How Injury Occurred

It was during Reforger, which is a big exercise where they redeploy all the United States forces to Germany in preparation for the Russians coming over the border if it was ever going to happen. There was a vehicle accident. I was a tank commander. I was actually a tank platoon leader, and my tank got hit with a tree, believe it or not, and took me out. Basically, it cracked open my skull, brain exposed to air, blood everywhere, and my crew drove me in a tank to the hospital at about 50 miles an hour with a whole bunch of other people wondering why they were driving so fast and why there was blood all over the top of the tank. I did not regain consciousness for seven days, and when I did - I don’t want to make it sound like it’s really weird, but in high school I had taken German, and I spoke not native German but pretty good. 

When I woke up I was in a German hospital with no one who spoke English, so I spoke German for the first couple of weeks, and I don’t remember speaking a lick of English until my wife showed up at the hospital. But basically, I had damage to one of the cranial nerves; my eyes were stuck crossed, and I had a big black gash across the forehead. The result from it is that this lobe right here is flattened, and then you know how you take a boiled egg and you squeeze it a little hole will appear in the middle? I have one of those nice little holes right about - if you intersect those two lines.

I was in a head-on collision, I was wearing a seatbelt. It broke my face in 178 places. I have nine plates, six titanium teeth, Kevlar mesh under my check, a silicone mesh eye socket. And at first, they said I would never work, then they said I would probably only be able to work in a limited way. And I was rebuilt by a plastic surgeon. I remember the accident well, but after the ambulance got there and everything it starts to become a little murky. I got out a lot quicker than they said I would. They said I’d be in the hospital per a minimum of three months, and then they said six weeks, and I was out in seventeen days. They found two of my teeth here, of my original teeth, and they found one other up here in the cheek. So, I have titanium teeth, they’re permanent. They told me, the plastic surgeon said you will always have sinus problems, because my sinuses were smashed, and I would always have pain, headache pain. 

I was shot down in Vietnam on May the 8^th of ’67.  When we crashed into the trees, actually before probably, but the, the, the main rotor came off. And it just spun right to my cockpit and tried to cut me, my head off. As far as I know, I am the only Vietnam Veteran to survive a motor, a rotor dislocation. And I’ve been blessed in many ways. I mean, I’ve been on Hour of Power with Bobby Schuller, Unsolved Mysteries, and Reader’s Digest and weird papers all over the world. And so, I am the most widely, widely known. But most people have no idea who I was - if they saw me again, they wouldn’t know. But that’s life, that’s life.

Oh my head injury, like I said, I was in the, after I got out of the Army I was in the National Guard and we did annual training. And this happened on my annual training in Fort Hood, Texas. We were out there for two weeks and in the two weeks we were kind of gathering up, we were mostly out in the field. Once we got there, we set up in the field and we went through the drills and everything else. And we were in the process of kind of heading back towards the barracks, and in doing, I was a gunner with a 106 Jeep, and the driver and a passenger and me sitting on the back. And we were heading through the woods back to Fort Hood and to the base you know and there was a curve with downhill slope and that’s where we rolled over. And I was unconscious, I don’t know for how long, but we had kind of like gone ahead of everybody and then, by the time I came to there was all kinds of people in the ambulances and everything you know. So that was kind of like the main experience. And it was a non-open head injury.

On November 27, 1980, a shipmate and myself were given an order to perform a simple, common and ordinary task that changed my life forever. On this miserable, rainy Seattle day, we carried forth a command to transfer a 350-pound tarp from the pier to our ship. As we lifted the tarp, my partner tripped. Letting go, the mast fell against me, shoving me off the pier, falling 30 feet, landing head first on a log that prevents the ship from surging against the pier. By God’s grace, and a glancing blow, I woke up in the water, no air in my lungs, sinking 40 feet, while unconscious, laden by my zipped-up foul-weather jacket and work boots. Seeing no blood in the water and finding where up was, by a single shiny spot glimmering through the murky abyss I was descending to, I started kicking with all my might, wanting to take a breath of air that was only water, when suddenly my head popped to the surface. I missed the log. I’m still alive. My training worked. In subsequent denial and shock, I told the command I felt no pain, and resumed my duties without medical care, for there was no medical staff on board, and civilian care was no option under the circumstances.

So, we do PT tests, physical training. You do your two-mile run, push-ups, sit-ups, and it was Tennessee, January, it was icy out and during our PT test, we weren’t supposed to be running that day yet we all were in trouble so they had us do it anyway and I slipped and fell on ice. With that being said, I fell backwards and my head was the first thing to hit the concrete, and the last thing I remember. I didn’t know my name. Apparently, the people who found me were all people I knew very well. I do remember people being around me, I just I couldn’t even tell you who it was. And they eventually took me to the hospital and told me I had a severe concussion.

I was coming home from work, I was pretty close to my residence, and I was accosted by two gentlemen who proceeded to rob me. There was a fight, there was a struggle, I was hit in the head with a brick, more than a couple of times. I was kicked and beaten about my head, so that’s where that injury occurred. I was, I’m sure I lost consciousness, but I was in such a state of shock or whatever, you know there is just so much I don’t remember and so much I do remember, but…eventually they were apprehended and they were charged with the crime.

OK. So, my TBI happened in January of 2010. And I was in the Navy and on a submarine, so it’s probably not the same as a lot of TBIs that are more like people over in Iraq or something like that, who had IEDs or something to that effect. But what had happened was, so there’s, there’s like multiple levels on the submarine, you know, in various spaces. And then you get up those by going up ladders. And at the top of each ladder, there’s a little – like, well, not little - it’s a big metal hatch that you can put down so that way if you need to do work above where the ladder is, then you can, you can do that.

And so, I was just going up on one of these ladders, and this happened like nine million times a day, but somebody had had it down, the hatch down and when they put it up, before that – or after they were done - they didn’t latch it in properly. So, I just unwittingly went up the ladder just like normal. And I grabbed onto the wrung of the hatch and it came out and I don’t know how much these metal hatches weigh but it’s a lot. And so, I, it came out and I pulled it down with my bodyweight and slammed my head in-between it and like the floor on the level above. And I blacked out. I don’t know exactly how long I was out of consciousness. But the impact just immediately, you know, pretty hazy after that.

And so, somebody saw what had happened right away, like there was somebody in the area. And so, I was told that they just kind of ran over and grabbed me up and like pulled me up, you know, to the next level. Got the hatch open or whatever. And then I was laying on the deck again. I don’t really know how long I was out of consciousness. Not – it wasn’t like super long, like less than a minute I think. But then kind of just after that, it was like very hazy when I came to. You know, throbbing headache at that exact time and just feeling like disoriented in like place and person. You know I mean, but I still knew I was me and I still knew I was alive and, and whatnot. But I didn’t know what was happening.

So, I was laying there on the ground for seemed like hours, but it was probably, you know, thirty minutes or maybe even less. And then they kind of helped me move along to, to see the ship’s doctor. And he sent me home for the day with a friend who drove me home. But I guess the – so, so that day, you know I mean I just don’t really remember much after that. I have flashes, I remember kind of proceeding through the boat and I was awake and cognizant, but not really.

I went through - the surgery to rebuild my face was 12 and a half hours. Rebuilding my mouth took two years.

I: Do you look very different than you did before?

My nose is different. Everything else, except I’ve got this big lump, because I’ve got that big plate. But everything is pretty much the same. The nose is too broad, because they couldn’t make it - they didn’t have enough bone to support the way it should be, so they spread it out a little bit. He told me, you know, after it’s all healed, you can come back. I’ll pass, thank you very much. But the teeth were the worst, putting in the implants, because I had broken teeth, and they had to remove all those, and then stitch them closed, allow them to heal. Got two bone grafts on the bottom and the top. They pulled a bunch of them that were cracked - all of them cracked. I had like six crowns. Anyway, that took forever. So, you’re dealing with the pain, and then you’re dealing with the dental stuff, too. And I actually had people who would come in and check on me, because I was trying to do things like run, because I had been running. And of course, I couldn’t do it, I would just fall over. It was dreadful, you feel so uncoordinated.  Nothing seems to be working right, you can’t focus on anything. It’s not your eyes, your brain isn’t focusing on stuff. It just won’t do it.

I went back to Iraq in 2007 during the surge. We had just come back from a mission and we were entering the FOB area where they have the main buildings, you know. There’s no such – we had tents. Tents for living quarters and places like that. And we had a tent for chow hall. And a rocket strike hit and I was entering the chow hall and the blast was about twelve feet from me. And when it blew up, I watched things – it was very weird. Things started to disintegrate in front of me. And then I got all loopy and I was like, I didn’t know what was going on. I kind of got knocked around a bit. You know, I landed on my butt on this side. And I’m sitting there. I can’t see, it hurts to see. And I hear somebody telling me, somebody came up to me and said you got to get out of here. But there’s no one there. It was really weird. And I came out, kind of you know, discombobulated, disoriented. And walked, you know, walked as best I could but I couldn’t see, I couldn’t see an inch in front of me. Then I got taken to the hospital and you know, we were under fire and we couldn’t get to Baghdad because it was too dangerous. And so, the next day or two, I finally got to Baghdad and saw an eye doctor because they were more worried about my vision loss than anything else. The doctor recommended that I probably had a concussion. He said you probably should go to Landstuhl and deal with that. But those guys were – I didn’t like it there when I went there before with a, you know, I mean I just didn’t like it. So, I was like, no I can go back.

OK, so I was on my second time I toured to Iraq. I was assigned 1st armor division, an MP, so I was actually responsible for setting up one of the first Iraqi police stations in Ramadi, Iraq. And at that time, I guess it was called like the Wild West, on the news or something. So, I took a team of military police up there. We had about 225 Iraqi police officers that we trained, and then we basically built a police station out of a water pump, a water pumping station on the side of the Euphrates River. So, our goal was to train them and equip them like a regular police force and then teach them how to be cops for normal people. So, I was in charge of the entire operation there and, basically, we were given a mission and told to figure it out, because that was one of the actual police transition teams that Richmond created, and on the day that I got injured, a suicide truck bomb with about 100 tanks of propane was drove to my, front of my police station and the truck suicide bomber detonated that. And it created a fireball that they saw for about two miles away. I happened to be standing in the middle of the compound and wasn’t wearing any ballistic armor or anything like that so I took the brunt of most of the blast. Wounded 56, killed 16. I brought six of my MPs back to the U.S. because we were burnt so severely, to San Antonio, Brooke Army Medical Center. Most of us had severe burns. And I think that’s basically the single event that created my TBI.

Well, it, actually my problem was a culmination, it was a cumulative effect of repeated injury. I was in the vicinity of and within the distance of the blast radius on several, we had a couple mortar attacks, IEDs, things like that, and I was inside that concussive wave. So, I never actually physically sustained injury, I never caught any shrapnel or anything like that, which I’m very happy for, but you know there were many times where I just, I got all goofy for a minute, you know I couldn’t focus, I was just kind of out of it for a little bit. And again, as far as I remember I never lost consciousness.

OK. Well, there’s several instances. Of course, we never knew it was an issue until years after I got back from overseas. But I suffered multiple concussions overseas. The main incident, the one that they have on record is when I fell fifteen feet off of a truck. Broke my back, shattered my arm in two places. And they’re not sure, but probably pretty likely I hit my head at the same time. But other than that, I was in very close proximity to an incoming mortar that actually sent me airborne. That was a pretty big concussion. And my job as a combat engineer, I did a lot of explosives and sometimes we didn’t always get as far away as we would have liked to. So, the shockwave can do a pretty hefty amount of damage if you don’t – if you’re blowing up thirteen thousand pounds of stuff and you can’t get far enough away, it’s not fun. It’ll hit you. One time in particular, I remember, we did it and you could see the shockwave coming and it, we were - all the roads over in Iraq are built up on berms or levies, so we were taking cover behind that. We would have liked to have gotten further back, but that was the closest, well that was the only form of protection, of cover and concealment we had. So, going further back would have actually been – more likely we would have gotten hurt by any kind of projectile or anything that, you know, fragmentation. So that’s where we were and the shockwave came and actually moved the road. And everyone – my guys either lost their bowels or their bladder or – it was a pretty hard concussion, shockwave when it hit us. So those are the main instances of when I had, you know, head injuries.

So, it’s hard to say when it first occurred. I was blown up – I was in strikers, and strikers are a pretty hardy vehicle for the, for – so you see pictures of like the torn-up Humvees and stuff like that. Well the same IED would strike a striker, and it wouldn’t hurt the vehicle. So, the people inside were relatively safe from shrapnel and all this other stuff. But the concussive blast will still affect you, shake you up, and all this other stuff. And especially if you’re in Air Guard where you’re not being, where the, where the wave doesn’t come through the actual armor, but it hasn’t, I guess an un-molested way to your head would be the best way of putting it.

And I was – during two explosions that I know of, because sometimes they get hazy thinking about it. I was in the air yard hatch, so I took the full brunt of the concussive force right to the face. And I remember the explosion. I don’t remember a sound. And then I remember waking up laying down inside the striker and dust going all around me and making it really dark, so I thought I was going blind. Because I was like, “What the heck’s going on? Did I get something in my eyes?” [Someone] said, “No, you got, you got knocked silly by the bomb.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” And that was the first one. And the second one I fell, I didn’t fall in, I bent backwards from the concussive. It pushed me backwards and knocked me out for about ten, fifteen seconds. And after those, and then I was inside the vehicle for a lot of explosions, too, which would rock me but they wouldn’t knock me out.

Then I joined the Marine Corps, and I got three concussions there. One I got – a guy hit me in the head with a rock. Took ten stitches here. And messed me up pretty bad, but you know, when you’re a Marine, I mean you shake it off. And the second concussion, I don’t know if it was my first or second tour, I just don’t remember. All I remember is I got hit, and I think it was from a 122. That’s 122-millimeter rocket that the enemy would engage us with. But the last one was my “million-dollar wound.” I got a, I sustained a concussion from an 82-millimeter mortar when we were overrun. Landed about four or five feet away, and the only thing that saved me was, a mortar has a trajectory, and so the shrapnel, the concussion, concentric with the shrapnel went this way. I was in my fighting hole, you know, with a guy over me, and he got killed. I got, I lost the hearing in this ear, and woke up in the hospital. And, and then that’s, that’s it, they sent me home.

It originally happened June of 2003. We were doing the physical training over in Afghanistan. We had full gear. Roughly about 100, 150 extra pounds on me. We were doing pull ups, and I was doing some pull ups and all of the sudden my shoulder just gave out. I landed flat on my back and when I opened my eyes I had people standing around me. Probably had been out for a couple seconds. And went and got checked and they really didn’t do much about it at the time because it was just like, “Oh you just got a minor headache, slight concussion. Go on about your business.” And the last time I got a concussion, I was in the dining facility and a rocket hit probably about 25 feet from where I was sitting. Jarred me and my ears rang for about two weeks afterwards.