(The Center Square) – In the spring of 2007, U.S. Army Capt. Ben Richards was serving in Iraq when the eight-ton armored vehicle he was traveling in was struck by a suicide bomber in a sedan loaded with 200 pounds of explosives.

The five-member crew all survived; the Stryker was destroyed.

“We were all able to walk out,” Richards, a West Point graduate, recalled in an interview with The Center Square. “We are all pretty wobbly. There was a period during the blast when I was temporarily unconscious.”

The U.S. Army at the time had not yet fully recognized the potential long-term impact of traumatic brain injury, Richards said.

When he returned to the forward operating base, Richards had a post-blast assessment by doctors.

“I was not able to walk straight,” he recalled. “I was wobbling around several hours after the blast and I couldn’t see straight.”

Despite the injuries, Richards went immediately back into the fight.

“I was a troop commander and you don’t just take a knee lightly when you are a leader,” Richards explained.

The unit set out on another operation the day after the suicide bomber attack. The soldiers engaged in firefights as Richards was struggling to maintain consciousness from his earlier head injuries.

“I was actually passing out during these little skirmish engagements,” said Richards.

During the battles, Richards remembers his radioman shaking him to wake him up, saying, “Sir, they are shooting at us, they are shooting at us!”

Richards was not alone. He estimates that more than 90% of the soldiers serving in his command had at least one traumatic brain injury largely because of the abundance of improvised explosive devices in the roadways and other locations. Many of those soldiers also returned to the battlefield despite their injuries.

Richards overcame years of hardship and pain before finding a solution – hyperbaric oxygen treatment therapy, colloquially known as HBOT – that finally worked for him.

After Richard’s tour was over, he returned to the United States to his wife and three children. He describes his condition as “a complete mess.”

The first night home, he had a nightmare and literally threw his wife out of bed, thinking she was an enemy soldier. His wife cried and urged him to get help.

The military guidance at the time was not to seek mental health services for at least three months, unless suicidal. The thinking was that post-traumatic stress syndrome would not surface for at least that long after a soldier was out of combat.

Despite debilitating headaches and difficulty sleeping, Richards remained in a command position for another eight months but remembers that he did a “horrible, horrible job.”

He was eventually diagnosed with both a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, commonly called PTSD.

In civilian life, his brain still perceived constant threats all around him. The traumatic brain injury made it difficult to process the threats in a rational way. In combat, the brain often overcomes fear with anger – someone is shooting at you and that makes you mad. As a civilian, that anger could instead be directed at friends and family members – not a positive outcome.

Lack of sleep and constant headaches didn’t help matters.

Richards went to counseling, but there was no mindset in the military at the time about chronic brain injuries, Richards said. The thinking was that the brain would heal itself over time.

He could not afford financially to take a medical retirement, with three children and a wife to support.

He was thrilled, however, when he was accepted for a teaching job at his alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Then, the couple had a fourth child.

At West Point, doctors officially diagnosed Richards as having a traumatic brain injury. They tried new medications, but the side effects were strong. But the tide was changing with an increased awareness of combat brain injuries.

In 2010, the Army opened the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, a traumatic brain injury center, in Bethesda, Md. Richards was admitted.

“The Intrepid Center was incredible,” he said.

After a three-week evaluation, doctors developed a comprehensive treatment program for Richards. It was then clear that his brain injury was so severe that he was not medically fit for duty so he took a medical retirement from the Army.

The family could not afford to continue living in New York so they moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, to be closer to Richards’ in-laws.

In 2012, he learned about HBOT therapy. He travelled to New Orleans for treatment, although he was initially skeptical because doctors at the Intrepid Center had warned that healing from traumatic brain injuries was rare after two years had passed. Richards was now five years out from his injury.

When Richards took the first treatment, breathing 100% oxygen for an hour inside a special chamber, he really didn’t notice much difference in the way he felt.

After 20 treatments, spaced out over a month, he did begin to notice a difference.

He woke up one morning and realized that he had finally had a good night’s sleep, the first time in about five years. He noticed that the constant pain in his head and muscles had also subsided.

“And then I realized that I was happy,” recalled Richards, who now lives in Oreille County in Washington. “Because I had not been feeling those emotions for so long, it was euphoric. I had forgotten what it felt like to be happy.”

He did 80 treatments initially and continues to get occasional treatments. He remains a big believer in the healing power of HBOT treatments, particularly for combat veterans who have suffered brain injuries.

For the Department of Veterans Affairs, there is still a need of change from the Department of Defense led by Secretary Pete Hegseth in order to help other veterans through the VA. PTSD and TBI each are treated as mental illness rather than injury. Until the VA gets a change from Hegseth or the administration, HBOT won’t be available to veterans at the VA.

U.S. Rep. Dr. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., in each of the last four Congresses, has proposed a pilot program furnishing HBOT at the VA. The Veterans Affairs subcommittee in the House moved it March 25 to the full committee and a mark-up session was held May 6.

“I’m not a special case,” he said. “My outcome was average in the amount of improvement I had. It’s not an outlier.”

Than Axtell, a fly-fishing guide who has lived in western North Carolina for three decades, adores the unimpeded wilderness around the south fork of the Mills River — the rare place, he said, where one can spend a weekend backpacking, fishing the whole way, and rarely seeing another angler.

Marc Hunt, a conservationist and former Asheville City Council member, once partook in a memorable, moonlit bachelor party atop Cheoah Bald, along the Appalachian Trail in Swain County. And Sam Evans, an attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, relishes his first memory of the Pisgah National Forest: A 1996 trip to mountain bike the Laurel Mountain Trail.

“The reason it’s such a cool place for a kid from Alabama to come up and experience the big mountains of North Carolina is because it’s a roadless area,” Evans said this week. “The only way to get there is under your own power. You can’t drive a car up Laurel Mountain, and that’s what makes it special.”

These places were on their minds, and those of many others, this week because of what many environmentalists, conservationists and outdoor-recreation enthusiasts see as a dire new threat. On Monday, Brooke Rollins, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, announced that the Department of Agriculture plans to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which prohibits road construction — and, in turn, industrial activity such as logging, mining and oil drilling — on large swaths of land in the National Forest System. The rescission announcement is the latest in a series of Trump administration efforts to strip protections from public lands in favor of industry interests.

Many of these roadless areas, which amount to 59 million acres nationwide, are in the West. These have received the most attention this week, in part because Rollins singled them out in her announcement: places like Utah and Montana, where a majority of Forest Service land is protected, and Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, long the locus of battles over preservation and resource extraction.

With 172,000 acres, North Carolina contains less than 1 percent of the country’s roadless land. But the implications of the Roadless Rule rollback could be devastating, experts said, especially in western North Carolina, where almost all of the state’s roadless land is concentrated. They warned that an incursion of logging and road building would threaten biodiversity, imperil water quality and destabilize the outdoor recreation industry, all while costing taxpayers.

“That is our natural heritage,” Axtell said of the areas at stake. “That is our cultural heritage. I don’t understand why there’s such a rush to put roads into every living acre of forest.”

‘They seem to want to hold complete control over land’

By the time the Roadless Rule arrived in 2001, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, it was both decades in the making and enormously popular. The 1964 Wilderness Act spawned the first efforts to catalog the nation’s dwindling roadless places of more than 5,000 acres, a process dubbed Roadless Area Review and Evaluation — or, in an on-the-nose acronym, RARE.

Efforts to formalize protections for these areas sputtered in the pro-industry, anti-regulation Reagan-Bush years. In the late 1990s, motivated by an expensive and poorly maintained network of roads that plagues it to this day, the Forest Service halted road construction and developed a policy to protect roadless areas. Over the next year, more than one and a half million people weighed in on the proposed rule, with a reported 95 percent of them supporting it; the Wilderness Society, in a history of the rule, later called it “the most extensive public involvement process in the history of federal rulemaking.”

“It felt like, after a couple of decades, it finally paid off, and these areas would be protected,” said Hugh Irwin, a conservation planner who had advocated for the rule since the 1970s, now retired after stints with the Wilderness Society and Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition.

In announcing the planned rescission of the Roadless Rule on Monday, the USDA dismissed it as “outdated,” though the regulation weathered legal challenges well into the 2010s. The move is of a piece with other efforts by the Trump administration to loosen regulations and ramp up resource extraction on public lands.

It also follows a pattern of pro-logging sentiment by the Forest Service that has taken hold in western North Carolina. The agency’s management plan for the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests calls for a dramatic expansion in timber harvesting over the coming decades; in April, an Asheville Watchdog investigation found that the agency had used flawed data to support that increase. Earlier this year, in a process that it largely kept out of the public eye, it opened salvage logging on sites hit by Tropical Storm Helene, including the Dobson Knob roadless area near Marion.

The rescission promise has drawn some applause, mostly from Republican lawmakers and timber industry groups. But it has also drawn vociferous criticism.

“I perceive a very strong domineering instinct, in that this administration wants to dominate other people and they also want to dominate the land,” said Josh Kelly, the resilient forests director for the Asheville-based environmental nonprofit MountainTrue. “They seem to want to hold complete control over land. I guess I would say, it seems like they’re looking to manipulate ecosystems as much as possible and do that in a way that generates revenue for industry.”

Rollins cited a familiar rationale Monday: the twin poles of wildfire management and timber production. The first makes little sense on its face, experts said. The Roadless Rule already allows fire-management measures, including controlled burns and some harvesting of small-diameter timber for fuel-reduction purposes. Though logging can be a useful tool for foresters, it can exacerbate fire risk by creating larger areas of dry soil and undergrowth and leaving behind slash — dead pieces of small or otherwise commercially unviable wood — which burns more easily than large trees.

Fire also plays an important regenerative role in forests, Irwin noted, and large undeveloped areas give it a place to do its job without threatening human life or property.

“Fire is a natural process in most natural ecosystems, and in particular in eastern forests,” he said. “Not having fires is a problem. In these big roadless areas, in a lot of cases, those natural fires can be allowed to burn because they’re not threatening lives or property.”

But introducing roads into these areas would change that calculus, he said.

“Most wildfires are caused by humans, and roads push human access back into these areas, so they would worsen wildfires rather than address them,” he said.

Experts said it’s clear that the federal government wants to bolster the domestic timber industry. But doing so by expanding logging in roadless areas would likely come at a huge taxpayer expense.

Roadless areas are roadless for a reason, Axtell, the fly-fishing guide, noted: Many are especially hard to access due to their rugged, steep terrain. Evans, the SELC attorney, said those challenges would likely make harvesting wood from North Carolina’s roadless areas prohibitively expensive if timber companies had to make their own way. 

To make the math appealing for private industry, then, the Forest Service would likely subsidize the work by building and maintaining new roads. That could be an expensive incentive. It’s also one the Forest Service has not shown the capacity to absorb: As of 2022, according to a 2023 Congressional Research Service report, the agency was facing $7.66 billion in deferred maintenance, more than half related to its 372,000 miles of roads.

“Exploiting these areas does not make sense from a taxpayer’s perspective,” Evans said, “because it will cost the Forest Service much more to build and maintain those roads than the Forest Service will ever get in receipts for the trees themselves.”

Fears about impact on erosion, water quality

North Carolina’s roadless areas may appear puny on a map next to the widescreen behemoths of the West, but experts said that’s also what makes them so important. By the time the U.S. got into the business of preserving land, much of the Appalachian South had already been ravaged by timber extraction and industrial development. North Carolina’s national forests look clunky and disjointed because they were scraped together with what the Forest Service could buy from private landowners.

The pieces that remain largely untouched are that way because their form made them inhospitable to human life in the first place. They are gems in a region that has vanishingly few wild places, experts said.

“Those few places where you do have well-consolidated large tracts of undeveloped land, they are the places where you’re going to find the most species diversity and the cleanest water and the reserves of old growth,” Evans said.

Conservationists in western North Carolina have long raised concerns about how logging could impact endangered and threatened animal species — including some types of bats and salamanders — that live in the national forests. This week’s news also has them especially worried about aquatic life: Road construction dramatically worsens erosion, which could immediately harm the streams that flow through many roadless areas.

“Aquatic biodiversity does not recover well from disturbances,” said Hunt, whose background is in whitewater outfitting. “We’re talking about a fairly isolated ecosystem (with) mussels or small darters and minnows and other kinds of fish, amphibians and so on. They can’t pack up and walk 25 miles to the nearest watershed — they’re stuck right here in the place where they’re born.”

The same forces could cause problems for humans, experts said. Kelly said the single biggest danger of removing the Roadless Rule is that it will imperil waterways, with erosion and landslides posing threats to downstream public health. Irwin said he was most worried about how degradation of streams in roadless areas could affect water supplies.

“Putting roads and logging in these areas clearly degrades water quality coming off a lot of these headwaters,” Irwin said. “So many communities — Asheville, Knoxville and others — depend on water coming off the national forests, particularly Asheville. But even more important, smaller communities that are at the base of these mountains get their water primarily from streams coming off the national forest.”

In part because of their relatively untouched waterways, the roadless areas are also magnets for recreation. Some are key spots for fly-fishing or paddling. Others draw equestrians or mountain bikers. That roadless areas are protected but not designated as wilderness areas — which don’t allow bikes, for example — allows them to fill this niche, a cornerstone of western North Carolina’s cultural identity and tourism industry.

“One of the appeals of our region is the status, its branding, as a very wild natural place,” Hunt said. “That manifests for people that might choose to live here or establish a business here or relocate a business or visit the area and spend money. It is a point of pride. It is a branding element. It is somewhat unique in the eastern US to have forests and streams and rivers that are unfettered with development.”

Though experts were dismayed by the rescission plan, some noted that it’s not yet a done deal. Conservation groups have already said they’re preparing legal challenges. Kelly noted that earlier this week, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s proposal to sell public lands — which was met with widespread opposition from across the political spectrum — was stripped from the Republican budget reconciliation megabill. There was hope that a similar fate might be in store for the Roadless Rule, with its long history of broad support.

“This is no small threat,” Evans said. “This is an existential threat to the things most Americans value about their public land.”

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Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Jack Evans is an investigative reporter who previously worked at the Tampa Bay Times. You can reach him via email at jevans@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.

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