Veterans Affairs doctors estimate 60% to 65% of soldiers have experienced a significant explosion

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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/345712_guardsmanmain02.html

Shock Wave: Troops who served in Iraq may have undiagnosed brain injuries
Like many, Lacey man returns from war -- but not to himself

LACEY -- The only outward sign of something amiss at Garry Naipo's household in this community of well-tended homes south of Fort Lewis is the ragged, yellowing lawn.

"It used to be like Safeco Field out there," Paoakalani "Paoa" Naipo said of the lawn his father no longer trims every three days. Before, Garry Naipo would forgo watching football on the weekend until the grass was cut. Once he started so early on a Saturday morning, his wife, Alii, rushed out, as she put it, "to save him from the neighbors."

Then Garry Naipo, a grandfather of three, went to Iraq -- boomeranging from cul-de-sac to combat and back in 15 months, a journey that would change his life -- and that of his family -- in subtle, corrosive ways.

Since returning from Iraq, Garry Naipo leaves his house less and less. His routine is to go to work, then come home to the bunker of his garage, which he cleans on a daily basis. "My safe place," Naipo calls his garage. "I just want to feel normal," he said recently. "I want to stop looking over my shoulder."

Naipo, 51, is one of thousands of National Guard citizen soldiers who have left established jobs and families to answer a call and come back altered men and women. On the outside, they look fine, the same even. They blend in at work, in the grocery line, at their children's soccer games. People tell them they're lucky. They're not dead.

They don't bear the grim signatures of combat, the missing limbs or shattered skulls. Their wounds, though, are as insidious as they are invisible. Many return with brains and psyches damaged by chronic exposure to the hammering of blast waves and the afterimages left by bodies blown apart.

They come home, but not back to themselves.

Veterans Affairs doctors estimate 60 percent to 65 percent of soldiers have experienced a significant explosion, or multiple detonations, by the time they leave the service. "Our mouths drop sometimes at how many blast events our servicepeople have been exposed to," said Jay Uomoto, a neuropsychologist with the VA Puget Sound.