NPR News Investigations Before Reaching War Zones, Troops Risk
Concussions Originally published on Fri August 24, 2012 6:47 pm
A new military study suggests that some soldiers suffer mild
traumatic brain injuries even before they go to war. These
concussions, as they're also called, can come from taking
"combatives" classes that teach hand-to-hand fighting during the
soldiers' training. The study looks, in part, at soldiers at
sprawling Fort Hood, Texas, one of the Army's major bases. The
preliminary findings, which NPR and ProPublica have obtained,
suggest that a soldier got a concussion in those classes every
other day, on average, over nine months. The researchers say
they need more evidence before they know how big the problem is
throughout the Army. But the early findings raise questions
about whether combatives training harms some troops more than it
helps them. Researchers stress that their study is relatively
small, examining subjects from classes at Fort Hood with just
under 2,000 soldiers. And they