450,000 U.S. Soldiers Diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury Since 2001
Readers wondering why I have an aversion to America's endless wars should spend time with invalids suffering from TBI.
When I was living in Menlo Park, California in the years 2011-2015, I got to be pals with an affluent, patriotic man who was a benefactor the VA hospitals in Palo Alto and Menlo Park. He introduced me to a psychiatrist with whom I got to be pals, and on a few occasions I was given permission to accompany him when he visited his patients.
By far the most common injury I saw was what neurologists call a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). According to the National Institutes of Health (Occupation and Risk of Traumatic Brain Injury in the Millennium Cohort Study) rom 2000 to 2021, an estimated 449,026 active-duty U.S. service members experienced a TBI. These injuries were often caused by combat-related incidents, such as explosive blasts, and are considered a “signature injury” of post-9/11 conflicts.
The vast majority of these injuries are considered mild, but a “mild” diagnosis is cold comfort for those suffering from the syndrome and their family members, as mild symptoms include:
Headache
Dizziness
Nausea and vomiting
Fatigue
Sensitivity to light or noise
Blurred or double vision
Balance problems
Cognitive: Confusion or difficulty concentrating, memory loss or problems with recall, Difficulty with attention or problem-solving, and slowed thinking or processing speed.
Emotional: Irritability or mood swings, anxiety or depression, difficulty sleeping, and changes in appetite.
Other: Ringing in the ears, loss of consciousness (briefly), and seizures (rare).
The following 2023 news segment presents a pretty good overview of the epidemic. Note that, as of this posting, it has only received 235 views.
Though I haven’t analyzed it, I suspect that the TBI epidemic is related to the epidemic of suicide among U.S. service personnel. According to the 2021 Brown University Cost of War Project, since 2001, 30,000 active-duty personnel and veterans of post-9/11 conflicts have died by suicide as of June 2021.
Most of the patients I visited had been diagnosed with moderate to severe TBI, and were profoundly debilitated. A remarkable feature of many severe cases of TBI is that they were not caused by a penetrating object such as shrapnel or a gunshot, but by the shockwave generated by a roadside bomb.
The U.S. military knows how to wage Blitzkrieg against an underdeveloped foreign nation, but when it comes to occupying the country to produce a favorable political settlement, our skills quickly reach their limits.
In the run-up to the Iraq War, key Bush administration policymakers such as Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz claimed that occupying Iraq would be like the successful post-World War II occupations of Germany and Japan, revealing that they knew nothing about Iraq, Germany, or Japan.
Readers commenting on my post of earlier today - Smearing & Threatening Tucker Carlson Will Generate Anti-Semitism Instead of Quelling It - should evaluate the discussion in light of American fatigue with foreign wars.
If you are like Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham—who bragged to the Republican Jewish Coalition on October 31, 2025 how much they favor further war and “killing people” in the Middle East—you are going to generate enmity against yourselves and the self-described “Jewish” political coalition to whom you are publicly trying to curry favor.
Note Graham’s vulgar remarks at 7:49 on the tape.
We’re killin’ all the right people and cuttin’ your taxes. Trump is my favorite president, we’ve run out of bombs. We didn’t run out of bombs in World War II!”
It’s simple: when tens of millions of Americans have developed deep feelings of antipathy to foreign wars that never accomplish anything other than getting hundreds of thousands killed and maimed, you are going to be very unpopular with tens of millions of people.
If you, like Senator Graham, expressly call yourself “a coalition of Baptists and Jews,” you are going to generate antipathy towards the Baptists and Jews to whom you appeal. War and its terrible consequences have long been known to cause very hard feelings.
War is Hell! Diplomacy in many cases would prevent war. War is usually started by those who have something to gain from it or in England's case now to take the heat off the failure of the current administration. There are answers to help some of the soldiers who have been harmed, nutrition-wise, but doctors don't have s clue. Drugs wipe out the organs, glands (in the brain, particularly) and cells in the body. The right nutrition and supplements would be valuable.. In addition, prayer is very potent! It saved my brain! Back in the sixties and early 70s, my husband put me into mental hospitals...and I was given a series of ECT treatments. Why.? Because i was not getting sufficient sleep and was not functioning well. I also was dieting to keep my weight down. i had gone into the study of nutrition in 1961, but much of the information was not good. i had to learn by Trial and Error. Well, I learned all about mental hospitals and what they were doing to the human brains with their drugs and ECT. I said a prayer, when I was in the hospital "Please protect my mind!" There are no doctors more ignorant thsn the psychiatrists (and other doctors who give tranquilizers to young and old. They are are wiping out people's minds and their bodies with their very toxic drugs, ECt and lobotomies. Many doctors have no comprehension that their drugs are destroying the glands in people's brains that control their ability to think.My mother's mind was destroyed by the tranquilizers she was given. Psychiatrists and doctors who give toxic drugs are totally responsible for damaging untold millions of young people that they put on tranquilizers, because doctors know nothing about nutrients for the brsin.. My 4-1/2 year old son was put on tranquilizers..and it was a miracle that I was handed books, which told me that SUGAR created Hyperactivity...and Tranquilizers STUNTED the growth of Children's organs. This is what got me into the study of nutrition and health back in 1961. It was not easy to learn, because of the misinformation coming from the Food Industry who presented their research to the world with the blessing of our money-grubbing government.
These symptoms you describe sound like brain injury. How do we know this was not caused by vaccines an then blamed on proximity to explosions? Since AI has now read everything ever written perhaps it might know how many of these types of injury were seen in the first world war when large numbers of soldiers were in close to multiple explosions for long periods. My best guess is that our brave soldiers who fought in the forever wars were probably experimented on with drugs of all kinds so the powers that should not be could find out what the real side effects were, rather than the fake testing that goes on in the fake trials that are designed only to pass licensure. I did not join the military and discouraged our sons from joining not because I was afraid of the battle field.