Thousands of TBI cases off the record

[CommunityEditor]

Along with 20,000 other veterans, Marine Lance Cpl. Gene Landrus is not included in the Pentagon’s official count of U.S. troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s because his wound was to his brain and hidden from view.

Landrus — who faces medical separation from the Corps and is up for the Purple Heart for wounds sustained in a May 2006 roadside bomb attack outside Abu Ghraib, Iraq — said he did not realize the nausea, dizziness, memory loss and headaches he suffered after the blast were signs of a lasting brain injury.

Army medics who examined him in the field didn’t find the wound either.

“They wanted to know if we had any holes in us, or if we were bleeding. We were in and out of [the aid station] in 10 to 15 minutes,” said Landrus, 24, of Clarkston, Wash.

For the balance of his combat tour, he tried to shake off the blast’s effects and keep going. Now, “my goal is to get back to a normal life,” he said.

A USA Today survey of four military installations and the Department of Veterans Affairs, where combat veterans are routinely screened for brain injury, has found that about 20,000 people show signs of damage. That’s nearly five times the number officially listed by the Pentagon — 4,471.

Soldiers and Marines whose wounds were discovered after they left Iraq are not added to the official casualty list, said Army Col. Robert Labutta, a neurologist and brain injury consultant for the Pentagon.

“We are working to do a better job of reflecting accurate data in the official casualty table,” Labutta said.

The military lacks “a standardized definition of traumatic injury or a uniform process to report all [traumatic brain injury] cases,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Ellen Embrey wrote in a memo last month. As a result, it is hard to determine the scope of the problem, she wrote.

Most of the new cases involve mild or moderate brain injuries, commonly from exposure to blasts.

“Unfortunately, because the Pentagon has been slow in understanding and tracking [traumatic brain injury], this huge gulf in reporting doesn’t surprise me,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a member of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee.

More than 150,000 troops may have suffered head injuries in combat, says Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., founder of the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force.

“I am wary that the number of brain-injured troops far exceeds the total number reported injured,” he said.

Landrus was riding in an open-backed, armored Humvee when the roadside bomb detonated. It was his second exposure to a blast. An explosion a month before had “rung our bells a little bit, but no one was knocked unconscious.”

In the attack, Landrus and three other Marines blacked out for several seconds. After Landrus regained consciousness, “everything looked like it was going in slow motion,” he recalled.

The battalion came home in August 2006 to Camp Pendleton, Calif., one of a few military installations that screens for brain injuries among returning troops. Landrus was referred to Navy doctors who diagnosed brain injury. With medication and rehabilitation training at nearby Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas, Landrus has improved.

“I still can’t remember what I did the day before or stuff that I did earlier in the day,” he said. He carries a Palm Pilot or a pad of paper to write down orders, numbers or dates, so he can remember them later. The headaches have never gone away.

Landrus will never fully recover, said Jessica Martinez, his lead therapist at Scripps.

“This is basically like an invisible injury,” she says. “He looks like a normal guy. ... But if you spend any amount of time with him ... you would be able to notice that something’s really happened.”



Article: http://www.militarytimes.com/news/20...ns_tbi_071123/

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Remember "The First Rule of Embarassing Facts"

"If we don't count them, they don't count."