What I've heard is they do/did a lot of explosive breaching. Then things like recoilless rifles, heavy machine guns or if you use a .50 caliber sniper rifle might further contribute to the situation.

I'm not sure if these types of units usually dive that deep that you would be worried about brain damage, but I'm less familiar with that side of things. Diving probably hasn't been that much of a focus during the recent years in the middle east either.

yeah, those do sound like more likely causes

as for diving, it's more about holding your breath for long periods of time repeatedly; look up national apnea teams

Rifles would never do this. They probably usually/always wore ear protection during training. Even if not it wouldn't do it. Many civilians fire guns throughout their lives, often without ear protection.

This would take a much bigger explosion.

If you have been firing a whole day, you definitely fell funny in the head.

Ear protecting does not protect brain much. It protects hearing. Brain heals from very mild damage when there is time to rest, but when you shoot all day, day after day, the damage can accumulate. One already recognized problem area is the show wave getting between helmet and skull. It can amplify the impact.

Nobody knows what the impact from very frequent rifle training is. Very people few do that. Once a month in the range is probably not enough.

sure, nobody knows, but physically it just seems implausible

People that hunt and shoot guns their whole lives do not commit suicide at high levels. This is what I am basing my statements on. Basically half the people I know in the US fall in to this category.

Men in the special forces shoot firearms much, much more than even enthusiastic hunters. Thousands of rifle rounds in a day. All day long.

A hunter (I am one) might shoot a dozen rounds to zero in a rifle, or a hundred shells at a clay range. Actually hunting is never more than a handful of rifle rounds or a few dozen shells.

Shooting suppressed carbines and SMGs generates a completely different level of air pressure than Grandpa's 30-06 or Dad's .308.

Have you shot anything you mentioned? .30-06 and .308 are both quite powerful, and you can feel them in your chest when fired.

An M4 (the only carbine I can think of in use by the military) is already a step down in boom as a 5.56mm; adding a suppressor makes that even less so. It’s like shooting a .22 at that point. As to SMGs, they’re all small caliber – 9mm, .45, 5.7mm…

All of the above, yes.

I'm saying that a SEAL shooting a suppressed SMG feels nothing after dumping magazine after magazine downrange. There's no way this is causing concussions.

Grandpa's 30-06 will rattle your fillings a little bit after one round - still probably doesn't result in TBI.

That's not all SOF shoot, of course.

SCAR-H, M14 EBR, M249 SAWs and M240 all shoot 7.52mm x 51mm NATO (compatible with .308 but slightly different chamber pressures)

Sure, but we should be able to see if 0331 guys and the like have a higher incidence rate of suicide overall. Presumably they are spending far more time on these platforms than SOF.

The amount of shooting 0311 Rifleman does is fraction of what SOF does. The problem is accumulation of damage and no healing periods.

As I said, we don't if calibers below .50 cause significant damage when shooting in excessive amounts. Trying to figure it as a layman is useless. It's better to show epistemic humility than try to assert one way or another.

The FN Minimi (M249) fires 5.56. The others fire 7.62, not 7.52.

I shot a .50 a couple times and didn't feel much of anything tbh. Less of a shockwave than fireworks on July 4th.

I know the US can be gun obsessed at times but I struggle to believe that even a professional hunter who frequents the range in his spare time fires as many rounds in a given day as a Navy SEAL who's entire job description revolves around being trained to deliver rapid and precise attacks under extreme pressure, which is only possible with incessant drills and practice.

People that hunt and shoot guns their whole lives don't shoot guns their whole lives. They shoot guns a few times when hunting and then a lot of times at the range but at a leisurely pace. This is like comparing a package delivery guy who likes jogging to an Olympic athlete.

> Navy SEAL who's entire job description revolves around being trained to deliver rapid and precise attacks under extreme pressure

You'd be surprised how much time SOFs im general spend lying in a bush, peeing on bottles and radioing in updates. Although US SOFs may have been doing it less than others during GWOT. Not everything is DA.

(That doesn't change your general point though, and SOF training is extremely rigorous and demanding and does include a lot of shooting. But not all day every day.)

I mean, yeah, still, they're probably spending more time near explosions and gun shots in aggregate even if most of the missions are spent idling.

How often do you shoot your guns when you hunt?

Modern combat helmets don’t leave a “gap” between head and helmet, the “gap” is filled with padding to absorb impact/shock and improve comfort.

the kind of shock that padding absorbs is not the kind of shock we're talking about here; we're talking about supersonically propagating pressure waves which create discontinuities in the pressure field, as well as the temperature field and the velocity field. to my surprise modern combat helmets are designed to protect against those to some extent, but padding is irrelevant to that; to shock waves, it's effectively a gap. the padding protects you from things that could displace the helmet until it hits your head, such as bullet impacts

If I understood it right, its firing artillery, not rifles. Even then I doubt cavitation, but not shock echos at density borders tearing he tissues at the border.

I wonder if the Havanna syndrome is somehow correlated with this as well

Pressure buildup in the cranium due to microwave heating? Victims have reported a feeling as if their heads are about to explode.

Huh. I feel like that almost daily nowadays. Maybe I should grab some tinfoil. Unless it's coming from inside the head...

Go see a doctor. Run. Don't walk.

If you believe someone may be pointing a microwave weapon at you, please do not wrap your head in foil like a baked potato.

There was a rather scathing study on it here. [1] In short the government's own internal investigations realized the obvious answer, a mass hysteria event, was the most likely culprit. But politics got involved and so then they classified reports mentioning this, and released reports suggestive of foreign adversaries attacking people with some mystery weapon, even though their own internal reports put the chances of that at basically zero. So they then set out so study and solve the issue, unsurprisingly finding nothing. The paper's concluding paraph is brutal:

---

Over the course of their 6-year investigation into “Havana Syndrome” U.S. officials expended considerable human capital and financial resources going down a rabbit hole searching for exotic explanations. Instead of finding secret weapons and foreign conspiracies—they found only rabbits. For in the end, prosaic explanations were determined to be the cause of the events in Cuba and its subsequent global spread. That is the lesson of “Havana Syndrome”—follow the science.

---

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10913303/

Then there was this: "Unraveling Havana Syndrome: New evidence links the GRU's assassination Unit 29155 to mysterious attacks on U.S. officials and their families"

https://theins.ru/en/politics/270425

Do you not realize when you're reading literal propaganda? This quote is but one section from there, which I clicked to because it had a silly heading - and it delivered.

---

A consensus has formed among the growing community of AHI sufferers that the U.S. government — and the CIA in particular — is hiding the full extent of what it knows about the source of Havana Syndrome. The victims offer two general hypotheses as to why. The first is that releasing the full intelligence around Russian involvement might be so shocking as to convince the American people and their representatives that Moscow has committed an act of war against the United States, thereby raising thorny questions as to how a nuclear power fond of showing off its hypersonic missiles ought to be made to pay.

---

Okay, so Russia is running around randomly attacking low level embassy workers, and the US knows this and is playing PR for Russia, because they're worried about US citizens viewing Russia negatively. I'm sure there's far more absurd mental gymnastics in there as well, as that was literally from the first section I clicked to. When we get out of this clown world era and back to something vaguely resembling normalcy, there's about a 100% chance that these "citizen investigative journalists" are mostly all going to end up having been little more than Operation Mockingbird 2.0. [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

Russia isn't "running around randomly". Their (alleged) actions are very targeted and deliberate.

"attacking low level embassy workers"

Do you think really they'd pick the US president as their first target on an experimental (or even proven) weapon? And I wouldn't call embassy employees "random" in any context.

>US knows this and is playing PR for Russia, because they're worried about US citizens viewing Russia negatively

As a student of history, there are hundreds of reasons and prior examples of governments hiding the true capabilities of nations they consider enemies or adversaries. This allows them time to investigate and create a defense, it also appease the public becuase telling everyone "hey everyone watch out our advisory has this super top secret weapon to which we have no defense!" is not a great idea.

The idea that the US would "play PR for Russia" is absurd.

I'd recommend reading the study. You're making some false claims. In particular quoting the study:

---

While the U.S. Government allowed the release of the [politicized findings which suggested weapons as a possible cause], they withheld the results of other investigations that were skeptical of the condition. In 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that mass psychogenic illness was most likely responsible for the outbreak. While the report remains classified, its conclusions were leaked to the media. The contents of a second classified report were only released in September 2021 after a Freedom of Information Act filing. It found the role of microwave radiation “highly unlikely,” and that psychogenic illness appeared to play a role

---

The political establishment was actively trying to suggest it was caused by secret weapons from "foreign adversaries", and classifying the opinions which contradicted that. They were undermined by a mixture of leaks and Freedom of Information Act requests. People claiming to suffer from the syndrome numbered in the hundreds in 70 countries around the world [1], including many Western nations where "foreign adversaries" would stand minimal chance of deploying any sort of a weapon, even more so after the initial incidents. Notably, from the same article, workers who reported suffering from 'Havana Syndrome' were able to receive compensation of up to $200,000.

[1] - https://apnews.com/article/health-cuba-havana-congress-e0186...

> Notably, from the same article, workers who reported suffering from 'Havana Syndrome' were able to receive compensation of up to $200,000.

Are you suggesting these people reported symptoms in order to be eligible for potential future government compensation? Compensation I remind you, that didn't even exist until very recently.

Oh and I couldn't resist:

"Specific amounts will be determined to by the extent and severity of the victims’ injuries, which have included brain damage not limited to vertigo, cognitive damage, eyesight and hearing problems, according to the officials and aides."

That's some "psychogenic illness"! And why would they compensate at all if this is just made up?

The study got into the "injuries" in detail. Quoting it, once again:

---

One found that patients “appeared to have sustained injury to widespread brain networks without an associated history of head trauma” (Swanson et al., 2018, p. 1125). But standard MRI scans of the brain were normal and based on the criteria for abnormal neuropsychological tests, just about anybody would be diagnosed with brain injury as the threshold for impairment was excessively high (Della Sala & Cubelli, 2018). Another study using functional MRI found “brain anomalies” in a small cohort of patients (Ragini et al., 2019). But such anomalies are common with this imagining technique, often representing normal individual variation.

--

And I'm stopping the quote there for brevity. It goes on with further elaboration.

Well... I would agree with your final sentence were it not for the fact that we strongly adhered to Russia's numerous red lines as far as weapon systems delivery to Ukraine.

I get you, but I wouldn't classify that as "running PR for Russia" more like "there are multiple factors involved". Was/is it to keep oil prices down? Was/is it to slow escalation? Or was/is it practical reasons related to strategy? I )(personally) don't think any of one of those is the sole reason, but I'm certain it wasn't because the current US administration wants to appease Russia. Now the potential next administration? That's a different story.

I'll grant that my example is a slight stretch, but only because I don't know definitively for what reasons all the delays took place. Somewhere in the calculus UA lives and hundreds of billions in infrastructure were deemed expendable in order to do what exactly? Sure, the U.S. has publically been frosty with Russia, but what dirt is there on certain U.S. politicians that was leveraged?

That doesn't read like science, it reads like an ideological statement. The current punishment for scientific fraud is non-existent and academia is full of it and ideologically driven pseudoscientific research.

Subsequent evidence debunked that "post-mortem", as another user posted.

We've seen, with evidence, China pressure research groups and Nature into calling the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory. Like "fake news", "conspiracy theory" is now actively used by China as a way to shut down evidence.

From subpoenaed communications we even know that certain figures who publicly denounced the lab-leak theory as a conspiracy, privately believed the theory was likely.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-lab-leak-deception-an...

Government covert operations are not the kind of phenomenon science can properly study because it's not reproducible and data is not open. It's the realm of investigative journalism and intelligence.

I would quite strongly disagree with you here. When researchers engage in academic dishonesty, it not only tends to have extremely negative consequences for themselves in terms of ability to publish, acquire grants, etc but it also directly and significantly affects the journals they published in. And in the case of the COVID stuff, public health officials who officially mislead people may also face criminal consequences, with ongoing investigations pursuing that exact outcome this very moment. [1]

But when journalists or intelligence agencies lie, exactly nothing happens. Intelligence agencies clearly see lying as just part of their retinue of weapons. And the media in general has mostly become a mixture of entertainment and bias confirmation. The internet seems to have largely killed the traditional role of the media as the bearer of information and knowledge on the happenings of the day.

[1] - https://nypost.com/2024/06/02/us-news/house-covid-panel-chai...

While public health officials may face criminal charges, Nature magazine editors and the team of researchers that were contacted by the Chinese government and lied walked away with nothing close to extremely negative consequences. I didn't claim public health officials can fraud without consequence, I said researchers can. I can't find one instance of misleading science for political purposes lead to academic consequences for fraudulent researchers. There were researchers arrested for connections with Chinese Military by the US government but if it were up to Harvard I speculate nothing would be done, because it never has been done, as far as I know and looked at. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/harvard-university-professor-...

I also didn't claim Journalists and Intelligence Agencies are bearers of truth but it stands that to study something like Lab Leak or Havana Syndrome is a question in the realm of investigation, not science. No?

Peter is risking criminal consequences based on evidence gathered by investigation, not the scientific process. Also not because of purposefully misleading research but dangerous research and lies while testifying, which isn't fraudulent science.

I feel like you're getting close to pulling a no true Scotsman here with claiming that Peter Daszak isn't being "really" punished (even though he's now lost all funding, will likely be debarred preventing him from securing future Federal funding, and his career is basically dead) because of the "medium" through which he was/is being punished.

But if you want a more general case, just check out Retraction Watch. You'll find that consequences are very real, they're just not the sort that typically make the news. For instance looking up cases at Harvard, I randomly picked Sam W Lee. [1] The final charge against him was in 2019. Since then he has not only been terminated at Harvard, but has not had a single publication - meaning he likely has been unable to find a position at another university, nor has he been able to independently publish. [2]

[1] - https://retractionwatch.com/2019/04/19/harvard-cancer-lab-su...

[2] - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sam-Lee-30

The pentagon is funding $750k in testing to re-create the effects of Havana Syndrome on ferrets and more studies without the details.

“It is necessary to use an animal like a ferret that has brain structures resembling the “gyrencephalic nature” of the human brain; mice and rats do not fulfill this criteria, according to the summary. The brain tissue of gyrencephalic animals, like humans, ferrets, pigs and primates, resembles ridges and valleys, compared to smooth surfaces of the brains of lissencephalic animals, such as mice and rats.”

“You don’t get approval for animal testing unless the science is there. … You’ve already proven out that the science is correct and exists, and now you are looking at the biological impacts that can’t be modeled and you need a specimen to determine what it does biologically,” the former official said.

0. https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/09/pentagon-funding-ex...

Past tense - that study was supposed to run from September 30 2022 to September 29 2023. [1] It ended up being cancelled with most of the DoD's money being returned by March 20th. [2]

[1] - https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_W81XWH2211105_210...

[2] - https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_W81XWH2211105_97D...

Any thoughts on this 60 minutes piece with circumstantial evidence that this is a GRU driven program using an ultrasonic system of some kind: https://youtu.be/JdPSD1SUYCY?si=DQNJ6EwFbwbPiDS1

Usually when I read or watch something news related, I try to revert it back into the author's outline. What I mean is that when somebody's writes an article, they start with a few facts, and then add a bunch of words and, in modern times, spin on top. But I'm mostly only interested in those few facts. They can be compared against other sources, challenged (or verified), and so on. So for instance in the article for this topic it'd look something like:

- a very small minority of navy seals have committed suicide after exhibiting signs of psychological disorders

- post-mortem analysis showed damage that could be related to exposure to blasts

- blasts causing brain damage? perhaps in training?

Everything else that's written is (to me) pretty much irrelevant. Because in science, a good scientist engaging in good science would now setout to reject their own hypothesis. And only after trying to refute it in every way imaginable might they begin to accept it as even possible, and then set out to test it, again with the goal of rejecting it, so much as possible. But media goes the other way and now runs around collecting statements, data, and evidence in favor of their hypothesis, but you can collect practically endless evidence in support of ideas that are false (which is why science focuses on rejecting your own ideas instead), so it's quite a pointless endeavor.

I tried to do the same with the 60 minutes article (going by the transcript), but failed. The reason is that what they presented sounds pretty silly if you remove it from the "flow." A Russian working in America as a chef, who previously worked as a military comms guy, is arrested for speeding/evading arrest and has a device to allegedly wipe his car's comp? That doesn't even really qualify as circumstantial evidence, because it's just not at all logically connected unless you're playing a game of "connect the dots." And one can do that, but in the end you mostly just end up drawing a Jackson Pollock.

.50 cal sniper rifles and shoulder launched weapons like Carl Gustaf, the M72 LAW or the AT4 can.

Firing a rifle may or may not cause shock waves that are strong enough. If you have been firing a whole day you definitely feel funny in the head.

> If you have been firing a whole day you definitely fell funny in the head.

This should really be a big, fat, red flag that something is not quite right..

that feeling might be partly due to the large amounts of lead compounds in primers being inhaled by the shooter

Lead poisoning symptoms take weeks to months to emerge. It would show in a blood sample.

Not really a concern outdoors. Ben Stoeger, world shooting champion and firearms trainer who shoots a lot, said his blood lead levels are normal and attributes it to shooting outdoors.

n=1

One counterexample may be sufficient to disprove a hypothesis. If you claim a certain quadratic equation has no roots and I give you one root, you can’t say “n=1”.

It is a strong datapoint, but he may be using meaningfully different weapons / ammo compared to seals.

Math avoids this kind of uncertainty.

The guns are different, but primers are mostly the same.

Claims about populations in medicine are not very much like math theorems. There are too many exceptions for a single case study to settle the question.

i don't think that is true of lead poisoning

plenty of troops shooting a lot outdoors. enlisted grunts shooting a machine guns, etc. lots of civilian shooters as well.

lead is also easy to detect in blood, or via things like hair samples. no doubt SF types are getting more residue than most, but again fairly easy to notice

Having fired a .50 cal sniper rifle just a couple of times, I was all set. The shock wave from each trigger pull made my nasopharynx hurt. That couldn't have been good.

> Carl Gustaf

The CG is LOUD. Wicked backblast on that, too.

Generally, you're limited to firing 6 rounds or less per day during training due to blast & shockwave effects. The guys we trained with didn't have that much ammo on hand, anyway, but interesting to know.

It's loud when you are the loader/spotter or are standing close by. It's not loud at all if you are the one firing it (with your head practically on the tube). That is my experience anyway.

I believe you but I wonder how that works

The explosive power is divided between forwards and backwards, there are no other holes in the tube and the weapon is basically recoilless.

https://www.forsvarsmakten.se/ImageVault/publishedmedia/fumm...

Not loud at all but it gives you a distinctive feeling like you've been slapped in the base of the skull by God. The Carl G was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the article.

How much do special forces use weapons significantly more specialized than the standard issue M4? CoD suggests that every operator is slinging a sniper rifle and some highly customized exotic small batch assault rifle; however, I'm guessing that's likely just to make the games more exciting.

HS friend of mine was SF so this info is OEF/OIF-era information and could very likely be different today. You are not going to be able to just pick whatever weapon you want, but you are going to have a wide array of training and be able to pick something more specialized to the mission, whereas for the most part if you're some random infantry grunt you just use your rifle for everything. But if you're a random infantry grunt your M4 is going to be a good rifle for all your missions - you're not going to need a silenced SMG/PCC or something that can reach out 800 yards. Sidearms are similar, it's not carte blanche but among what is available you can carry whatever you are comfortable with within the scope of the mission.

You're much more likely to see SF guys with short-barreled rifles, pistol-caliber carbines, suppressors on everything, etc. For all the (justified) complaints about military overspending, there just aren't the resources or training available to give every rifleman a suppressor.

My guess for most likely vector is breach charges.

> .50 cal sniper rifles and shoulder launched weapons like Carl Gustaf, the M72 LAW or the AT4 can [produce shock waves that induce cavitation in brain tissue]

The US military, and militaries in general, do not use weapons like the M82/M107 as sniper rifles very often. The M82/M107 in particular has a recoiling barrel (the entire 2.5' barrel slides back when shooting) and isn't a very precise weapon.

They're used for blowing up ordinance or disabling light vehicles. They are sometimes used for hostage situations because they're more likely to immediately disable someone.

The US military has pretty rarely used shoulder fired weapons, since they very rarely have to worry about tanks or aircraft. SEALs in particular wouldn't be doing that.

> The US military has pretty rarely used shoulder fired weapons, since they very rarely have to worry about tanks or aircraft. SEALs in particular wouldn't be doing that.

Do you know that, or are you thinking "these are AT weapons so they wouldn't be used"?

I haven't worked with US forces on a tactical level, but I have served in Afghanistan with my own country's SOFs. We used M72s extensively, even though we never engaged any armor.

I wasn't around for this picture, but it illustrates the point:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BwDn4ryCEAApiYS.jpg:large

You state a lot of random things as a fact, while none of them are, not sure why the upvotes.

Other react mostly to guns, but as a diver I can assure you that there is no automatic brain damage from 'diving deep underwater', whatever that layman term means. There are many folks in diving community with 10s of thousand of dives working cognitively as well as their peers. If you mean Nitrox for bigger depths, again that ain't true, Nitrox is actually better than regular compressed air re effects like nitrogen bubbles in your bloodstream.

If you screw up or your equipment fails and end up with decompression sickness thats another story, but its like saying paragliding breaks your legs.

i don't mean nitrox, and i agree that scuba diving doesn't cause brain damage at all (except, as you point out, in accidents)

possibly people are upvoting because they know some facts you don't

But what diving except scuba is relevant when talking about seals? Are they doing apnea diving?

that was my inference, but i don't have much information about seal training, so i could be wrong. it's a little irrelevant though because, as i said originally, the description of the type of brain damage should rule out diving as a cause

> diving deep underwater, which is also known to cause brain damage

never heard about that. can you back this up with a source or explanation?

10.1096/fj.201701031R

That’s about apnea though. Don’t seals mostly do scuba diving? Or are they really holding their breath?

Some have died from doing underwater breath holding training [1] but I don't know how many minutes they aim for or how regular that is.

[1] https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/1...

technically they didn't die _from_ doing underwater breath holding training _directly_. they fainted (the question at hand is - does the training up to this point cause brain damage) and then drowned.

Im assuming you are referencing this paper [1], which is about competetive breath hold diving - diving to hundreds of feet on a single breath.

I've never heard of seals doing that kind of training.

[1] https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1096/fj.201...

"Collectively, these observations suggest that increased cerebral oxidative stress following prolonged apnea in trained divers may reflect a functional physiologic response, rather than a purely maladaptive phenomenon."

so, this paper neither is relevant for seal training nor does it claim any harm caused by breath holding, based on the Abstract section.

yeah, maybe this paper isn't the most relevant source. hopefully you can find a better one if learning about this is important to you, i suggest reading the papers it references, or related papers in google scholar. i'm super not motivated to help you right now because you're acting like if you're wrong about something it's my responsibility to convince you

this kind of bullshit is really frustrating. my comment already explained that the kind of brain damage caused by apnea isn't the kind the pathology reports found, so it absolutely doesn't matter whether seal training involves apnea or not, or exactly what conditions are needed for apnea-induced brain damage, unless you have some strong reason for believing that the news article's reporting of the pathology is wrong

so actually it's fine with me for you to continue being wrong if you want. i don't have anything to sell you

well, i read plenty about breathing techniques and training from various angles and also practice breath exercises where hyperventilation and breath holding play key roles. i never came across anybody claiming that holding your breath especially pre-fainting (which is essential when practicing apnoe diving - and btw you seem to confuse apnoe with sleep apnea?).

to add something of substance - here is a study that does not even find any "Link between Repeated Transient Chokes and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Related Effects" and that kind of asphyxiation is obviously much more extreme than holding your breath.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466005/

i am specifically not talking about sleep apnea, which everyone already knows causes brain damage

Famously the Navy SEALs' entry exam-slash-basic training is named "Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL" as a carry-over from its WWII Underwater Demolition Team legacy, maybe GP is referring to that?

I don't really have a source, but anecdotal evidence... Some of my commercial diver friends got really fucked up after a while of doing it.

One of my friends in particular had a saturation dive go really bad and he came back a completely different person. Like going from someone living the life to a complete wreck in one month.

> got really fucked

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/App-Central/How-to-create...

FWIW The standard rifles used by the US Military (M16 and it's variants/decedents) are fairly low power, low recoil, and quiet as rifles go. Of course I'm not doctor so maybe they are still enough to cause damage and like another poster pointed out, there are other weapons that soldiers use which are much more powerful.

Mostly agree - I'd like to add that 5.56 seems like a toy until you bring it inside to play, where it's an entirely different story... The first shot feels like someone slamming the switch off on your ears. I wouldn't think this is the cause of brain damage though. IMO the overexposure SEALs have to the modern warfare breach charge is a huge red flag.

The M16 platform has small projectiles, but there’s a lot of powder behind them.

They are pretty loud, more so if you’re to the left or, especially, right where the ejection port sits.

My guess for SEALs is the breaching charges play a big role. Carl Gustafs are notorious as well, but I don't know whether SEALs use them. US Army Special Forces do.

Edit: Yeah, I should clarify to say the M16 is more likely to cause hearing damage, but not brain damage. The concussive force isn't that bad.

As far as rifles go 5.56 is about as anemic of a round as you can get and have it still be fit for purpose in a military or defense context. You can't even hunt most things with it because it's not powerful enough. They only way these rifles are causing brain damage is if you're on the wrong end of one.

They are however incredibly loud. Being close to someone shooting 556 with a brake is a really annoying experience and I would not be shocked if there were follow on effects.

I mean you'll get hearing damage for sure but I'm just saying that's a far cry from cavitating your brain tissue.

Yep. Clarified my original comment a bit.