Page 957 - Total War on PTSD

I received multiple Traumatic Brain Injuries, shrapnel in my leg (from a nearby explosion — a secondary shrapnel injury), a ruptured lumbar disc and two blown out knees. Over the years of parachute jumping and normal military activities, I have all of the typical shoulder injuries. I have a lot of arthritis from all of it. I've got neck issues and a lot of neuropathy in my arms from the neck issues. The TBI's happened during my service in Afghanistan. One TBI occurred from a close rocket attack and I got knocked down from the concussion of the rocket and I couldn't hear anything for about 24-hours afterwards. The ringing in my ears has never gone away. I also had a week’s worth of headaches and short-term memory problems around it. Still, being in the field, it wasn't an EVAC situation.
One was from driving a vehicle off of a dry waterfall nose end first and ending up in the dashboard windshield from it. This occurred during an extended patrol to look into some remote provinces that, pretty much, the U.S. had not been into yet. We were there to check out the area and check out some super remote mountain villages and we were following the rule of 'don't come out the way you went in'. The way out really wasn't a road at all, it was a dry stream-bed. So, we took this convoy down through it and were using local vehicles, driving Toyota's instead of Humvees. So, we took our trucks down this dry stream-bed and it was dark...and we weren't allowed to operate with headlights. And, being in the front vehicle, all of a sudden, the bottom dropped out and we nosed down about 15 feet (around a full truck length) and, what seemed logical at the time was not wearing seatbelts so you wouldn't get hung up on them if you had to bail out. So, no seatbelt and not wearing a helmet because the idea was to blend in and not be obviously American's. So, when I hit the dashboard and windshield, it was a pretty hard impact.
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