Wars Past and Present: Head Games

So, hearing a lot lately, especially on ABC, home network of Bob Woodruff, that traumatic brain injury, or "TBI," is the "signature" wound of the Iraq clusterfuck. (Although on tv news, it's never described as a "clusterfuck," and often the talkingheads call these "injuries" instead of wounds, for some unknown reason.)

Here's my question. We know that TBI happens because of explosions and that it's difficult to diagnose, or, at minimum, the current military medical regime is not coping very well with the problem. But past wars certainly had their share of explosions, if not exactly IEDs. So clearly, some soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines suffered from TBI in past wars and went undiagnosed. I'm thinking here of the stories of the guy from down the block who went off to war but, after he came back, "was never the same." Or: "Something happened to Uncle Fred in the war. He came back another person." This is anecdotal, but I think that this not that uncommon with veterans. How many of the Vietnam vets sleeping on the streets tonite were never the same after the war?

I think that we usually understand this as an experiential change--combatants see things, do things, that "change them," i.e., change who they are. But it's also possible that some of these guys who "were never the same" were actually wounded. The change, in other words, was not experiential but physical. I don't know a lot about PTSD, but it seems to me that this is an experiential concept--not an actual physical change to the brain. And as the brain changes, the person(ality) changes.

I saw a story on ABC tonight--Bob Woodruff reporting--about such a guy. His armored personnel carrier got blown ten feet in the air and he took one to the skull. Diagnosed with TBI, his wife described him as a "different person." But fifty years ago, eighty or ninety years ago, wouldn't this have been chalked up to "shell shock" or "battle fatigue"? Isn't it possible that this guy's wounds would have been invisible to his contemporaries? It took Army doctors two full years to diagnose this as TBI, as it was. If this guy had been at Pusan, or Tarawa, or the Argonne . . . this would never have been understood.

Some readers of this blog know that I'm inherently skeptical of the grandiose claims of "cognitive science." But this strikes me as one place where thinking about the physical nature of the mind makes a lot of sense.

Oh, and then there's this.