(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.”

(The Center Square) – Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine touted the United States’ early success against Iranian nuclear sites in a news conference.

“President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history, and it was a resounding success, resulting in a ceasefire agreement and the end of the 12-day war,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth and Caine celebrated the strikes, but referred assessments of the damage to Iran’s nuclear site to the intelligence community, including the CIA. 

“What the United States military did was historic,” Hegseth said.

Caine said the strike against Iran with 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs included 15 years of intelligence assessments on Fordow, Iran’s nuclear site, and many tests of the bomb. He said the United States developed the bombs with Iran’s nuclear facilities in mind.

“Operation Midnight Hammer was the culmination of those 15 years of incredible work, the air crews, the tanker crews, the weapons crews that built the weapons, the load crews that loaded it,” Caine said.

Caine said the military targeted two ventilation shafts in Iran’s Fordow nuclear site. He said Iranians tried to cover the ventilation shafts with concrete caps.

“The cap was forcibly removed by the first weapon, and the main shaft was uncovered,” Caine said.

Caine said the next five bombs were meant to go through the opened shaft and explode the main complex at 1,000 feet per second. Another six hit the other shaft.

“The weapons functioned as designed, meaning they exploded,” Caine said.

B-2 bombers dropped 12 “bunker buster” at Iran’s nuclear site. The bombs weigh as much as a semi-truck and can penetrate up to 200 feet underground.

The U.S. military spent about $400 million to design and produce 20 such bombs for the U.S. Air Force. The 30,000-pound bomb is called GBU-57, or Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or for short, simply MOP. MOP was designed to “attack hard and deeply-buried facilities.”

All 12 MOPs hit their targets, Caine said. 

“Unlike a normal surface bomb, you won’t see an impact crater because they’re designed to deeply bury and then function,” he said. “All six weapons at each vent at Fordow went exactly where they were intended to go.”

Caine warned adversary nations that the United States is working on the same kinds of operations against targets in other countries.

“Our adversaries around the world should know that there are other [Defense Threat Reduction Agency members] out there studying targets for the same amount of time, and will continue to do so,” Caine said.

While Caine and Hegseth lauded the operation, they declined to offer specifics on the damage assessment, referring it to CIA reports.

“The Joint Force does not do [Battle Damage Assessments],” Caine said. “By design, we don’t grade our own homework, the intelligence community does.”

Hegseth and Caine declined to comment on reports that uranium was moved from Iran’s nuclear site before the United States attacked.

“There’s nothing that I’ve seen that suggests we didn’t hit exactly what we wanted to hit in those locations,” Hegseth said.

He said leaked intelligence that the operation only set Iran’s nuclear program back by two months was motivated by “political purposes.”

“Someone had an agenda to try to muddy the waters and make it look like this strike wasn’t successful,” Hegseth said. 

Reporters asked about satellite imagery showing trucks moving material, possible enriched uranium out of Fordow before the attacks. Hegseth said he had no credible information to support that assessment. 

President Donald Trump said the imagery showed work related to the recently constructed concrete caps Iranians put over the ventilation shafts.

“The cars and small trucks at the site were those of concrete workers trying to cover up the top of the shafts,” Trump wrote in a social media post. “Nothing was taken out of facility. Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move!”

(The Center Square) – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a pair of bills on Wednesday designed to bring reforms to the state’s behavioral health apparatus and assist with the mentally ill in the criminal justice system.

The second-term GOP governor signed Senate Bills 1620 and 168 in a ceremony in Tampa. 

SB1620 implements some of the key recommendations by the Florida Commission on Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder. The measure will standardize clinical mental health assessments used by providers and school mental health programs; improves discharge planning from treatment facilities; requires plans to address access to long-lasting injectable medications for the mentally ill; mandates biennial reviews of telehealth availability with a focus on rural; and underserved areas and supports new training programs and stipends for behavioral health workers. 

SB1620 was sponsored by Sen. Darryl Rouson, D-St. Petersburg, who was honored by the governor on his legislative work on substance abuse and mental health by having the University of South Florida’s behavioral health services research institute named in his honor. 

“I’ll never forget 27 years, three months ago when I woke up in the Hanley-Hazelden treatment facility and the day I asked for help,” said Rouson, a recovering addict. “The hopelessness, the loneliness, the anger, the fear, the rage, the bottom became my gift of desperation. I became desperate to change and whether I believed I could or whether I couldn’t, I knew I was right. I’m very honored to be here today.”

Rouson also said that he told then-Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, who appointed him to lead the Florida Commission on Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder in 2021, that he didn’t want to help author a report that would gather dust on a shelf, but do something that would lead to real, lasting change.

He also said SB1620 turns thoughtful recommendations by the commission into real policy and would help keep Florida a leader at treating people with mental illness and addiction. 

SB168, sponsored by Sen. Jennifer Bradley, R-Fleming Island, is known as the Tristan Murphy Act. It was named after Murphy, a victim of suicide in 2021 at a state correctional facility work program during a mental health episode. 

“We talk about a lot of issues in Tallahassee, but mental health is a messy issue. It’s a difficult issue,” Bradley said. “It’s an issue that is hard to move the ball meaningfully because it takes a lot of resources, it involves the criminal justice system and our sheriffs on the ground. It involves our providers.”

The bill requires the state Department of Corrections to provide physical and mental screenings for inmates eligible for work assignments and allows screening within 24 hours for people detained by law enforcement for a crime. This can allow them to be diverted to a mental health facility instead. 

“And I think if you talk to a lot of people in law enforcement, and obviously you have a lot of really dangerous criminals, they just need to be kept off the street,” DeSantis said. “But a lot of people that interact with the justice system, the root cause is not that they’re bad people trying to harm others, it’s that they’ve got a lot of mental health problems that are leading to behavior that is antisocial, and so to the extent that we can do that and identify that and potentially provide solutions for that, that’s going to ultimately be better for taxpayers, it’ll be better for the entire justice system, and it’ll be better for the safety of our community.”