Doug Scott doesn’t remember.
When he opened his eyes, he saw his Humvee was on the side of the road. The hood was crushed. His gunner was slumped over in the back. It took a few moments before it made sense.
Roadside bomb.
His memory trickled back. His Humvee was third in a convoy of six vehicles headed to the site of a downed helicopter. He must have been knocked unconscious by the blast and drove into the ditch.
It was the spring of 2004—a little more than a year into Operation Iraqi Freedom. Baghdad’s Sadr City was the epicenter of violent attacks by insurgent militias. Scott’s recon unit, Charlie Troop, 10th Cavalry, maintained security on a tenuous supply route through the city.
It was the first of nine improvised explosive device (IED) blasts that Scott survived before his third and last deployment to Iraq in 2009. “It shakes your guts and vibrates right through you,” he says. “Everything went black and white a couple times. It just shakes you to your core.”
When he returned home to Pittsburgh, it soon became clear that though he had made it out alive, he wasn’t unscathed.
Concentration was difficult. He began to have severe migraines and suffered short-term memory loss. He slept only a few hours a night. Worst of all, he frequently “zoned out,” moments when he just stood and stared, but could not remember later.
Though certain he suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) from repeated exposure to IEDs, Scott had to fight to obtain an accurate diagnosis and health care in military and veterans health systems.
His predicament is not uncommon among veterans who, like him, served on the frontlines in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars before 2007 when the Army began routine screening for TBIs. With no record of trauma, it’s likely that thousands had no outward physical injuries but incurred brain injuries—one of the “invisible” wounds of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.