Zolan Kanno-Youngs: From the New York Times, I'm Zolan Kanno-Youngs filling in as host. This is The Daily.

Over the past decade, the US military experienced a wakeup call. Research showed that traumatic brain injuries were not just caused by bombings and explosions, but also by the shock waves troops feel from their own weapons like artillery and shoulder fired rockets.

Now, new reporting shows that similarly devastating impacts can come from another unexpected place, the ocean. Today, my colleague Dave Phillips on a significant blind spot in the Coast Guard and the teenager who helped expose how widespread the danger really is. It's Tuesday, September 1st.

Dave Phillips, you have been covering the military for how long?

Dave Phillips: Probably like 20 years.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: And I think it's fair to say that you have expanded our understanding of specifically brain injuries in the military and how they can impact a wide range of jobs. But recently your reporting took you to a branch of the military that I think most of us would not associate with head trauma and that's the Coast Guard. How did you end up there?

Dave Phillips: Yeah, basically it started in Iraq because brain injuries were a huge part of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. IEDs going off, people getting really shaken up but not having a scratch on them. And so we started to talk about these invisible injuries. And of course, I wrote about that years ago.

But it was only recently that I started to figure out that you could get those injuries not from some big blast that comes from the enemy, but from multiple small blasts that come from firing your own weapon. So people that work on artillery cannons or mortars or fire shoulder fired rockets, these people are repeatedly getting a shock wave that whips through their brain tissue and over time those repeated shocks to the brain can lead to a really lasting and disruptive issue.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Right. So you're describing heavy weapons, working with explosives, you're describing combat, and I don't usually associate all of those things with the Coast Guard. So I guess were you surprised that your journey brought you here to the Coast Guard?

Dave Phillips: Yeah, because most people when they think about the Coast Guard, they think like EMS for the sea, you know, like search and rescue, port safety, drug interdiction. And while they do have some weapons training, that's not what we really associate them with.

So honestly, the Coast Guard wasn't even on my radar for these types of injuries until I got a call from a reader who said, "Hey, I think the same thing happened to my husband, and he recently died."

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Wow.

Dave Phillips: She described symptoms of a boat driver in the Coast Guard that were exactly like the symptoms that I was seeing in these other folks. So I said, "Hey, if this is happening to your husband and to other people who are doing the same job, help me find those people who are being exposed and are maybe also suffering." And she knew a lot of them. And she quickly connected me with a woman named Jenna Bonner.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Okay. So tell me about Jenna.

Dave Phillips: Jenna Bonner is in her 40s. She's got four kids and she moved to a beautiful little spot in the mountains of North Carolina a number of years ago with her husband Brett Bonner.

Dave Phillips (Interview): What was your first impression of him?

Jenna Bonner: Um, he was very fit. Like total life of the party. Um, his friends used to call him big dumb animal. He was like golden retriever.

Dave Phillips: Jenna, she had met this guy when she was in college. And he was this young, big, muscly, you know, as she describes him, hot guy who was a friend of her brothers. And he pretty instantly fell in love with her. In fact, after they only meet each other a couple times...

Jenna Bonner: He told my parents, he's like, "Hold on, I got to go walk my future wife out to her car."

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Are you serious? In front of— I mean that level of confidence.

Dave Phillips: He starts introducing her to other people as his future wife.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Okay, not wasting time here.

Jenna Bonner: No, it's just like very fun. I joke that I married him cuz he made me laugh.

Dave Phillips: And they got married pretty quickly. He was in the Coast Guard and he wanted to become one of their elite rescue boat drivers, which is called a surfman.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Dave, this may just be me, but what's a surfman? Can you just explain that a little bit more?

Dave Phillips: Yeah. When a boat is out in distress in a storm, stuck in big waves, someone has to go out there and rescue them. And that person who's driving that boat is the surfman.

And these boats are built to withstand anything. They can get knocked over by a 25 foot wave and then right themselves like a rubber ducky. And so you can imagine that driving one of those in stormy seas in surf that's higher than a building, that takes a great deal of skill.

So when he's starting his career, they move to the west coast because that's where all the really rough surf is along the Pacific. And so that's where all the surfmen train. And he's really excited. He gets stationed at the Coast Guard station that's right under the Golden Gate Bridge by San Francisco and he and Jenna get established there.

Jenna Bonner: He was just not the guy who was going to sit at a desk and he loved being on the boat. He loved being underway. He was always the guy.

Dave Phillips: And he was good at it. And for the next 15 years, Brett was based along the Pacific Northwest, driving boats over and over in really rough surf.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Dave, what is that experience like for these boat drivers? And how does that relate to trauma?

Dave Phillips: They drive a type of boat called the 47-foot Motor Lifeboat. It's built super sturdy. But navigating those waves is incredibly violent.

They launch off the top of a wave, the boat goes airborne, and then it slams down into the trough. When it hits the water, it doesn't feel like hitting liquid; it feels like hitting concrete.

Jenna Bonner: They used to say it feels like someone taking a sledgehammer to the bottom of your feet and the shock goes all the way up through your spine into your head.

Dave Phillips: Every time they hit, they endure immense G-forces. Studies show that these impacts can reach 10 Gs, even 14 Gs. That means for a fraction of a second, your brain is being subjected to ten times the force of gravity, sloshing and bouncing inside the skull.

And it's not just once; during a multi-hour mission or training, they might get hammered hundreds or thousands of times.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: And when did things start to change for Brett?

Dave Phillips: At first it was subtle. About 10 years into his service, Jenna started noticing changes in Brett.

He used to be this easygoing, fun-loving guy, but he began suffering from severe migraines. He became forgetful, irritable, and extremely sensitive to light and noise. He would come home from work and have to lie down in a dark room with the blinds drawn for hours.

Jenna Bonner: He couldn't sleep. He would have insomnia, or wake up with night terrors. He became short-tempered and would snap over minor things, followed by immense remorse. He would tell me, "Jenna, my head feels broken. I feel like I'm losing my mind."

Dave Phillips: Eventually, Brett's cognitive function deteriorated so much that he couldn't drive boats anymore. The Coast Guard saw that something was wrong, but doctors initially labeled it as depression, PTSD, or general burnout.

He was eventually medically discharged. In the years following his retirement, his health rapidly spiraled downward. Struggling with unrelenting head pain, cognitive decline, and severe mood swings, Brett tragically died in his 40s.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: That is heartbreaking. But in the military system, when someone exhibits mental health issues or passes away, it's often easy for officials to dismiss it as psychological PTSD or personal issues. When did people realize that this wasn't an isolated case, but widespread physical brain trauma?

Dave Phillips: That is the most incredible part of this story. The person who really blew the lid off this and showed how systemic it was wasn't a Pentagon doctor or a senior military researcher—it was a 16-year-old high school student named Ella Worthington.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: A 16-year-old? How did she get involved?

Dave Phillips: Ella's father was also a veteran Coast Guard surfman. Ella grew up on Coast Guard stations on the West Coast, surrounded by this community.

As she grew older, she noticed that her dad and almost all of his fellow boat drivers were developing the exact same set of problems: chronic headaches, memory lapses, balance issues, mood swings, and insomnia.

When she was a sophomore in high school, she had to do a project for the science fair. She decided to investigate the neurological symptoms experienced by these rescue boat operators.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: A high school science fair project? How did she actually conduct this study?

Dave Phillips: Using her father's connections in the tight-knit surfman community, she designed a detailed epidemiological survey. She surveyed active-duty and retired surfmen, and set up a control group of Coast Guard members who worked desk jobs or on larger cutters.

The results were staggering. Ella gathered data from dozens of boat operators. The data showed that over 70% to 80% of these surfmen suffered from classic post-concussion syndrome symptoms: chronic migraines, vertigo, cognitive fog, vision problems, and depression. In contrast, the control group showed negligible rates of these issues.

Crucially, Ella showed a direct correlation between the number of hours spent driving small rescue boats in rough seas and the severity of neurological symptoms.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: A high school student produced clear epidemiological evidence of occupational brain injury. How did the Coast Guard leadership react?

Dave Phillips: Ella won top honors at the science fair, but she and her father didn't stop there. They sent the study directly to the leadership of the Coast Guard.

Initially, leadership was slow to respond and tried to downplay it. But the study began circulating virally among boat crews. More and more veterans stepped forward saying, "This is exactly what happened to me." Independent biomechanical studies using sensors on boats and helmets confirmed the massive repetitive G-forces slammed into these operators' heads.

The evidence was undeniable. Coast Guard leadership could no longer ignore the reality.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: What changes has the Coast Guard implemented now, and what does this mean for the future of military health?

Dave Phillips: Facing scrutiny from Congress and public reporting, the Coast Guard has begun instituting sweeping reforms:

1. Operating Limits: Strictly capping the hours boat drivers can spend in heavy surf and limiting cumulative lifetime exposure.
2. Shock-Mitigation Technology: Retrofitting boats with state-of-the-art shock-absorbing suspension seats and developing specialized impact-dampening helmets.
3. Cognitive Baseline Monitoring: Mandating regular neurological baseline testing to catch early signs of cognitive decline before permanent damage occurs.
4. VA Benefits and Recognition: The Department of Veterans Affairs is beginning to recognize chronic wave-impact brain trauma as a service-connected disability.

This marks a profound shift in military medicine. For decades, brain injuries were only recognized from direct blunt trauma or massive bomb explosions. Today, from artillery blast overpressure to the repetitive pounding of ocean waves, the military is finally recognizing the danger of cumulative subconcussive head trauma.

As Jenna Bonner told me, while these changes come too late to save Brett, they may protect the minds and lives of hundreds of future surfmen.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: Dave, thank you so much for this crucial reporting.

Dave Phillips: Thank you, Zolan.