face ripped off by a piece of copper.
And I don't know who it was that came up with the idea to put these ballistic shields on the top of turrets.
But whoever it was, if for whatever reason you ever see this, or anybody who ever sees this may just by chance know the person that came up with that idea, whoever it was, wherever they are, thank you.
You saved my life.
And the real shitty part about that is when all of these things, these enclosures designed out of ballistic glass were first put up because soldiers quit asking for permission.
The cool thing about the military is that the peons, the soldiers, they all talk and they all take care of each other the best they can.
Sometimes there's feuds and shit like that.
But for the most part, when soldiers are dying and soldiers need help and someone needs to think of something so we don't lose all these people this fast, you quit asking for permission.
And at some point, somebody just did it.
And then other soldiers saw it.
Other gunners and Humvees saw it.
Well, hey, where the fuck did you get that, bro?
That'd be great to have.
I wouldn't have to sit down.
I can do my job better.
I know that our command doesn't want us standing in that turret, but I don't give a fuck because they're not out there.
They're not out there doing the mission.
I'm out there doing the mission.
So if this is going to help me, where do we go?
Where do I got to bring my truck?
I'll take the ass chewing.
I'll take whatever the consequences are, but I want to go home because I got a baby at home and I want to see him again.
That was the attitude we had.
And what we learned about ballistic glass that many people probably knew already by this point is that glass, when hit with liquid hot metal, turns to liquid.
Right?
Maybe this is the whole design of ballistic glass.
But this is just a regular guy, regular infantryman, figuring it out.
Right?
So the molten metal turns the glass into liquid.
What do we know about cooling metals?
We know that liquid cools metal a lot faster than metal cools metal, which is why when copper is launched at anything with a very high heat explosive and all this concussive force and it's traveling at insane speeds as a liquid molten hot metal, it slices through Humvee armor Like no one's fucking business.
And it was, I'm telling you guys, it was mutilating soldiers.
I had a buddy who his job for a little while, he was a mechanic, and his job for a while was to work in the section of the motor pool where they brought in the destroyed vehicles, the vehicles that were blown up, the vehicles that may have rolled over or whatever, vehicles that weren't operable anymore.
His specific purpose in this section of the motor pool was to look where for any places that the armor may have failed.
The Army was trying to collect data to see where the armor on our vehicles was failing because soldiers were getting injured and killed and worse and maimed all the time.
Daily, almost, it seemed.
And so I lost it.
Man, see what I'm saying?
This is just an asset.
It's asinine.
What's going on?
Oh, his job was to go through the trucks and find where the armor failed.
What they didn't tell him about that job was that they didn't clean them out.
They were still full of bone chunks, flesh chunks, blood everywhere, bullets everywhere, bandages, any personal effects that just got swooshed around in there while they were trying to do whatever they were doing to save each other's lives.
They didn't tell him about that.
Well, that really fucks a guy up.
When you're crawling through other soldiers' blood and guts and brains and skull pieces.
But we had to know, right?
We got to try to figure out where this armor is failing.
We got to protect the ones that are still out here doing the job.
And so that was his job.
And see, all of these things, now we've gotten way down the goat trail from burn pits and low-level blast exposures.
Let me just finish with that and then I'll finish with my final thought because we're running low on time.
I believe that low-level blast exposures for military members need to be researched more.
We need to compile more information.
Maybe for those of us who have already been through it in our home and are dealing with it now, maybe it's too late for us to get any real kind of solution.
But there are things we can do to cope.
There are things we can do to fight.
And I believe that most people will.
But if we can do more research on this and we can learn more, we can help the ones that aren't having problems yet.
Maybe there's some precursors we can be on the lookout for.
Maybe there's testing that everyone should just do who's been in the military.
Maybe other industries need to take this on.
Construction trades, all these things.
I think that we still will find people that are going to do the job.
I believe there's a possibility to design better equipment to help these things not be so prevalent.
But I think it needs to be researched a whole lot more.
I think that this could be a massive problem for the veteran community as we all age.
Keep in mind, most of us from the GWAT or the Global War on Terrorism era, so 01 to, what was it, 23, 22, most of us are in our early 40s.
Some of us, there's quite a few guys that are older, for sure.
There's a lot of dudes that are younger, in their early 30s, even.
This could be a problem for many people.
And I believe if we don't take it serious and at least do more research, maybe the research will show that we really don't have to worry about it moving forward.
Maybe it's something that's an easy fix to prevent moving forward.
But if we don't, I believe that this could be a condition that is, or a situation, many different conditions that will be like this era's Agent Orange, which we thought the burn pits were going to be our Agent Orange.
Well, this may prove, oops, excuse me, this may prove to have even bigger effects, more damaging over time.
But if we don't research, we won't know.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see as we all get old.
I guess when by the time I'm 75 or 80, if a whole massive group of veterans of my era are all drooling on themselves or they all have dementia or they all have Parkinson's and they're shaking themselves, whatever the case is, maybe there'll be more common denominators then.
Maybe there'll be more information.
We'll be able to see the results of these low-level blast exposures and this burn pit exposure.
Maybe we'll be able to see them easier.
Maybe they'll be more prevalent as we age and these conditions get worse.
If it's going to be a thing, maybe it'll be nothing.
But I don't think that's the issue.
So we'll see.
Hopefully they do more about this, but we're going to keep up on it.
I'm going to keep researching it, especially the brain stuff.
Because to be quite honest, I'm a little pissed off about it.
I don't think it's anybody's fault directly, but I just want to know what's going on inside my own calvarium.
The one thing I'll say is through the process of this, and what I did learn from a doctor who read my MRI is that I have an extremely dense calvarium.
I did not know what a calvarium was until recently.
Your calvarium is the medical term for your skull.
So I got a thick-ass skull, which my mother, my wife, probably most of my uncles and my aunt would tell you is all extremely accurate because I'm a hard-headed son of a bitch, I guess.
So anyway, take that for what it's worth.
Religious Identity and National Defense00:02:22
Folks, have a great rest of your night.
We'll see you again next week.
Please come back.
We love you here at the Richard Leonard Show.
Take care.
Have a great night.
We'll see you next week.
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 side of Israel.
Look at the side of Tel Aviv and look at the side 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 study, 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 lot and say we stand with them.
You go to Trump's cabinet, you go to Biden's cabinet, it's full of 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 just like to say that, you know, in our Bible, it says that you're like animals.
The Jews crucified our God.
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