Sgt. Briggs War:
Bob Briggs got a head full of shrapnel in Iraq.Then he came home to more wars: to regain the use of hishalf-paralyzed body, and to get the U.S. government topay for his medical care.
BY MOLLY PRIESMEYER
Illustration: Lou Fancher & Steve Johnson // Photos: Fred Petters
FROM THE TIME BOB BRIGGS was a kid, what always thrilled him most was the romance of operating heavy equipment—the big machines that made roads and dug holes and moved steel beams, that got jobs done and kept the world moving. The fascination never left him. It was part of the reason that the then-23-year-old Briggs enlisted in the National Guard in 1991, after the first Gulf War, as a combat engineer and equipment operator. And it was certainly the reason he chased after, and eventually won, what he calls his "dream job," as a road maintenance worker with the Iowa Department of Transportation.
These days, the heavy machine Briggs is learning to operate is his own body. Last April 16, at an encampment 70 miles west of Baghdad, an Iraqi insurgent's rocket-propelled grenade exploded about 10 feet from Briggs. The blast shredded the right side of Briggs's skull with shrapnel. His right eye was destroyed, along with most of the vision in his left eye. The resulting massive brain trauma effectively wiped out a lifetime's worth of vital neural connections that encompassed tasks as varied as walking, feeding himself, and making and storing memories. The left side of his body was almost completely paralyzed. Shrapnel littered his brain and right hip. After being evacuated from the field, he spent nearly a week on life support. "I got so much metal in me I probably won't be able to go through airport security ever again," he jokes now.
Since June 2, Briggs has spent countless hours in physical rehabilitation here at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration Medical Center, one of four newly designated "polytrauma" units created in April 2005 to deal with the complex and multiple injuries soldiers are sustaining in Iraq and Afghanistan. The staff at the new polytrauma units (the others are located in Tampa, Palo Alto, and Richmond, Virginia) have had to readjust and receive fresh training to deal with a set of life-changing injuries not seen in previous wars. "We're seeing a lot more brain injuries. That's definitely the most common injury," says Dr. Larisa Kusar, one of the lead physicians for the brain injury and polytrauma team. "But we're also seeing multiple orthopedic fractures, amputations, severed limbs, blindness—a lot of multiple traumatic injuries."
The physical therapy room where Briggs has spent countless hours since June is a drab, bare-walled beige. Today he's working to ascend a plywood riser built to simulate a curb. The diminutive physical therapist at his side is reminding him to lead with his right side, then to move the cane and drag the left side of his body onto the raised pallet. As a natural left-hander, Briggs is accustomed to leading with that side when he moves, and it doesn't work anymore. He has a hard time at first trusting his none-too-steady right side to carry the entire weight of his body, and the exertion wears him out quickly. He needs to stop and rest on a nearby chair for a few minutes. After a couple of more tries, Briggs executes the necessary movements more confidently. His rule of thumb in rehab: Don't stop trying until you get it right at least once.
Besides the curb-stepping exercise, Briggs's rehab regimen includes tasks such as climbing a set of stairs, rising from a chair, and getting up off the floor. The last is especially brutal given the essential uselessness of his left side: He compares the job of lifting his 200-pound frame into a standing position to "picking up a couch with one hand tied behind your back." Without the stabilizing tripod-base cane he uses in all his mobility exercises, it would be entirely impossible.
Briggs practices walking in the hallway outside the PT room, a 50-foot corridor finished in sedate institutional brown and beige. Before starting, he often touches the padded green helmet he wears, almost unconsciously. Portions of his skull had to be removed to accommodate the swelling of his brain, so the helmet is an absolutely vital part of his rehabilitation. Without it, falling down could be deadly.
The physical therapist tucks herself under Briggs's inert left arm and they set off. As they go, she uses her right foot to gently kick his near-paralyzed left leg out ahead of him, and a certain faltering rhythm is established by the clack of Briggs's cane and the little kicks the therapist is giving his bad leg. Together, they look a little like the equipment manager and the star linebacker, hobbling off the field.
As if the walking itself were not arduous enough, the therapist is peppering Briggs with questions as they go: "How are you feeling now?" and "How have you been sleeping lately?" and "How has this week been for you?" She encourages me to ask him questions, too. As they pass the waiting area where his wife, Michelle, is sitting, Briggs struggles to call up the answers while still pulling the weight of his body forward. The point of making him talk is to teach his brain how to do more than one thing at a time again. Briggs says the energy this requires is palpable, and that it's made his walks even more exhausting.
"My leg has come back a lot," he offers when it's over, studying his brace-trussed left leg. "I'm actually starting to get some movement in my upper arm, too." He smiles, showing off a baby face accentuated by fleshy cheeks that belie his age.
On top of dealing with the brain injury and the physical and emotional issues that come with it—he says his moods are sometimes a mystery to him now, and that sadness overtakes him without warning—there is another issue compounding Bob and Michelle Briggs's troubles: Like many families of Iraq vets, they're not sure how, or even if, all the medical and travel expenses they are bound to incur will be covered. The Army to which Bob dedicated almost 14 years as a reservist has abandoned them, they say. Three months after his injury, the Army medically retired Bob and shifted his benefits to the VA, leaving unclear how his future care will be paid for.
"They shoved me out quick," Bob says. "It's pretty bad when you're knocking on heaven's gate and you darn near die for your country and the Army doesn't want to take care of you."
BOB BRIGGS grew up in Keokuk, Iowa, a Mississippi River town of 11,000 located at the southeast corner of the state, just north of the Missouri state line. After graduating from high school, he went to work at Keokuk Steel Castings. "It was a dirty, awful place to work," remembers his sister, Brenda Best. "Just a dead-end job. You work at a factory and that's where you end up the rest of your life. And he wanted to do something better with his life." He joined up as a National Guard reservist not long after the first Gulf War ended, she recalls, hoping in part to learn skills that could catapult him into a better job.
Briggs re-upped his Guard enlistment in August 2004, almost a year and a half after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He had almost 14 years of Guard service under his belt at that point, and he was hoping to get to 20 years so that he could earn an early retirement pension from the military. With a wife, a four-year-old daughter, and a three-month-old son at home, he hoped his unit would not get the call-up to Iraq. "Nobody really wants to go," he says now. "But I knew what I had to do. I could never allow my company to go and me not go. I could never live with that." Two months later, on October 14, Briggs's unit was on its way to Fort Sill in Oklahoma for training. They later celebrated the coming of the New Year—twice—in the air en route to Iraq, where they landed on January 1, 2005.
During the long days in the Sunni Triangle, the group of 500 or so soldiers from southeastern Iowa was responsible for route-clearing patrol missions, which involved traveling either on foot or in vehicles searching for improved explosive devices (IEDs) planted by Iraqi insurgent fighters. They'd scour the landscape and rifle through dirt in search of anything suspicious-looking: ground that appeared freshly dug up, piles that seemed out of place, wires, packages—anything that could camouflage a makeshift explosive. Sometimes they'd use a "Buffalo," a heavily armored vehicle outfitted with an articulated arm capable of digging around to find IEDs and detonate them.
On April 16, Briggs and his fellow soldiers in the 224th Engineer Battalion were setting up their barracks at Camp Ramadi west of Baghdad. They had moved from Habbinaya the day before, where the group had put up in an old Air Force base when they weren't running security missions for the second Marine division. That night, at around 8:00, the soldiers had just finished erecting walls to partition the various offices and facilities of their new base. Some of the soldiers were assembling beds, while others were putting pictures up on the walls of their new sleeping quarters.
Briggs and some friends were out back in the gazebo-like smoking shack, waiting to go to a late dinner. They decided to play a quick game of horseshoes to pass the time. Dusk was turning into nighttime. "We were just waiting to eat," Briggs says. "We didn't hear anything. No warnings. Usually there are sirens. They got closer than normal."
He has no memory of what happened next. He only knows what other soldiers and his staff sergeant later told him. Without warning, insurgents began launching rocket-propelled grenades into the barely established camp. Three soldiers from another unit were killed. Briggs and two other Iowa National Guardsmen were injured. One man in his battalion was an emergency medical technician in civilian life, and Briggs believes the EMT's fast action made the difference. "I tell you, he saved my life," Briggs says, choking up. (He hasn't been able to speak to the man since. And given the fragile state of Briggs's mind and emotions, no one is anxious to press for the encounter too soon. Right now it's one more thing than he can't deal with. "It will be a long time before [Bob] can talk to him," says Michelle Briggs. "Maybe when he comes home.")
The day after the attack, Briggs was transported to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where he arrived on life support and in a coma. No one was sure of his prognosis, or the extent of the brain injury. Owing to the metal fragments scattered throughout his body, doctors were unable to do an MRI. Michelle and Bob's parents flew up to Washington to be with him. His sister, Brenda Best, stayed back in Keokuk to take care of the kids.
"I had daily calls," Best remembers of that first week. "Sometimes two and three times. It did me good that day my mom called and said, 'He's asking for you.' He had woken up and come off life support. And he could talk to me."
The doctors said Briggs had suffered a penetrating brain injury from shrapnel. The shards of metal that pierced his frontal and temporal lobes caused brain bleeds, and—because they remained lodged in the tissue—subsequent small seizures. The shrapnel also tore up his right eye, forcing a later surgery to remove the remains of the eye from its socket, a procedure called nucleation. He also lost much of the sight in his left eye due to internal bleeding, though the vision in that eye has since improved. "This is a good prognostic factor," Dr. Kusar notes. "He can go a long way in terms of function and independence."
Along with suffering from a penetrating brain injury, Briggs also incurred what Kusar calls a diffuse brain injury from the blast, a widespread brain trauma that disrupts a whole range of cognitive functions. "This is becoming a common combat injury," she adds, "from a new mechanism of war."
SINCE THE INVASION of Iraq was launched in March 2003, Veterans Administration statistics have recorded a total of 2,310 patients with traumatic brain injuries, all of whom are still presently under treatment. The VA's four new "polytrauma" units in Minneapolis and elsewhere have cared for 219 severely injured Iraq war vets.
But you can't measure the burden those numbers represent without consulting another set of numbers: the VA budget. In April of this year, just as VA officials were reorganizing their hospital system to accommodate these new patients, the Minneapolis VA facility was facing a $7 million budget shortfall of its own. While the Department of Veterans Affairs notes that "the average cost of treating a TBI patient is $21,231 in their various stages of treatment...[and] 101 patients have exceeded $80,000 and two have exceeded $500,000," none of the brain injury or polytrauma facilities have received added funding to pay for the care of their most severely injured patients, many of whom face hospital stays of up to six months. The VA, which sought emergency funding from Congress back in July, is facing a dollars-and-cents crisis brought on partly by underfunding in wartime and partly by the growing incidence of injuries like Briggs's, which represent a challenge that neither war planners nor VA administrators were ready for.
The American public is well acquainted with the U.S. military's death toll in Iraq, which stood at 2,108 as of last Monday. Less familiar is the number of troops who have sustained serious and, in many cases, permanently life-altering, wounds: around 15,500, according to the Department of Defense. In fact, the ratio of killed to wounded in Iraq is about one to eight, or roughly twice the ratio of the Vietnam War. "The survivability rate is much higher," says Paul Rieckhoff, an Operation Iraqi Freedom vet who served as a platoon leader in Baghdad and later founded Operation Truth, a soldiers' and veterans' advocacy organization. "Guys who would have died in past wars are living because of the advances in body armor and in medical technology." But the heightened survivability of many war injuries also means more vets with problems such as serious brain deficits, full or partial paralysis, loss of vision, or loss of limbs. ("The amputation rate has almost doubled" in this war compared to past ones, Rieckhoff notes.)
Improved field medicine and triage care are not the only reasons for the heightened incidence of major traumatic injuries in the Iraq War. Critics (who are not all opponents of the war itself) have highlighted numerous other factors: The Defense Department left troops ill-equipped for guerrilla and street-to-street combat, they say. Humvees and other vehicles used by troops were not properly armored. Insurgents used an extraordinary volume of homemade IEDs filled with projectiles from bones to nails.
Nearly 65 percent of the injuries seen at Walter Reed in this war have been brain-related. And that figure does not account for an increasing number of soldiers suffering concussive brain injuries whose symptoms may take weeks or months to manifest themselves. "We're not seeing all the mild brain injuries, and that's what's happening more," concedes Kusar. "I think as people are getting out and figuring out they're suffering from concussive brain injuries, we're going to be seeing a lot more of those."
Rieckhoff says the 1.2 million U.S. troops who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq since September 11, 2001 are about to flood a VA system that the Bush administration has funded inadequately all along the way. "There's an old adage," Rieckhoff says, "that the Army is always built to fight the last war rather than the current one. There's a wave coming. And the [VA] is not ready for it."
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BY MOLLY PRIESMEYER
Illustration: Lou Fancher & Steve Johnson // Photos: Fred Petters
FROM THE TIME BOB BRIGGS was a kid, what always thrilled him most was the romance of operating heavy equipment—the big machines that made roads and dug holes and moved steel beams, that got jobs done and kept the world moving. The fascination never left him. It was part of the reason that the then-23-year-old Briggs enlisted in the National Guard in 1991, after the first Gulf War, as a combat engineer and equipment operator. And it was certainly the reason he chased after, and eventually won, what he calls his "dream job," as a road maintenance worker with the Iowa Department of Transportation.
These days, the heavy machine Briggs is learning to operate is his own body. Last April 16, at an encampment 70 miles west of Baghdad, an Iraqi insurgent's rocket-propelled grenade exploded about 10 feet from Briggs. The blast shredded the right side of Briggs's skull with shrapnel. His right eye was destroyed, along with most of the vision in his left eye. The resulting massive brain trauma effectively wiped out a lifetime's worth of vital neural connections that encompassed tasks as varied as walking, feeding himself, and making and storing memories. The left side of his body was almost completely paralyzed. Shrapnel littered his brain and right hip. After being evacuated from the field, he spent nearly a week on life support. "I got so much metal in me I probably won't be able to go through airport security ever again," he jokes now.
Since June 2, Briggs has spent countless hours in physical rehabilitation here at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration Medical Center, one of four newly designated "polytrauma" units created in April 2005 to deal with the complex and multiple injuries soldiers are sustaining in Iraq and Afghanistan. The staff at the new polytrauma units (the others are located in Tampa, Palo Alto, and Richmond, Virginia) have had to readjust and receive fresh training to deal with a set of life-changing injuries not seen in previous wars. "We're seeing a lot more brain injuries. That's definitely the most common injury," says Dr. Larisa Kusar, one of the lead physicians for the brain injury and polytrauma team. "But we're also seeing multiple orthopedic fractures, amputations, severed limbs, blindness—a lot of multiple traumatic injuries."
The physical therapy room where Briggs has spent countless hours since June is a drab, bare-walled beige. Today he's working to ascend a plywood riser built to simulate a curb. The diminutive physical therapist at his side is reminding him to lead with his right side, then to move the cane and drag the left side of his body onto the raised pallet. As a natural left-hander, Briggs is accustomed to leading with that side when he moves, and it doesn't work anymore. He has a hard time at first trusting his none-too-steady right side to carry the entire weight of his body, and the exertion wears him out quickly. He needs to stop and rest on a nearby chair for a few minutes. After a couple of more tries, Briggs executes the necessary movements more confidently. His rule of thumb in rehab: Don't stop trying until you get it right at least once.
Besides the curb-stepping exercise, Briggs's rehab regimen includes tasks such as climbing a set of stairs, rising from a chair, and getting up off the floor. The last is especially brutal given the essential uselessness of his left side: He compares the job of lifting his 200-pound frame into a standing position to "picking up a couch with one hand tied behind your back." Without the stabilizing tripod-base cane he uses in all his mobility exercises, it would be entirely impossible.
Briggs practices walking in the hallway outside the PT room, a 50-foot corridor finished in sedate institutional brown and beige. Before starting, he often touches the padded green helmet he wears, almost unconsciously. Portions of his skull had to be removed to accommodate the swelling of his brain, so the helmet is an absolutely vital part of his rehabilitation. Without it, falling down could be deadly.
The physical therapist tucks herself under Briggs's inert left arm and they set off. As they go, she uses her right foot to gently kick his near-paralyzed left leg out ahead of him, and a certain faltering rhythm is established by the clack of Briggs's cane and the little kicks the therapist is giving his bad leg. Together, they look a little like the equipment manager and the star linebacker, hobbling off the field.
As if the walking itself were not arduous enough, the therapist is peppering Briggs with questions as they go: "How are you feeling now?" and "How have you been sleeping lately?" and "How has this week been for you?" She encourages me to ask him questions, too. As they pass the waiting area where his wife, Michelle, is sitting, Briggs struggles to call up the answers while still pulling the weight of his body forward. The point of making him talk is to teach his brain how to do more than one thing at a time again. Briggs says the energy this requires is palpable, and that it's made his walks even more exhausting.
"My leg has come back a lot," he offers when it's over, studying his brace-trussed left leg. "I'm actually starting to get some movement in my upper arm, too." He smiles, showing off a baby face accentuated by fleshy cheeks that belie his age.
On top of dealing with the brain injury and the physical and emotional issues that come with it—he says his moods are sometimes a mystery to him now, and that sadness overtakes him without warning—there is another issue compounding Bob and Michelle Briggs's troubles: Like many families of Iraq vets, they're not sure how, or even if, all the medical and travel expenses they are bound to incur will be covered. The Army to which Bob dedicated almost 14 years as a reservist has abandoned them, they say. Three months after his injury, the Army medically retired Bob and shifted his benefits to the VA, leaving unclear how his future care will be paid for.
"They shoved me out quick," Bob says. "It's pretty bad when you're knocking on heaven's gate and you darn near die for your country and the Army doesn't want to take care of you."
BOB BRIGGS grew up in Keokuk, Iowa, a Mississippi River town of 11,000 located at the southeast corner of the state, just north of the Missouri state line. After graduating from high school, he went to work at Keokuk Steel Castings. "It was a dirty, awful place to work," remembers his sister, Brenda Best. "Just a dead-end job. You work at a factory and that's where you end up the rest of your life. And he wanted to do something better with his life." He joined up as a National Guard reservist not long after the first Gulf War ended, she recalls, hoping in part to learn skills that could catapult him into a better job.
Briggs re-upped his Guard enlistment in August 2004, almost a year and a half after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He had almost 14 years of Guard service under his belt at that point, and he was hoping to get to 20 years so that he could earn an early retirement pension from the military. With a wife, a four-year-old daughter, and a three-month-old son at home, he hoped his unit would not get the call-up to Iraq. "Nobody really wants to go," he says now. "But I knew what I had to do. I could never allow my company to go and me not go. I could never live with that." Two months later, on October 14, Briggs's unit was on its way to Fort Sill in Oklahoma for training. They later celebrated the coming of the New Year—twice—in the air en route to Iraq, where they landed on January 1, 2005.
During the long days in the Sunni Triangle, the group of 500 or so soldiers from southeastern Iowa was responsible for route-clearing patrol missions, which involved traveling either on foot or in vehicles searching for improved explosive devices (IEDs) planted by Iraqi insurgent fighters. They'd scour the landscape and rifle through dirt in search of anything suspicious-looking: ground that appeared freshly dug up, piles that seemed out of place, wires, packages—anything that could camouflage a makeshift explosive. Sometimes they'd use a "Buffalo," a heavily armored vehicle outfitted with an articulated arm capable of digging around to find IEDs and detonate them.
On April 16, Briggs and his fellow soldiers in the 224th Engineer Battalion were setting up their barracks at Camp Ramadi west of Baghdad. They had moved from Habbinaya the day before, where the group had put up in an old Air Force base when they weren't running security missions for the second Marine division. That night, at around 8:00, the soldiers had just finished erecting walls to partition the various offices and facilities of their new base. Some of the soldiers were assembling beds, while others were putting pictures up on the walls of their new sleeping quarters.
Briggs and some friends were out back in the gazebo-like smoking shack, waiting to go to a late dinner. They decided to play a quick game of horseshoes to pass the time. Dusk was turning into nighttime. "We were just waiting to eat," Briggs says. "We didn't hear anything. No warnings. Usually there are sirens. They got closer than normal."
He has no memory of what happened next. He only knows what other soldiers and his staff sergeant later told him. Without warning, insurgents began launching rocket-propelled grenades into the barely established camp. Three soldiers from another unit were killed. Briggs and two other Iowa National Guardsmen were injured. One man in his battalion was an emergency medical technician in civilian life, and Briggs believes the EMT's fast action made the difference. "I tell you, he saved my life," Briggs says, choking up. (He hasn't been able to speak to the man since. And given the fragile state of Briggs's mind and emotions, no one is anxious to press for the encounter too soon. Right now it's one more thing than he can't deal with. "It will be a long time before [Bob] can talk to him," says Michelle Briggs. "Maybe when he comes home.")
The day after the attack, Briggs was transported to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where he arrived on life support and in a coma. No one was sure of his prognosis, or the extent of the brain injury. Owing to the metal fragments scattered throughout his body, doctors were unable to do an MRI. Michelle and Bob's parents flew up to Washington to be with him. His sister, Brenda Best, stayed back in Keokuk to take care of the kids.
"I had daily calls," Best remembers of that first week. "Sometimes two and three times. It did me good that day my mom called and said, 'He's asking for you.' He had woken up and come off life support. And he could talk to me."
The doctors said Briggs had suffered a penetrating brain injury from shrapnel. The shards of metal that pierced his frontal and temporal lobes caused brain bleeds, and—because they remained lodged in the tissue—subsequent small seizures. The shrapnel also tore up his right eye, forcing a later surgery to remove the remains of the eye from its socket, a procedure called nucleation. He also lost much of the sight in his left eye due to internal bleeding, though the vision in that eye has since improved. "This is a good prognostic factor," Dr. Kusar notes. "He can go a long way in terms of function and independence."
Along with suffering from a penetrating brain injury, Briggs also incurred what Kusar calls a diffuse brain injury from the blast, a widespread brain trauma that disrupts a whole range of cognitive functions. "This is becoming a common combat injury," she adds, "from a new mechanism of war."
SINCE THE INVASION of Iraq was launched in March 2003, Veterans Administration statistics have recorded a total of 2,310 patients with traumatic brain injuries, all of whom are still presently under treatment. The VA's four new "polytrauma" units in Minneapolis and elsewhere have cared for 219 severely injured Iraq war vets.
But you can't measure the burden those numbers represent without consulting another set of numbers: the VA budget. In April of this year, just as VA officials were reorganizing their hospital system to accommodate these new patients, the Minneapolis VA facility was facing a $7 million budget shortfall of its own. While the Department of Veterans Affairs notes that "the average cost of treating a TBI patient is $21,231 in their various stages of treatment...[and] 101 patients have exceeded $80,000 and two have exceeded $500,000," none of the brain injury or polytrauma facilities have received added funding to pay for the care of their most severely injured patients, many of whom face hospital stays of up to six months. The VA, which sought emergency funding from Congress back in July, is facing a dollars-and-cents crisis brought on partly by underfunding in wartime and partly by the growing incidence of injuries like Briggs's, which represent a challenge that neither war planners nor VA administrators were ready for.
The American public is well acquainted with the U.S. military's death toll in Iraq, which stood at 2,108 as of last Monday. Less familiar is the number of troops who have sustained serious and, in many cases, permanently life-altering, wounds: around 15,500, according to the Department of Defense. In fact, the ratio of killed to wounded in Iraq is about one to eight, or roughly twice the ratio of the Vietnam War. "The survivability rate is much higher," says Paul Rieckhoff, an Operation Iraqi Freedom vet who served as a platoon leader in Baghdad and later founded Operation Truth, a soldiers' and veterans' advocacy organization. "Guys who would have died in past wars are living because of the advances in body armor and in medical technology." But the heightened survivability of many war injuries also means more vets with problems such as serious brain deficits, full or partial paralysis, loss of vision, or loss of limbs. ("The amputation rate has almost doubled" in this war compared to past ones, Rieckhoff notes.)
Improved field medicine and triage care are not the only reasons for the heightened incidence of major traumatic injuries in the Iraq War. Critics (who are not all opponents of the war itself) have highlighted numerous other factors: The Defense Department left troops ill-equipped for guerrilla and street-to-street combat, they say. Humvees and other vehicles used by troops were not properly armored. Insurgents used an extraordinary volume of homemade IEDs filled with projectiles from bones to nails.
Nearly 65 percent of the injuries seen at Walter Reed in this war have been brain-related. And that figure does not account for an increasing number of soldiers suffering concussive brain injuries whose symptoms may take weeks or months to manifest themselves. "We're not seeing all the mild brain injuries, and that's what's happening more," concedes Kusar. "I think as people are getting out and figuring out they're suffering from concussive brain injuries, we're going to be seeing a lot more of those."
Rieckhoff says the 1.2 million U.S. troops who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq since September 11, 2001 are about to flood a VA system that the Bush administration has funded inadequately all along the way. "There's an old adage," Rieckhoff says, "that the Army is always built to fight the last war rather than the current one. There's a wave coming. And the [VA] is not ready for it."
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