Less than a second after the blast, chunks of hot metal bounce off body armor and sever exposed limbs. Travelling at 1,600 feet per second, the accompanying blast pressure front ripples through Kevlar as if you and your buddies were nude. This initial shock wave of extremely high pressure is instantly followed by a secondary wind as a huge volume of displaced air floods back in. Compressed 1,000 times greater than the normal atmospheric pressure in which the human body is designed to operate, this double-whammy rattles brains against skulls.

There is red - all red. Followed by blackness. And maybe, if you are lucky, or at least at first think you are lucky, a blurry coming to.

Sharp pain means you've been relatively lightly hurt. Agonizing pain that makes you scream for your mama means your skin has come unzipped and your guts unmoored. No pain at all usually means that you are in a major world of hurt.

If you're still breathing when guys from the rest of the column drag you off the road, it does not matter - at least officially - if you croak. Because back in Washington you will not be listed as a KIA. These are the rules that keep the daily Killed In Action tally down, despite an average 70 to 80 armed attacks on American convoys and patrols every goddamn day. If everyone actually killed in the line of fire were counted - including those fucking cowboy mercs - the real American death toll would be easily twice that reported.

But you don't die. In fact, it seems you're hardly hurt at all! Limbs intact, heart, guts and lungs ticking, gurgling and thumping away. Carl's brains are spread across your fatigues. But your own appear to be still as dumb as ever.

Welcome to the club. Even if your blurred vision and headaches won't win you a purple heart, you've just joined the 80% of wounded American GIs fucked up by IEDs. After four months in-country in Afghanistan or Iraq during a 15-month repeat tour, just about everyone will experience six to 25 bomb blasts while on combat patrol.

But hey, the Army did promise you an education when you joined up. And yours is just beginning.

Remember when you felt all those protuberances inside that skull? You thought, what a bad design - the last thing you'd want soft brain tissue bumping against in say, a bad fall. But that bearded dude up in the clouds thought of that, too. A shock-absorbing layer of liquid separates soft from hard, dampening the occasional jolt.

What you hadn't figured on is how liquid under compression - say, from massive shock waves - becomes too thin to insulate. And can even amplify and transmit shock on its own. If that hurts your brain to think about, you're closer than you know to what's just gone down.

But you don't realize this at first. Instead, you become the company mascot, a much-remarked “Miracle Man” who somehow survived the carnage that eviscerated the hummer and everyone else inside with a copper squirter.

The guys with penetrating brain injuries are easy to diagnose. Hole in head = brain damage. If it's the front of the head that's hurt - what medics call the prefrontal cortex - “social functioning” is impaired. Basically, you can't think straight. With a smoking gap in the switchboard, brain signals directing proper social behavior, reasoning, attention and planning are shorted out.

Luckily, that didn't happen to you.

Still, it's hard to remember what else the VA told you after you rotated home, got booted out of the army, and discovered you could not hold a job because you kept forgetting what the job was. You feel like a fucking retard. In boot camp you could easily run a six-minute mile. Now it's hard to stand, even to think. Your deafness has half-receded. But just looking out your eyes is confusing. You're anxious all the time, and you don't know why.

This pisses you off.

So people keep avoiding you.

Two years later, you still can't follow a movie or TV show, read a book or remember a date. Your sex life is not too good. Hell, your no-longer-whole young life has gone to shit. Every night you dream that helpless feeling, lying in that baking dirty street with 50-cal from the hummer cooking off, not knowing if you're going to die, if your buddies are going to die, if you're about to get shot. When your eyes snap open and you jerk up sweating and screaming in bed, that little girl is looking at you. Except her head is not attached to her body.

Or you have that other episode, the one where you're cut off from your unit. You're back in uniform. But this time you're running through a bunch of empty street markets. It's just you. Nobody else. You're trying to find your way back to the guys. And you're screaming, “What am I supposed to do?” just scared out of your mind.

You'd like to become an alcoholic. But you can't afford it. The army says you broke your contract by getting blown up and not completing your agreed years of service. They told you, "It's all in your head!"

And since there's not a scratch on you, they aren't paying you squat. In another month, other displaced vets will be dressing ranks to make space for you to pitch your own cardboard Hilton on the street.

Funny how that fucking recruiter forgot to mention any of this.

The more depressed and angry you get, you more isolated you become. Suicide is starting to look more and more appealing. Maybe on the White House steps. Even without the virgins.

Even when there are no outward signs of injury from the blast, cells deep within the brain can be altered, says Geoff Ling, an advance-research scientist with a Pentagon not yet advanced enough to figure out that war is insane. Their metabolism changes - the cells, remember? - causing them to curl up and die.

These multiplying little deaths of brain cells lead to symptoms that may not surface for months or year later. Things you're already intimately familiar with, like memory loss, splitting headaches, falling down vertigo, freaked out anxiety and the equally devastating flip-side: apathy and lethargy.

Not exactly preferred attributes in a job applicant.

A concussion, which is basically a bruise on the brain, can heal over time. But brain damage at the cellular level is permanent - especially after repeated exposures to blasts - and leads to lasting neurological deterioration.

Now specialists are saying that the number of brain-injured GIs and Gyrenes - many of whom appear unhurt after repeated exposure to soul-numbing blasts - “may be far greater than reported.”

No shit. Could this possibly be why Traumatic Brain Injury is now considered the “signature wound” of Iraq, because it's so common? So far, screenings just beginning at stateside military bases are showing as many as one in three returning veterans may have suffered invisible brain injuries. Maybe one in ten are missing arms and legs, or are too badly burned to ever again venture out into public.

Put both ratios together and these are not real swift odds. Then add the nearly obligatory PTSD with its debilitating nightmares and flashbacks - and just about no one comes home unhurt.

"We've had patients who have been in a blast, who we tested. They looked OK. And they came back later, and they were not OK," echoes Maria Mouratidis, head of brain injury treatment at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The damage is so microscopic, Mouratidis adds, it cannot be found with routine imaging tests.

Big hugs to Ibolja Cernak, who pioneered this new injury and put it front and center before a VA still struggling to admit Gulf War Syndrome from the last time around.

A scientist with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, she began examining wounded soldiers in her native homeland of the former Yugoslavia during the Balkans conflict of the 1990s. Ms. Cernak says that the microscopic damage that changes brain cell metabolism creates a “cascading effect” that leads to the premature aging and death of neurons that cannot be replaced.

"When the sound wave moves through the brain, it seems to cause little gas bubbles to form," further explains P. Steven Macedo, a neurologist and former doctor at the Veterans Administration. "When they pop, it leaves a cavity. So you are littering people's brains with these little holes."

Kind of like Mad Cow Disease for vegetarians.

So far, the docs know two things about TBI for certain:
1. The symptoms are going to get steadily worse.
2. There is no treatment or cure.

Or as one newspaper recently reported, “Military and civilian scientists worry whether a generation of service members could emerge from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with some form of brain damage steadily more severe.”

Which may not be such a good thing.

To paraphrase a neurosurgeon at the Combat Support Hospital in Balad, Iraq: "We can save you. But you might not be you.”

“Now in its fifth year, the Iraq conflict is not a war of death for U.S. troops nearly so much as it is a war of disabilities,” writes Ronald Glasser in the Washington Post. “The symbol of this battle is not the cemetery but the orthopedic ward and the neurosurgical unit. The men and women inside those units have come home alive but missing arms and legs, many unable to see or hear or remember who they were before being hit by a roadside bomb.”

Especially when you consider this is the same Skull and Bones REMF who keeps cutting VA funding, while handing trillions to the banks and corporations who put and keep him in power.

Better to just give the one-finger salute in your civvies and say, “Yessir, I'm right behind you sir. I'll follow you into battle anywhere, sir. You take point. And I'll take your position in the rear.”

Whatever you do, use whatever brains you've still got.

And keep your righteous good name off that deadly dotted line.