Photo By Scott Sturkol | Medics with Wisconsin National Guard’s 2nd Battalion, 127th Infantry Regiment...... read more read more
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In April 2024, a study with the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on mitigating the impact of blast exposures was under way during a training session for Soldiers with the Wisconsin National Guard’s 32nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (IBCT).
The 2024 study work was highlighted in an article by Staff Sgt. Kati Volkman of the 32nd at https://www.dvidshub.net/news/468690/researchers-and-guard-physicians-set-their-sights-mitigating-impact-blast-exposures. During that study session, Soldiers with the 1st Battalion, 120th Field Artillery Regiment and 1st Squadron, 105th Cavalry Regiment were observed while they trained at Fort McCoy.
The article explained how that observation period was planned and conducted.
“Dr. Walter Carr, research psychologist with Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Center for Military Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Blast Induced Neurotrauma Branch, has conducted this type of research for several years, and explained that it is eye-opening when he talks about the possible effects of blast exposure in front of people who have responsibility for Soldiers and they frequently nod and say ‘yup, I’ve heard this and I’ve seen this before.’
“We’re out here today to see how everything works in the field during training and plan how we can bring our equipment and research personnel on site to gather the information without interfering with the mission,” Carr said in Volkman’s article.
“The idea of bringing this study to the 32nd IBCT came from a conversation (in 2022) between Maj. (Dr.) Gregory Miller, surgeon with Headquarters and Headquarters Team, 1st Squadron, 105th (1-105th) Cavalry Regiment Squadron, and Sgt. First Class Joseph Russett, Troop A, 1-105th, who serves as an indirect fire infantryman,” the article states.
Fast forward to June 2025 and Miller was back at Fort McCoy observing training with the 2nd Battalion, 127th Infantry Regiment and other Soldiers during two weeks of training on post.
Recalling how it all started
Miller said the impetus for the study was the Wisconsin National Guard’s annual training of 2022.
“(It) was my first annual training,” Miller said. “I joined at age 51, kind of late to the party, and I went to my first annual training. I decided to go out to a mortar range just to see. I’d never heard of mortars, didn't know what they did, so I thought I’d go out and check it out.
“Heard some mortars shot off … jumped out of my boots,” Miller said. “I wasn’t ready for it the first time. So, after we were done watching, I went up to the mortar sergeant and I just said, ‘Hey, I’m medical, do you have any questions?’ Just expecting them to be easy, like ‘you know, hey, got something on my finger, how is it?’
“He looked at me, and obviously I’ve been thinking about this, which I found out a couple years later, but he looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, I got a question,’” Miller said. “What are you going to do about my buddies who are retiring? They’ve been doing this for 20 years, and they now are alcoholic, suicidal, depressed, can’t sleep, drug addicts … what do you do about it?”
Miller said that was a pretty tough question to have an answer for.
“It is a tough question,” he said. “I just kind of looked at him and I said, ‘I don't know, but I will look into it.’ I went back and did some quick research on the internet but didn’t find much of anything.”
Getting started
Miller said his next phone call was to Maj. Karl Greene, also a medical doctor with the Wisconsin National Guard.
“He and I joined the same day, four years ago, and he’s a neurosurgeon,” Miller said. “I said, ‘What do you know about this stuff? … What do you do about this? What do you know about it?’
“So that has led to a journey that has taken three years to get here,” Miller said.
That journey has brought in a state physician named Carl Strickwood and also Carr, who was previously mentioned in Volkman’s article.
“(Carr’s) been doing this stuff for 20 years,” Miller said. “He’s been doing it on the active-duty side, and he will do a one-time study, and when they try to go back a couple years later, the guys are gone. So the nice thing about the National Guard is we can offer is a short-term, one-time study, but also long-term, because people stay for 20 years, and then you can even study the next generation.
“We feel that the mortars, along with artillery, all those other things, they can cause problems if not approached in the right way, and right now, we don’t think we’re doing everything we can to protect the Soldiers,” Miller said. “That’s the whole goal of the study. We’re not trying to get rid of mortars. We need them. They’re vital. The guys love shooting them off. … But you know, we got to keep them safe, because unfortunately, young guys are not looking out for that. So that’s our goal. It’s to find out what, you know, what are the consequences of shooting off 200, you know, mortars in a week, in a weekend.
Miller said shooting off one mortar and the level that it is shot off at is considered to be at a safe level.
“But what do you do when you have 200? You know, you’ll talk to the Soldiers, and I’ve interviewed them, and they’ll say, yeah, when I do that, when we have a whole weekend of just shooting, you know, I can’t sleep the night in between, or the night after,” Miller said.
What they’re learning
Miller said they do know it affects them.
“But what we got to do is define it, quantify it, and then figure out how we can change the training,” Miller said in June. “This group from Walter Reed is just amazing. We have about seven to nine different researchers here for over a period of a week, and they are bringing all different technologies to try and study it. We have blood tests that can look for early markers that you can have a blood marker that can show up within … a relatively short amount of time.
“It can show up and say, yes, this person’s had a traumatic brain injury,” Miller said. “We look at that, we look at two different hearing tests, we look at some eye tests, some vision tests, and then also what they’re looking at is they’re using vibration sense to see the spread of the blast, and then we can measure the blast pressure, compare it with the symptoms that people are having, and kind of compare and see where we need to go.”
Miller also discussed “bounce back” from a blast.
“They can look at things like the tree,” Miller said. “You can even have bounce back from a tree line, where (blast pressure) … comes back. If … you … have a wall right behind you, you can get double, triple the effect.
“Every time I have a conversation, I learn something new,” he said.
Miller added that Green has had a major role in keeping the study going with the Wisconsin National Guard.
“He helped when I went on deployment this past winter to Kuwait with the 128th,” Miller said. “He attached himself to the 127th, which has been amazing because that’s the unit that we’re studying. And his knowing everybody in the 127th has allowed us to get all the approval and make this happen. So, it’s just really neat to see it all come together after all this good work.”
Green explained further about his involvement in the study with Walter Reed and Miller.
“I was asked by Maj. Miller to look into the whole issue because of a question asked in the field by one of the mortar squad leaders,” Green said. “And as we dug into it further, we found that there’s this real issue with what’s now referred to as sub-concussive traumatic brain injury. So, each time there’s a blast from something like a mortar tube, it send off a blast wave, rattles the brain. Maybe not enough to knock you out, but enough to cause some early and late effects.
“So that being the case, we attempted to pursue a study that was organic to the Guard, but we had no infrastructure for doing any kind of research in the field,” Green said. “Probably because it’s never been done before. It’s notable that the research that Walter Reed is doing has only been done primarily … active Army. There’s been no … Guard, no … Reserve. So, our push was to somehow involve our Soldiers in the Guard, who are citizen Soldiers who do this.
Green said Guard and Reserve Soldiers make the commitment of one week in a month and two weeks of annual training every year.
“That’s what the public knows, but what the public doesn’t know is that many of those weekends are live-fire exercises, and so they’re exposing themselves to a lot of blast overpressure on a repeated basis, and they're just going back into civilian life.” Green said. “So, knowing that, we pushed to try to find a source for an ongoing research project that would have the resources that would be able to do that kind of a study with us, and we could piggyback on to their infrastructure.
“And God bless Maj. Miller. He stumbled upon it through the help of the state surgeon, and we’re now part of an ongoing longitudinal study with Walter Reed Army Institute of Research looking at blast overpressure and its contribution to sub-concussive traumatic brain injury,” Green said.
Green said in 2024, they were able to do the site visit to training at McCoy. The study’s primary principal investigator, Carr.
“Carr came out to visit us to see what we were all about and how he could integrate the study with what they were doing and not disrupt the flow of or the rhythm of training here,” Green said. “That being the case, we got the thumbs up and making it happen this year. This is now the first Guard unit in the country that is actually studying that issue of sub-concussive traumatic brain injury from blast overpressure from explosive weapons. I’m kind of proud of what we’ve been able to pull off by making this happen. It came (together) with the efforts of a whole lot of people.”
Work will continue
Miller said work with the study will continue with 32ndIBCT Soldiers and Walter Reed and they will work to develop practices and more to improve what they learn from their findings.
“The least we can do is keep them safe,” Miller said. “So, 20 years from now, hopefully they can still be married, happy, not alcoholic, depressed, can’t sleep, all those kinds of things. Because some of them will tell you right now, I mean, we have some of the guys have been in for 16, 18 years. They will tell you they have hung probably 40 to 50 to 60, 70,000 birds. And some of them will tell you, I can’t sleep. That’s not an exaggeration.
“No, it’s not because the mortar guys, they will do it a couple of times a year, but they hang a couple hundred, several hundred in a weekend. And do that several times a year. It adds up. When you have limited time to do your training, you're going to do as much as you can during the time you have,” Miller said.
“And that’s the worry,” he said. “On the study itself, I (have been) blown away at the depth of research capabilities that they have and all the different things that they’re testing out. I wasn’t expecting everything they brought out.”
Learn more about the Wisconsin National Guard by visiting https://wi.ng.mil. See more of the interviews with Miller and Green at https://www.dvidshub.net/search/?filter%5Bunit%5D=FMPAO&filter%5Btype%5D=video&sort=date.
Fort McCoy’s motto is to be the “Total Force Training Center.”
Located in the heart of the upper Midwest, Fort McCoy is the only U.S. Army installation in Wisconsin.
The installation has provided support and facilities for the field and classroom training of more than 100,000 military personnel from all services nearly every year since 1984.
Learn more about Fort McCoy online at https://home.army.mil/mccoy, on Facebook by searching “ftmccoy,” on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/fortmccoywi, and on X (formerly Twitter) by searching “usagmccoy.”
Also try downloading the My Army Post app to your smartphone and set “Fort McCoy” or another installation as your preferred base. Fort McCoy is also part of Army’s Installation Management Command where “We Are The Army’s Home.”
| Date Taken: | 09.02.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 09.02.2025 13:50 |
| Story ID: | 547022 |
| Location: | FORT MCCOY, WISCONSIN, US |
| Web Views: | 33 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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