How a Teenager Found Undiagnosed Brain Injuries in the Military

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Zolan Kano-Youngs** (0:16)
From The New York Times, I'm Zolan Kano-Youngs, filling in as host.
Over the past decade, the US military experienced a wake-up call. Research showed that traumatic brain injuries were not just caused by bombings and explosions, but also by the shockwaves troops feel from their own weapons like artillery and shoulder-fired rockets. Now, new reporting shows that similarly devastating impacts can come from another unexpected place. The ocean. Today, my colleague Dave Philipps on a significant blind spot in the Coast Guard, and the teenager who helped expose how widespread the danger really is. It's Tuesday, September 1st.
Dave Phillips, you have been covering the military for how long?

**Dave Philipps** (1:27)
Probably like 20 years.

**Zolan Kano-Youngs** (1:29)
And I think it's fair to say that you have expanded our understanding of specifically brain injuries in the military and how they can impact a wide range of jobs. But recently, your reporting took you to a branch of the military that I think most of us would not associate with head trauma. And that's the Coast Guard. How did you end up there?

**Dave Philipps** (1:50)
Yeah. Basically, it started in Iraq because brain injuries were a huge part of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. IEDs going off, people getting really shaken up, but not having a scratch on them. And so we started to talk about these invisible injuries. And of course, I wrote about that years ago.
But it was only recently that I started to figure out that you could get those injuries, not from some big blast that comes from the enemy, but from multiple small blasts that come from firing your own weapon. So people that work on artillery cannons or mortars or fire shoulder fired rockets, these people are repeatedly getting a shockwave that whips through their brain tissue. And over time, those repeated shocks to the brain can lead to a really lasting and disruptive issue.

**Zolan Kano-Youngs** (2:39)
Right. So you're describing heavy weapons, working with explosives, you're describing combat. And I don't usually associate all of those things with the Coast Guard. So I guess were you surprised that your journey brought you here to the Coast Guard?

**Dave Philipps** (2:53)
Yeah. Because most people, when they think about the Coast Guard, they think like EMS for the sea, you know, like search and rescue, port safety, drug interdiction.
And while they do have some weapons training, that's not what we really associate them with. So honestly, the Coast Guard wasn't even on my radar for these types of injuries. Until I got a call from a reader who said, hey, I think the same thing happened to my husband and he recently died.

**Zolan Kano-Youngs** (3:21)
Wow.

**Dave Philipps** (3:22)
She described symptoms of a boat driver in the Coast Guard that were exactly like the symptoms that I was seeing in these other folks.
So I said, hey, if this is happening to your husband and to other people who are doing the same job, help me find those people who are being exposed and are maybe also suffering. And she knew a lot of them. And she quickly connected me with a woman named Jenna Bonner.

**Zolan Kano-Youngs** (3:48)
Okay. So tell me about Jenna.

**Dave Philipps** (3:50)
So you guys ready to start?

**Jenna Bonner** (3:51)
Yeah.

**Dave Philipps** (3:52)
Okay.
Jenna Bonner is in her 40s. She's got four kids and she moved to a beautiful little spot in the mountains of North Carolina a number of years ago with her husband, Brett Bonner. What was your first impression of him?

**Jenna Bonner** (4:07)
He was very fit. Like total life of the party. His friends used to call him big dumb animal.
He was like a golden retriever.

**Dave Philipps** (4:18)
Jenna, she had met this guy when she was in college, and he was this young, big, muscly, you know, as she describes him, hot guy who was a friend of her brothers. And he pretty instantly fell in love with her. In fact, after they only meet each other a couple of times.

**Jenna Bonner** (4:36)
He told my parents, he's like, hold on, I got to go walk my future wife out to her car.

**Dave Philipps** (4:40)
Are you serious?

**Jenna Bonner** (4:41)
I mean, that level of confidence.

**Dave Philipps** (4:44)
He starts introducing her to other people as his future wife.

**Zolan Kano-Youngs** (4:47)
Okay, not wasting time here.