A Secret War, Strange New Wounds, and Silence From the Pentagon.

Many U.S. troops who fired vast numbers of artillery rounds against the Islamic State developed mysterious, life-shattering mental and physical problems. But the military struggled to understand what was wrong.

It turns out that the Trump Doctrine of doing WAR on the CHEAP, by working gun crews TO DEATH, actually was killing them.

An investigation by The New York Times found that many of the troops sent to bombard the Islamic State in 2016 and 2017 returned to the United States plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, depression and, in a few cases, hallucinations. Once-reliable Marines turned unpredictable and strange. Some are now homeless. A striking number eventually died by suicide, or tried to.

The United States had made a strategic decision to avoid sending large numbers of ground troops to fight the Islamic State, and instead relied on airstrikes and a handful of powerful artillery batteries to, as one retired general said at the time, “pound the bejesus out of them.” The strategy worked: Islamic State positions were all but eradicated, and hardly any American troops were killed.

But it meant that a small number of troops had to fire tens of thousands of high-explosive shells — far more rounds per crew member, experts say, than any American artillery battery had fired at least since the Vietnam War.

Islamic State fighters overran vast swaths of Syria and Iraq in 2014, taking over some of the region’s largest cities and using their self-proclaimed caliphate to organize attacks on civilian targets across the region and beyond. American military planners knew they needed to confront the Islamic State, but also knew that the American public was weary of long wars in the Middle East.

Artillery offered a lot of bang with hardly any U.S. boots on the ground. A battery with four howitzers and about 100 troops could deliver a torrent of fire, day or night, in any weather. But keeping the troop count to a bare minimum meant there would be no relief shifts. Each battery would have to do the work of many.

“The people running this war made a choice,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan O’Gorman, a Marine officer who oversaw artillery operations in the offensive and now teaches strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, “and choices have consequences.”

Alpha battery troops set up their big guns in March 2017 in a dirt field in Syria within sight of the enemy-controlled city of Raqqa and almost immediately started firing. They rarely stopped for the next two months.

Military guidelines say that firing all those rounds is safe. What happened to the crews suggests that those guidelines were wrong.

The cannon blasts were strong enough to hurl a 100-pound round 15 miles, and each unleashed a shock wave that shot through the crew members’ bodies, vibrating bone, punching lungs and hearts, and whipping at cruise-missile speeds through the most delicate organ of all, the brain.

Night and day they hurled rounds, using some of the military’s most sophisticated cannons, M777A2 howitzers. The 35-foot-long guns had modern, precisely designed titanium parts and a digital targeting system, but when it came to protecting the crew the design had changed little in a century. Gun crews still worked within arm’s reach of the barrel and fired the gun by pulling a simple cord.

The resulting blast was several times louder than a jet taking off, and unleashed a shock wave that hit the crews like a kick to the chest. Ears rang, bones shivered, vision blurred as eyeballs momentarily compressed, and a ripple shot through every neuron in the brain like a whipcrack.

Basically 'shaken baby syndrome' effect on adults.

The relentless firing was being driven by a small, top-secret Army Delta Force group called Task Force 9. President Donald J. Trump had given the task force broad authority to use heavy firepower, and the task force applied it with savage enthusiasm, often bending the rules to hit not just enemy positions, but also mosques, schools, dams and power plants.

Sometimes, artillery crew members said, the task force ordered them to fire in a grid pattern, not aiming at any specific target but simply hurling rounds toward Raqqa, to keep the enemy on edge.

The military’s Central Command, which oversaw the task force, did not respond to requests for comment.

The demands of Task Force 9 led to rates of artillery fire not seen in generations.

During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, artillery crews fired an average of 70 rounds during the entire six-week campaign, said John Grenier, a historian at the Army’s Field Artillery School. During the initial months of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, crews fired an average of 260 rounds. In Syria, each gun in Alpha battery shot more than 1,100 rounds in two months — most of them using high-powered charges that produce the strongest shock waves. Some guns in Fox battery, which replaced Alpha, fired about 10,000 rounds each.

Under the relentless tempo, Marines would wake up feeling hung over and stagger to the guns like zombies. Their sense of taste changed. Some threw up. Crews grew irritable and fights broke out.

The symptoms were telltale signs of concussion, but also what anyone might feel after a string of stressful 20-hour workdays in the desert, sleeping in foxholes and eating rations from plastic pouches.

Medics came around daily to check on the crews but never intervened. And Marines trained to endure didn’t complain.

More than a year after Marines started experiencing problems, the Marine Corps leadership tried to piece together what was happening by ordering a study of one of the hardest-hit units, Fox Battery, 2nd Battalion, 10th Marines.

The research was limited to reviewing the troops’ medical records. No Marines were examined or interviewed. Even so, the report, published in 2019, made a startling finding: The gun crews were being hurt by their own weapons.

More than half the Marines in the battery had eventually received diagnoses of traumatic brain injuries, according to a briefing prepared for Marine Corps headquarters.

Traumatic brain injuries can have profound effects on parts of the body that are nowhere near the skull, because the damage can cause communication with other organs to malfunction. Dozens of the young veterans interviewed by The Times said they now had elevated, irregular heartbeats and persistent, painful problems with their digestion.

The report warned that the experience in Syria showed that firing a high number of rounds, day after day, could incapacitate crews “faster than combat replacements can be trained to replace them.”

All four of the artillery batteries examined by The Times have had at least one suicide — a striking pattern, since death by suicide is rare even in high-risk populations. Some batteries have had several, and many service members said in interviews that they had tried to kill themselves.

The military did not seem to be taking the threat seriously, the briefing cautioned: Safety training — both for gun crews and medical personnel — was so deficient, it said, that the risks of repeated blast exposure “are seemingly ignored.”

Firing weapons is as fundamental to military service as tackling is to football.

Research has started to reveal that, as with hits in football, repeated blast exposure from firing heavy weapons like cannons, mortars, shoulder-fired rockets and even large-caliber machine guns may cause irreparable injury to the brain.

It is a sprawling problem that the military is just starting to come to grips with.

The science is still in its infancy, but evidence suggests that while individual blasts rippling through brain tissue may not cause obvious, lasting injury, repeated exposure appears to create scarring that eventually could cause neural connections to fail, according to Gary Kamimori, a senior Army blast researcher who retired recently after a career studying the problem.

“Think of it like a rubber band,” he said. “Stretch a rubber band a hundred times and it bounces back, but there are micro tears forming. The hundred-and-first time, it breaks.”

Those blasts might never cause a person to see stars or experience other signs of concussion, but over time they may lead to sleeplessness, depression, anxiety and other symptoms that in many ways resemble P.T.S.D., according to Dr. Daniel Perl, a neuropathologist who runs a Defense Department tissue bank that preserves dead veterans’ brains for research.

“It’s common to mistake a blast injury in the brain for something else, because when you walk into a clinic, it looks like a lot of other things,” Dr. Perl said.

His lab has examined samples from hundreds of deceased veterans who were exposed to enemy explosions and blasts from firing weapons during their military careers. The researchers found a unique and consistent pattern of microscopic scarring.

“You have a blast wave traveling at the speed of sound through the most complex and intricate organ in the body,” he said. “Wouldn’t you think there would be some damage?”

The military for generations set maximum safe blast-exposure levels for eardrums and lungs, but never for brains. Anything that didn’t leave troops dazed was generally considered safe. But that has recently changed.

Over the last decade, veterans suffering from brain injury-like symptoms after years of firing weapons pressured Congress to rethink the potential dangers, and lawmakers passed a number of bills from 2018 to 2022 ordering the Pentagon to start a sprawling “Warfighter Brain Health Initiative” to try to measure blast exposure and develop protocols to protect troops.

SADLY, most of the troops in these units who suffered damages have been GIVEN LESS THAN HONORABLE DISCHARGES and denied VA benefits and medical care.

That's how America, "thanks you for your service" these days.