Coming Back: Battling the Invisible Wounds of War

Coming Back: Battling the Invisible Wounds of War
Military men and women now are returning with brain injuries that would have been fatal in earlier times. Here's how the nation's warriors and the medical teams that treat them are fighting these unseen battles.
By John Pekkanen Published Monday, September 12, 2011

In combat in Iraq, Justin Bunce was where he wanted to be. Then shrapnel from an exploding IED broke his leg and ripped into the right frontal part of his brain. Photograph by Chris Leaman

Justin Bunce struggles into the conference room dragging his left leg, using a cane, and looking as if he’d rather be somewhere else. He sits at a long table with members of a Traumatic Brain Injury medical team at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, awaiting their questions as part of his intake evaluation.

Bunce, 27, appears distracted. Despite lots of medications, he’s often unable to concentrate. He has had short-term-memory loss ever since an improvised explosive device (IED) planted in the wall of a cemetery detonated while he was on foot patrol in the Iraqi city of Husayba, near the Syrian border, in March 2004.

Shrapnel riddled his body, broke his leg, and ripped into the right frontal lobe of his brain and his right eye, leaving him effectively blind in that eye. At the time, he was a lance corporal in the Marine Corps, which he had wanted to join since his freshman year at Centreville High School in Fairfax County.

“What’s the toughest branch of the service?” he had asked his father, Peter, an Air Force colonel and career military man.
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