Kimberly and her husband Dan*, 30, were sitting in their kitchen on a cold Melbourne morning when it first happened.
Mid-conversation, Dan, a former Australian Army sniper, looked over at the mother of his three children and asked her who she was.
“I could see the fear in his eyes,” says Kimberley, a registered nurse.
She started to panic.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God. Is he having a stroke?'”
Dan says he remembers feeling “all the emotion of being lost and not knowing who I was, where I was or who Kimberley was”.
About a minute later, “it was like a light switch flicked back on behind his eyes” and it was over, Kimberley says.
Hundreds of kilometres away, in Adelaide, another former sniper, Max*, was confused when his wife came home and didn’t greet him.
Except she had, minutes earlier.
He just had no memory of it.
“She’s like, ‘I literally came and gave you a kiss and we spoke? Don’t you remember?'” he says.
Max says he struggles to remember words and often uses the wrong one.
“I noticed that I was getting really angry. My brain just doesn’t work anymore. My vocabulary just disappeared,” he says.
Both Dan and Max have been diagnosed with brain injuries.
The only apparent cause: their exposure to shock waves caused by the high-powered rifles they fired during their years of sniper training.
The fallout from invisible shock waves
In 2016, Dan and Max were among hundreds of soldiers deployed to Iraq to train the local Iraqi army in the fight against Islamic State.
In the rush to push Iraqi soldiers through their training, some current and former Australian Army snipers were exposed to extremely high levels of damaging blast overpressure that have caused long-term damage.
An Iraqi soldier fires a .50-calibre sniper rifle as an Australian soldier spots a target for him during a zeroing class in 2016. (Supplied: US Army. Photo by Sgt. Joshua Powell)
Blast overpressure occurs when a weapon is fired and the explosion creates an invisible high-pressure shock wave that travels through the body — including the brain.
Scientists have now found this kind of pressure can cause microscopic damage and scarring within the delicate brain tissue. The symptoms, such as memory loss, personality changes and headaches, can take years to surface.
Those within the ADF who train others are most at risk of brain injury due to their repeated exposure, including Special Forces method-of-entry experts, navy clearance divers and others who work with explosives or heavy weapons.
“There’s probably more than a dozen different specialties within the military which render them vulnerable in training to chronic brain injury,” says Dr David Rosen, a neurologist who specialises in veterans with blast-related traumatic brain injury.
He says he’s now seeing more patients exposed to repeated blast overpressure from training with high-calibre rifles like those used by snipers.
Australian soldiers worked with Iraqi soldiers during advanced marksmanship training. (Supplied: Contact Publishing/Corporal Jake Badior)
“What becomes really salient is how sometimes dramatically the change in the patient occurs, and it’s usually the family who are the first to notice.”
Dr Rosen assessed Dan and concluded the veteran had “symptoms suggestive of permanent neurological injury” likely caused by “a history of recurrent low-level blast exposure”.
Dan’s wife, Kimberley, is afraid of what her husband’s injury could mean for him and their three young children.
“[Dan’s] now only 33 years old,” she says.
“What does this mean for him at 40 or 50, or him at 60? Can he still work? Is he going to be able to function? Where do I even go for help?“
Exposed to hundreds of rounds per day
Simon Lancaster says shock waves from a .50-calibre sniper rifle were like being “punched in the face”. (ABC News: Patrick Rocca)
Former sniper Simon Lancaster was in his late 20s when he was deployed to Iraq with Dan and Max.
When they arrived at Camp Taji in the summer of 2016, the men were given a cheap Iranian-made replica of a .50-calibre sniper rifle to train the Iraqis on.
The rifle had a modified box-shaped muzzle, which meant instead of directing the blast overpressure forward and away from the shooter, it was reflected backwards at a 45-degree angle.
Exactly where sniper trainers like Dan and Simon were often positioned.
“It put us also in a pretty direct line for that overpressure and blast,” Simon says.
An Iraqi soldier fires an HS Steyr 50 Cal sniper rifle during marksmanship training at Camp Taji, Iraq in 2016. (Supplied: US Army Spc. Craig Jensen)
The former soldiers said the feeling of the pressure generated when firing a single shot was like being “punched in the face”.
The invisible shock waves were strong enough to kick up dust a metre away.
In the rush to equip the Iraqis to go to battle, their Aussie trainers were either firing or directly exposed to hundreds of rounds per day.
“There was a restriction on the number of rounds that you’re actually meant to fire or be exposed to for those types of weapon systems. And that’s for the weapon systems that we use that are designed and built a bit better,” Simon says.
“I believe we were well and truly in excess of those limitations, probably five times, or six times those limitations each day.“
‘There was blood everywhere’
The Defence Department did not respond to questions from the ABC about what the safety limits were for .50-calibre rifles at the time and whether enough was done to protect the snipers during training.
“The exposure levels these men experienced during their deployment in Iraq are among the most extreme I’ve encountered,” former Special Forces Officer Paul Scanlan says.
“These guys were eating the blast waves.”
Mr Scanlan runs Vigil Australia, a social enterprise dedicated to raising awareness of blast exposure and its links to mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). The group also supports veterans and their families.
“What happened at Camp Taji wasn’t just a failure of individual safety measures — it was a systemic breakdown,” he says.
“We’ve got soldiers that are being discharged with no diagnosis, left to fight a system that won’t recognise their injuries.”
After several weeks of daily exposure to hundreds of rounds, both Simon and Dan became disoriented, dizzy and had constant headaches.
“There was one day in the afternoon where I’d gotten up to go to the toilet and I couldn’t really walk,” Simon recalls.
“It felt very similar to being very, very drunk. As in, I barely could stand up, it was only maybe a 25-metre walk to the rest room areas and that was a battle.“
The final straw came when Simon witnessed one of Dan’s nosebleeds.
“He fired his first round and his nose just erupted all over the weapon. There was blood everywhere,” Simon says.
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“It wasn’t just a normal, regular dripping blood … it was similar to what you’d see in maybe a UFC fight where someone’s taken a direct hit to the nose and it’s sort of done a fair bit of damage.
“For there to be enough of an impact from the pressure of shooting a weapon for this amount of blood to sort of come out … It was concerning.”
After weeks of escalating symptoms, the snipers went to medics for help.
“They were of the impression that both my colleague and I were essentially punch-drunk at this point from firing those weapons and being around them on a repeated basis, day after day,” Simon explains.
“Each of those times, they’re delivering sort of mini concussions to you over and over and over again.”
At the time, Dan’s wife, Kimberley, a health worker, urged him to ensure everything was documented.
“I know what that can do to the brain and I actually said to him, ‘you need to go back to like the medics and tell them to make sure it’s on your medical record because that can cause long-term damage,'” she says.
The pair were told to rest for a few days.
Their colleague, Max, recalls that after this, the snipers had blast gauges fitted to their helmets to measure the blast overpressure.
“They said when it’s green, you’re good to go. When it’s yellow you need to have a break and when it turns red, stop shooting.”
Within the first 10 rounds, he says the gauges went red.
“Essentially, we were told to keep going,” Max says
“We weren’t allowed to stop because if we stopped, then no one was getting trained.“
Photographs from the end of that deployment show rudimentary wooden blast shields were constructed after the snipers complained. Defence did not answer questions about why they were installed, how long they remained or what else was done to protect the soldiers from injury.
The wooden barriers came too late for Dan, Simon and Max. The deployment to Iraq would be their last.
The elite snipers, who once performed at the highest levels and scored highly on cognitive tests, are now struggling to complete basic tasks.
Call for better safety guidelines
The Australian Army has been grappling with how to manage traumatic brain injuries in soldiers caused by their own weapons and conducting studies on blast overpressure for more than a decade.
Head of the Army Snipers Association Greg Robertson, a highly experienced former special forces sniper, said he and a colleague had repeatedly woken with blood on their pillows after shooting hundreds of rounds of a .50-calibre sniper rifle while training locals in Afghanistan in 2012.
At the time, Greg thought the cumulative exposure to the overpressure from the heavy weapons had made their ears and nose bleed.
They also had headaches, nausea, dizziness and felt concussed.
“I don’t blame Defence completely,” he says.
“I pushed myself to be the best, we fired all the rounds we could.”
An Iraqi soldier fires a .50-caliber sniper rifle during a zeroing class at Camp Taji, Iraq in 2016. (Supplied: US Army. Photo by Sgt. Joshua Powell)
When Greg became a sergeant supervisor years later, he says he reduced the number of rounds he would let trainees fire down to 10 at a time with a maximum of 60 a day, because he was worried about the health impacts he had started to experience.
“I get migraines and stuff all the time, my wife and I have noticed my cognitive ability isn’t as good as it used to be. I find it really difficult to focus and concentrate.”
He says it’s a common problem for other snipers he knows.
Defence did not respond to questions about what current safety limits were in place to protect soldiers from exposure to the overpressure from high-calibre sniper rifles.
Last year, the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide recommended a brain injury program be established to mitigate the impact of repetitive low-level blast exposure.
While the federal government agreed in principle to the recommendations, it stopped short of committing to implement the program, disappointing veterans and advocates.
Australia is lagging behind other nations, such as the US, which has legislated to protect military personnel through the Blast Overpressure Safety Act, by setting safety limits, tracking exposure and ensuring weapons are modified to reduce the risks to soldiers.
Paul Scanlan says Australia needs to follow suit.
“The ADF must establish national safety limits for blast exposure and implement tracking systems to monitor exposure throughout a soldier’s career [which align with US and NATO guidelines],” he says.
“Not enough is being done, and the consequences of this inaction are falling squarely on veterans and their families.”
Despite the ADF beginning trials in 2012 to investigate blast overpressure on brain health, dozens of veterans told the ABC they struggled to get a diagnosis, find treatment or have their condition recognised or treated through the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA).
‘It’s not a mental health issue’
Simon Lancaster is yet to get a formal diagnosis but now has problems with his memory on a daily basis.
“I couldn’t even tell you what holidays we’ve gone on over the last year because I would have to probably go through my calendar to figure out where and when we went,” he says.
“It’s something that seems to be getting worse, not better.”
His colleague, Max, has been diagnosed with a brain injury and his neurologist has told him it’s hard to predict how quickly his memory will decline.
“Getting told that you might not remember your kids is horrible,” he says.
“I think it’s scarier than dying, essentially, because you’re alive but you don’t remember anything, that’s horrible.“
Late last year, Dan received cognitive test results showing his functioning was severely impaired.
Exactly what that means for Dan and his family going forward is frightening.
He works full-time in a high-stress job, and his wife is a full-time paediatric nurse shift worker juggling their three kids as well as fostering other children.
His workplace doesn’t know about his diagnosis or the struggles he’s having.
The young couple are now looking for treatment options and, armed with a diagnosis, are beginning the process of having his condition recognised through DVA.
They hope speaking out will help other veterans and their families.
“In hindsight … if I could rewind the time to 10 years ago, I would say [to myself], ‘get out,'” Dan says, looking into the distance.
“It’s not worth being like this at 33. It’s just not.”
*Names have been changed.
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