A Retirement Benefit for Special Operators -- Dain Bramage?

A pervasive pattern of brain damage has been found in SEALs who have committed suicide.

I've been reading the article and intended to gift it to everyone, but Digby beat me to it.

It's not just blast damage from IEDs. It's brain concussions from, well, everything, including repeated rifle fire. Those blast waves are micro-blasts that the person won't feel, but they do add up. The scientists have been studying the brains of those who have died, but those findings were not disseminated to military leadership to change things.

The SEALs have been serving all of their careers in the War on Terror and, when they hit their forties, the damage adds up and becomes evident. It sounds as though a lot of them are not going to have long retirements.

What I wonder about is the effect of firing thousands of rounds through short-barrelled rifles. The rifles used are not your dad/grandpaw's M-16s with 20" barrels. Even the CAR-15s back in the day had longer barrels than the SBRs that the "special operators" use. The shorter a barrel on a rifle, the louder the report, the more blast and the more of a concussion wave for each shot. I don't know if suppressors mitigate that by a lot and whether or not they use them all the time during training.

We are going to need to build a shitload of care facilities for these guys if we don't want to see them off on their own and killing themselves (and others). We should do everything we can to ensure that "brain-damaged special operator" doesn't become as much of thing as "homeless Vietnam vets" were forty years ago.

We owe those guys no less.