True Costs of War: "the left side of his head, which is cratered, like an apple with a bite taken out of it."

[{Army Specialist David}Warren has trouble remembering a lot of things. Which isn't surprising, considering that several pieces of shrapnel tore through his skull after insurgents outside Kandahar blew up his truck with a rocket-propelled grenade in May. One piece came to rest in the center of Warren's brain - two millimeters from his carotid artery - where it remains, suspended like a piece of fruit in a gelatin mold, too dangerous to extract...


At the Bethesda hospital, the flow of brain-injured patients is constant. For nearly a decade, the United States has been fighting wars in which soldiers are routinely exposed to brain-rattling blasts that can send ripples of compressed air hurtling through the atmosphere at 1,600 feet per second. Now, the military is struggling to come to terms with an often-invisible wound...


Since 2000, traumatic brain injury, or TBI, has been diagnosed in about 180,000 service members, the Pentagon says. But some advocates for patients say hundreds, if not thousands, more have suffered undiagnosed brain injuries. A Rand study in 2008 estimated the total number of service members with TBI to be about 320,000.]  Washington Post, 3 Oct '11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/01/AR2010100106339.html?hpid=topnews