America's #1 Sport

[don]

I sent a career Army buddy LOA's compilation of American WW2 war correspondents pieces, along with GI poems from the same conflict. He told me both worked their way through most of the company on his last tour (#3) in Afghanistan . . . .

A Young Soldier Pauses on Dallas Cowboys Turf

By JANET MASLIN

BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK


By Ben Fountain
307 pages. Ecco. $25.99.


The players are at the Texas Stadium outside Dallas. They are larger than life, immortalized on the Jumbotron, bathed in glory. Pompom-waving cheerleaders celebrate their triumphs. Spectators thrill to the sight of their heroics on the field. Strangers want a piece of them, but access is limited. Still, Billy Lynn, the favorite, finds himself getting “passed around like everybody’s favorite bong.”

By the way, the Dallas Cowboys are also here. So is another pro football team; after all, this is the Cowboys’ Thanksgiving home game, with Destiny’s Child as its musical attraction. But Ben Fountain’s inspired, blistering war novel “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” is about a group of special guests at the stadium: eight American soldiers who have become known as the Bravos.

Ever since Fox News showed them fighting a fierce battle in Iraq, the Bravos have been wildly famous. They are just completing a two-week Victory Tour of the homeland.

Nobody wants to mention that they are hours away from being sent back to war. And nobody wants to think too hard about what kind of American heroes they really are.

Mr. Fountain, whose only previous book was the short-story collection “Brief Encounters With Che Guevara,” sets up this Thanksgiving game as an artfully detailed microcosm of America in general, and George W. Bush’s Texas in particular, during the Iraq war. Though it covers only a few hours, the book is a gripping, eloquent provocation. Class, privilege, power, politics, sex, commerce and the life-or-death dynamics of battle all figure in Billy Lynn’s surreal game day experience. Although Beyoncé’s girl group is on red-hot display during halftime, this book leaves no doubt that Billy is the real destiny’s child in the story.

“Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” unfolds in real time, beginning as a limousine arrives at the stadium. Outside the vehicle are beautiful, excited women looking for somebody famous to shriek about. Inside: Billy and the other baffled men of Bravo, who have not quite processed their fame. They get a dose of reality once the windows roll down, “and you can just see those girls deflate.” Oh, soldiers, the girls all but sigh. “Not rock stars, not highly paid professional athletes, nobody from the movies or the tabloid-worthy world, just grunts riding on some millionaire’s dime, some lame support-the-troops charity case.”

What are the Bravos worth? And to whom? Those questions arise over and over, from the way a Hollywood producer tries to sell their story — with Hilary Swank playing Billy, and thanks a lot for that — to the football moguls who want to exploit the soldiers’ propaganda value. Tongue-tied spectators want to thank the Bravos for their service, stammer opinions about the war, talk about the enemy in words that barely make sense to Billy (he keeps hearing 9/11 as “nina leven”) and generally affirm their own patriotism. Mr. Fountain makes Billy naïve enough to be surprised by this but smart enough to know that his only reality that matters is the kind raging inside his head.

Billy can’t forget the battlefield horrors and can’t believe they have been turned into Jumbotron video fodder. But now, at the end of their home tour, the Bravos are on the march, “and how fine it would be if they could outwalk the war by sheer force of will.” Instead they walk through different realms of Texas Stadium, greeted in revealing ways at each new turn. To Billy, the fans are “weird and frightening.” They are “this pack of half-rich lawyers, dentists, soccer moms and corporate V.P.’s,” and “they’re all gnashing for a piece of a barely grown grunt making $14,800 a year.”

Money doesn’t matter much to Billy. But he’s galled to find merchandisers selling Cowboy-branded swag, all redolent of victory on the field of combat, that no real soldier could afford. He’s keenly attuned to the Hollywood price tag attached to the Bravo story by that producer who wants to market it. When the movie prospects falter, Billy astutely hears “the almost imperceptible slackening of ego and effort that denotes the triage mode of the consummate pro.”

And he’s amazed at the polished, well-preserved look of elite Cowboy executives and their wives, though Mr. Fountain is at his least subtle with this crowd. These very wealthy friends of the Bush family, one even nicknamed “Mr. Swift Boat,” do some needlessly heavy-handed advocacy for the greatness of commerce and Texas-style capitalism.

But there are such bravura scenes in “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” that this book never seems narrow or small. One stunner is set in the Cowboys’ equipment room: What should soldiers, who are about to go back to Iraq and get wet when it rains, make of the fact that the Cowboys go through 700 towels on a dry game day? And why aren’t these huge, pampered, highly paid players doing actual fighting? The Bravos marvel at the Cowboys’ pumped-up ferocity. Like most of the thoughts that sear Bravo brains during the course of this story, it makes no sense to them at all.

The book’s other great set piece is its halftime musical number. Although some aspects of that game day are clearly fictitious, Mr. Fountain describes the erotic fireworks of a Destiny’s Child performance mixed with the military fervor of an accompanying marching band. Real American soldiers did march through this 2004 Cowboys’ halftime event, and Mr. Fountain has said that his idea for this book came from contemplating the wild incongruities he saw on television that day. The stimulation of these extremely mixed signals simply explodes in Billy Lynn’s brain; the effect of this “porn-lite out of its mind on martial dope” on readers will be just as devastating.

By the book’s end Billy Lynn has a wild crush on a Cowboys cheerleader, who seems to reciprocate his excitement. He has a nagging awareness that he will never be able to sustain such a high-maintenance woman. He has come close enough to Beyoncé to touch her, come close enough to the pro-football version of toughness to realize that it has nothing to do with his own wartime experience. And he has nowhere to go but back to battle. The halftime of the title isn’t about the pause in the football game. It’s about this brief, stunning, life-changing pause in the way Billy Lynn, two-week American hero, goes to war.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/bo...-fountain.html

[lakedaemonian]

Re: America's #1 Sport

I read a review of it.....it sounds like it has some decent potential.....I like the texture of it from a couple different perspectives in the review.

But for a sec I thought this was going to be about NASCAR......there's a story running around the last few days about NASCAR hurting a bit..

[Shakespear]

Re: America's #1 Sport

Ever since Fox News showed them fighting a fierce battle in Iraq, the Bravos have been wildly famous. They are just completing a two-week Victory Tour of the homeland.

Since 2001 I am allergic to the word "homeland". It bring memories of the Nazis use of "vaterland".

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph...=8&smoothing=3

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph...=5&smoothing=3

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph...=5&smoothing=3

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph...=5&smoothing=3

Mems at work ??? Ohh, found my answer, it is the New York Times at work.

[don]

Re: America's #1 Sport

Brain Ailments in Veterans Likened to Those in Athletes

By JAMES DAO

Scientists who have studied a degenerative brain disease in athletes have found the same condition in combat veterans exposed to roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, concluding that such explosions injure the brain in ways strikingly similar to tackles and punches.

The researchers also discovered what they believe is the mechanism by which explosions damage brain tissue and trigger the wasting disease, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., by studying simulated explosions on mice. The animals developed evidence of the disease just two weeks after exposure to a single simulated blast, researchers found.

“Our paper points out in a profound and definitive way that there is an organic, structural problem in the brain associated with blast exposure,” said Dr. Lee E. Goldstein of Boston University’s School of Medicine and a lead author of the paper, which was published online Wednesday by the peer-reviewed journal Science Translational Medicine.

The paper provides the strongest evidence yet that some and perhaps many combat veterans with invisible brain injuries caused by explosions are at risk of developing long-term neurological disease — a finding that, if confirmed, would have profound implications for military policy, veterans programs and future research.

The study could provide a starting point for developing preventive measures for blast-related brain injuries, as well as drug therapies and diagnostic tests for C.T.E., an incurable disease detected only by autopsy.

“The animal model developed by the researchers will enable a better understanding of the brain pathology involved in blast injuries and, ideally, lead to new therapies to help service members and veterans with traumatic brain injuries,” said Dr. Joel Kupersmith, the chief research and development officer for the Department of Veterans Affairs, which helped finance the research.

The paper also seems likely to fuel a debate that has raged for decades over whether veterans who struggle emotionally and psychologically after returning from war suffer from psychiatric problems or brain injuries.

Dr. Goldstein and his co-lead author, Dr. Ann McKee, co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University, assert that their paper shows that many of those veterans probably have organic brain injuries and should be given appropriate treatment and disability compensation.

“Not long ago, people said N.F.L. players with behavior problems were just having problems adjusting to retirement,” Dr. Goldstein said. “Now it’s more or less settled that there is a disease associated with their problems. But we do not have that consensus in the military world yet.”

Since 2001, the military has confirmed traumatic brain injury — widely considered the precursor to C.T.E. — in more than 220,000 of the 2.3 million troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, though some experts believe the actual number is higher. There is no way yet of estimating how many of those combat veterans may develop the disease.

Some experts who have read the paper questioned the authors’ conclusions, saying that there was not enough data to conclude that blast exposure leads to C.T.E. Dr. McKee autopsied only four veterans, and three of them had head injuries from multiple sources, making it hard to determine the cause of the disease, they said.

“It’s too small of a sample size,” said Dr. David Hovda, director of the Brain Injury Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a health adviser to the Pentagon.

But Dr. Hovda said that the growing body of research linking C.T.E. to multiple head injuries was “quite remarkable.”

Dr. Daniel P. Perl, professor of pathology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the military’s medical school, said the study did not convince him that the injuries from blast exposure were identical to head injuries from sports, and he questioned whether data from the mouse research was applicable to humans. But Dr. Perl, who has just started his own project to study the brains of military personnel, called the paper “an important contribution.”

While acknowledging some issues in using mice, Dr. McKee said that animal tests helped resolve a problem scientists face in studying C.T.E.: human patients typically suffer concussions in several ways, whether from car accidents, sports or combat. With mice, the researchers could ensure that the brain damage was caused solely by blast exposure.

C.T.E. causes neurological decay and is linked to memory loss, personality changes, impaired judgment, depression and dementia. A once obscure disorder thought mainly to afflict boxers, it has entered the popular lexicon in recent years as more athletes have received the diagnosis, including David Duerson, the former All-Pro defensive back for the Chicago Bears, who killed himself last year.

The new study out of Boston is just the second time scientists have found C.T.E. in combat veterans. Last fall, a team of researchers led by Dr. Bennet Omalu discovered evidence of the disease in a 27-year-old Iraq war veteran who committed suicide in 2010. The former Marine had reported being close to mortar blasts and roadside bombs in Iraq, but also experienced multiple concussions from contact sports.

Dr. Omalu, the chief medical examiner for San Joaquin County, Calif., said he was preparing another paper documenting C.T.E. in eight veterans who had received diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder before they died.

Dr. McKee, who directs a brain donation center at the Department of Veterans Affairs medical center in Bedford, Mass., said it took her four years to gain access to the brains of the four veterans. Three of the veterans had single or multiple exposures to blasts, while a fourth had multiple concussions from football and vehicle accidents.

She compared tissue samples from those veterans with the brains of four athletes — three amateur football players and a professional wrestler — three of whom reported multiple concussions and all of whom died in their teens or 20s. She also studied the brains of four people with no record of concussions.

In all the veterans and athletes, Dr. McKee found the signature evidence of early phase C.T.E.: dead or dying neurons, abnormal clumps of a toxic protein and damaged axons, the fibers that transmit signals between nerve cells. She found no evidence of the disease in the people with no reported concussions.

For the animal part of the study, Dr. Goldstein developed a 27-foot-long “shock tube” to simulate explosions. At one end of the aluminum tube the researchers attached a device that uses compressed nitrogen to explode a Mylar membrane, generating force equal to the explosion of a 120-millimeter mortar round. At the other end, they tied down mice, allowing their heads to move freely.

The researchers found that shock waves from the blast moving at more than 1,000 miles per hour had no perceptible effect on brain tissue. But the subsequent blast wind, traveling at 330 m.p.h., shook the skull violently in what the researchers called “bobblehead effect.”

When the scientists examined specially stained tissue from the mouse brains under microscopes just two weeks later, they found the telltale signs of C.T.E.

The scientists also found that mice exposed to blasts showed short-term memory loss and declines in learning capacity just a few weeks later.

But when the researchers immobilized mouse heads during blasts, the mice did not develop learning problems later, suggesting that the brain trauma might be blocked by preventing the head from snapping around during an explosion.

Dr. Hovda said that one implication of the study might be that “traumatic brain injury is not an event that we recover from.”
“Maybe it is the beginning of a series of events that we have to deal with for years,” he said.

As devastating as that news may seem, it may also provide comfort to some military families.

Jennifer Smith, the widow of Michael Smith, the Marine found to have C.T.E. by Dr. Omalu, said she had gained a better understanding of his suicide after researchers told her his emotional problems might have been the result of a brain injury.

In an interview, Ms. Smith said that after her husband returned from his second tour of Iraq in 2009, he had nightmares and mood swings and seemed angry much of the time. (He also had a concussion from playing football in that period.)

Before he hanged himself in 2010, doctors gave him a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and put him on antidepressant drugs, to no avail, she said.

“He had no control over it,” she said, referring to C.T.E.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us...bs.html?ref=us


Army to Review Its Handling of Psychiatric Evaluations

By JAMES DAO

The Army said Wednesday that it had ordered a service-wide review of how its doctors diagnose psychiatric disorders, indicating that complaints about unfair diagnoses at a sprawling base in Washington State have been echoed on installations around the country.

The review, announced jointly by the Army secretary, John M. McHugh, and chief of staff, Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, will focus on whether consistent and accurate diagnoses are being issued by the disability evaluation system, which determines whether injured soldiers are fit to remain on duty.

Concerns about the system emerged last fall after soldiers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma told Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington, that their diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder had been changed by doctors at Madigan Army Medical Center to lesser conditions. The soldiers asserted that the changes were done to save the Army money.

That complaint seemed to gain credibility with the emergence of an internal Army memorandum in February that quoted a Madigan doctor saying that Army clinicians needed to be “good stewards” of taxpayer dollars and that a PTSD diagnosis could cost $1.5 million in disability compensation over a soldier’s lifetime.

Under pressure from Mrs. Murray and other lawmakers, the Army agreed to review the cases of nearly 300 soldiers whose PTSD diagnoses were reversed at Madigan. So far, in about 100 of the cases, the initial diagnosis has been reinstated.

“The Army clearly realizes they have a nationwide, systematic problem on their hands,” Senator Murray said in a statement. “I credit them with taking action, but it will be essential that this vast and truly historic review is done the right way.”

The Army said it would create a task force led by Lt. Gen. David G. Perkins, commander of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., to study the evaluation system.

The review will include a statistical analysis by the Army surgeon general’s office of diagnoses of soldiers who went through the system from Oct. 7 through April 30. The vice chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Lloyd Austin, and the under secretary of the Army, Joseph Westphal, will oversee that analysis, the Army informed Congress.

In addition, the memorandum said Mr. McHugh and General Odierno had ordered independent reviews by the Army inspector general and the Army auditor general of the disability evaluation system. Among other issues, the inspector general will look at whether commanders pressure doctors to issue certain diagnoses and whether soldiers are able to appeal decisions.

“Just as our behavioral health professionals are committed to providing the best possible care, we, too, must ensure that our processes and procedures are thorough, fair and conducted in accordance with appropriate, consistent medical standards,” Mr. McHugh said in a statement.

The disability evaluation system is a nerve-racking process for soldiers, requiring them to undergo a variety of examinations so that the Army can decide whether they should remain on duty or be separated. If they are declared unfit, the Army and Department of Veterans Affairs then assign them ratings based on the severity of their injuries.

Those ratings determine whether a veteran will receive a monthly disability check and other benefits after leaving the military. Soldiers often fight for the highest ratings they can get.

Some military officials have raised concerns that because of that rating system, soldiers who might have resisted diagnoses of PTSD in the past will push to receive the diagnosis when they prepare to leave the Army, since it might increase their benefits.

But many soldiers awaiting the outcome of their evaluations have complained that Army doctors try to play down legitimate physical and psychological problems to reduce the long-term cost of health care and compensation.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us...ss.html?ref=us

[Shakespear]

Re: America's #1 Sport

As devastating as that news may seem, it may also provide comfort to some military families.

don I just have problems with things like this because to me all that is found in that article is obvious. No amount of analyzing ("Oh folks we are working on the problem, so just relax.") will change the fact that keeping guys under stress for years in a war situation has any chance of bringing them back to normal. I wonder even if it would be a good thing (now here we have a dilemma) if that were to be possible, as this would give further incentive to continue wars and at worst would be used in other sick ways.

[don]

Re: America's #1 Sport

In at least two ways. An ongoing update on the impossible cost of the perpetual military adventures, where expenditures are fused to the hip with the mark to mystery economic 'model', and my own selfishly reasons, pugilistic dementia and its tie-in with the above studies. (A large database of fighters is also being studied for the effects of relatively light but consistent blows to the head)

[don]

Re: America's #1 Sport

putting the data to work . . . not so easy

Cataloging Wounds of War to Help Heal Them

By C. J. CHIVERS

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — To those unfamiliar with a battlefield’s bleak routine, Col. Michael D. Wirt’s database could be read like a catalog of horrors. In it, more than 500 American soldiers are subjected to characteristic forms of violence of the Afghan war.

Faces are smacked with shrapnel, legs are blasted away near knees, bullets pass through young men’s abdomens. Vehicles roll over, crushing bones. Eardrums rupture. Digits are severed.

Dozens of soldiers die. Hundreds more begin journeys home, sometimes to treatment that will last the rest of their lives.

Each was listed in a small but meticulous computer entry by Colonel Wirt, a doctor intent on documenting how soldiers were wounded or sickened, how they were treated and how they fared. For those seeking to understand war and how best to survive it, the doctor on his own initiative created an evidence-based tool and a possible model.

His database is one part of a vast store of information recorded about the experiences of American combatants. But there are concerns that the potential lessons from such data could be lost, because no one has yet brought the information together and made it fully cohere.

Colonel Wirt was a brigade surgeon from the 101st Airborne Division during the American-led effort in 2010 and 2011 to dislodge the Taliban from their rural stronghold along the Arghandab River. His database was part official record, part personal research project.

His commander required him to keep tabs on ailing and wounded soldiers, and to inform him of their prognosis and whereabouts in the medical system.

To this, Colonel Wirt added layers of information. He documented which weapons caused which wounds. He tried to record increased or decreased risk factors — whether the victim was wearing larger or smaller body armor, whether a bomb-sniffing dog was present, when a tourniquet was applied.

He recorded which accidents and diseases took which soldiers off duty, and for how long. He mapped where on a human body bullets most often struck.

A year after he returned to the states, Colonel Wirt and his database point to the promise and obstacles related to studying more than a decade of American war.

The amassed information on combatants over 10 years amounts to the most detailed data ever assembled on battlefield trauma and its care, American military officers say. But the records are scattered.

The Defense Department’s trauma registry has information on roughly 66,000 patients who were admitted to modern military hospitals, including American and coalition troops, Afghans and Iraqis, contractors, and the odd journalist, diplomat or aid worker. It is a record, largely, of those who survived.

The Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s Office maintains separate sets of records, including full-body CT scans, for service members killed in action. And each patient’s medical records, often with narrative details of wounds and a thorough chronicle of treatments, are available in electronic form, but only to those involved in each person’s care.

Supporting documents for Purple Heart awards can also include medical and tactical data.

In certain contexts, some of the data is merged, as at quarterly meetings of a special committee that has been seeking ways to improve prehospital care.

So far these disparate storehouses of information have not been joined in a permanent place, much less made widely available for cross-disciplinary study.

Col. Jeffrey A. Bailey, a surgeon who directs the Joint Trauma System at the Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, confirmed what several military doctors noted: There as yet is no standardized medical database that enables researchers to look back comprehensively on the experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Colonel Bailey said his institute, a research arm to promote improvement in medical care, eventually hopes to combine a “K.I.A. module” from the medical examiner with the registry of patients treated in hospitals.

He added, however, that discussion of merging the data is in its early phases, and that while “I think we will get there, I can’t tell you when it will happen.”

Against this background, Colonel Wirt, a neuroradiologist who volunteered for duty in an infantry brigade, set out in 2010 to make his own record of one brief but bloody chapter of the Afghan war. “This was a way to take something away,” he said, “so that all of the casualties mean something.”

His commander wanted a high level of detail, he said. Curiosity drove him further.

“If you don’t take data and analyze it and try to find ways to improve, then what are you doing?” Colonel Wirt asked in an interview at Fort Campbell, where he is a deputy commander at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital. “In my humble opinion, a consolidated database with standardized input consisting of mechanism of injury and resulting wounds, classified by battle and nonbattle injuries, would be something you could actually use.”

Other officers agreed. Maj. Kirk W. Webb, formerly responsible for compiling casualty data for the 101st Airborne Division, said each unit tracked its casualties, although not to the detail that Colonel Wirt pursued. Most of the information has probably vanished, he added.

“It’s kind of sad, actually, because there is a lot information out there that gets lost,” Major Webb said.

Dr. Dave Edmond Lounsbury is a retired colonel and medical doctor who was co-author of “War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq,” a textbook from the Office of the Army Surgeon General that, over considerable internal dissent, published case studies of combat wounds.

He said that data like that compiled by Colonel Wirt would also be valuable for those who study workplace safety, for historians and for officers who hope to rise above collecting anecdotes to examine how insurgent and counterinsurgency forces fought each other and evolved.

But he and other officers noted a potential obstacle: Many people in the military have opposed sharing detailed medical data. The reasons, Dr. Lounsbury said, include concerns about patient privacy and a desire to present an airbrushed picture of war for public consumption.

One military official also said restricting access to the data could prevent potential enemies from studying it.

(The Office of the Surgeon General forbade Dr. Wirt to share with The New York Times his data on how American soldiers were wounded, even though the newspaper asked for the data in the format in which the data is released and updated monthly by the Office of the Secretary of Defense for the entire Iraq and Afghan wars.)

The data can be politically charged. Records from the Arghandab offensive, for example, show that 530 Americans from Dr. Wirt’s former unit were wounded in a roughly one-year period, compared with 150 Afghan soldiers and police officers. The contrast belies the official insistence that Afghan forces led the campaign, or even participated equally in it.

Dr. Lounsbury suggested that whatever the political content or concerns, compiling data and circulating it broadly was important for the practice of wartime medicine, and for the American military and public to understand better a long period of war.

“I can’t think of a higher lesson learned than to put all of that data together and find out what weapons were used and who got killed and who lived and with what therapy and treatment,” he said. Dr. Wirt, he added, “should be applauded for what he has done.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/wo...ef=todayspaper