6 days ago
Australian army said to not be doing enough to protect troops from blast overpressure
Sergeant Andrew Jennings thinks the first warning sign that something was terribly wrong inside his brain was more than a decade ago.
But it was not until 2021 that he made a potentially lethal mistake that could have ended his career.
He was instructing young soldiers at a rifle range but forgot one of the most critical safety steps: to officially open the range before soldiers started firing.
"Anyone could have walked onto the range and been shot," Sergeant Jennings told 7.30.
He was disciplined at the time and put it down to a memory lapse.
Now, he thinks it was the beginning of severe cognitive decline caused by repeated exposure to blasts over 17 years of service.
He is speaking out now because he is worried that it is no longer safe for him to lead and mentor the soldiers below him.
"I am unable to function at the level that would be required for my rank," he said.
Plagued by crippling headaches, memory loss, and persistent suicidal ideation, he fears that he will place himself or his colleagues at risk while performing his duties.
"I am getting completely disorientated. I'm forgetting where I am … I can get lost driving to work," he told 7.30.
Lately, he said, there have been several occasions he has not recognised his own wife.
Sergeant Jennings is a man who likes order, policies and strictly sticking to the rules, but he is breaking ranks because he is so concerned that Australian soldiers are being put at risk every day from the blast overpressure coming from their own weapons during training.
"I'm expecting a lot of pushback on this," he said. "But it's an issue that is affecting huge numbers of defence members.
"It's affecting me. It's affecting my wife. It's affecting my peers. It's affecting those people that are coming through below me.
"We are placing our soldiers at risk."
The Australian Army has been grappling with how to manage blast exposure for well over a decade and has been criticised for failing to move swiftly enough to prevent ongoing injury to soldiers.
Every day at training ranges around the country, soldiers are being exposed to invisible blast waves which scientists have now discovered cause new kinds of visible physical brain injury, inflammation and scarring.
The debilitating symptoms of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) can look a lot like PTSD and other psychological conditions experienced by many veterans, making diagnosis and treatment challenging.
Soldiers like Sergeant Jennings never forget the feeling of firing weapons like the Carl Gustaf recoilless rifle, known as the 84.
"You can feel the pressure wave, going through all your sinus cavities."
The weapon is so infamous for making soldiers feel physically sick from the gut-punching blast wave it emits that its manufacturer, Saab, even notes it has been nicknamed the "Charlie guts ache" by Australian soldiers on its website.
The shoulder-fired heavy weapon is so powerful it can launch a rocket capable of destroying tanks, bunkers or buildings hundreds of metres away.
First introduced around the Vietnam War, it has been fired by generations of Australian soldiers.
During training, two soldiers and a safety supervisor must be in close proximity when it is fired, exposing all of them to high levels of blast overpressure.
For more than a decade, the Australian Army has placed limits on how many rounds can be fired in a 24-hour period because of concerns about the amount of blast overpressure it exposes soldiers to.
To demonstrate the safety protocols in place to protect soldiers, the Australian Army gave 7.30 vision of infantry soldiers training with the weapon behind three-walled concrete firing bays, designed to protect soldiers if a rocket detonates short of its target.
A 2021 US Marine Corps technical operator manual seen by 7.30 instructs marines firing the same weapon to do so from an open firing point to reduce the risk of the concrete barriers amplifying the blast overpressure back onto soldiers.
Uniformed Services University researcher Joshua Whitty from the US-based CONQUER blast monitoring project said the Australian Army had "inadvertently created a very real hazard that affects everyone in those firing points" by using the concrete barriers.
The vision provided by the Australian Army shows soldiers writing down their exposure to blast overpressure and calculating the overall exposure to ensure it is within a daily limit.
According to range documents seen by the ABC, depending on the kind of round fired, soldiers can only fire between four and seven rounds on a Carl Gustaf 84 in a 24-hour period. That includes the second operator and safety supervisor standing next to them.
Sgt Jennings was in the safety supervising role for years and says he ensured he stuck to the rules for his trainees.
But due to staff shortages and pressure to get soldiers trained, he says was regularly exposed above daily limits, including, on one occasion, to 46 rounds in 36 hours.
Firing well over the limits occurred when staffing was short, there was pressure to finish training, or when ammunition expired, according to more than half-a-dozen veterans the ABC spoke to.
Two former soldiers described how in the years before safety limits were introduced, there were occasions of soldiers firing more than 100 rounds in a day to get rid of excess or out-of-date ammunition.
Former Special Forces officer Paul Scanlan said that according to his own experience and surveys he has conducted, that is not uncommon.
"That's probably one of the high-risk groups that are often ignored in this, are those people supervising in training."
Mr Scanlan now runs Vigil Australia, a social enterprise dedicated to research and raising awareness of blast exposure and its links to mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI).
"That's the inconsistency … leadership is saying you can only fire seven. That's not what's happening on the ground," he said.
"100 per cent they're not doing enough. They're too slow. It's a leadership issue. You could do something tomorrow.
"I respect that they are trying to do something and I get that feedback from people inside the army, but it's way too slow.
"Cognitive baseline those in the high-risk groups … and put gauges on them. Capture the data now."
Last year, the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide noted that "traumatic brain injury from blast exposure is common in active-duty military personnel" and that brain injuries are associated with a heightened risk of death by suicide.
It recommended the establishment of a brain injury program to look at the impact of repetitive low-level blast exposure on the brain and to treat those affected.
The responsibility to make that happen sits with the Chief of Army Lieutenant General Simon Stuart, who told 7.30 he was pleased to have a "very clear direction to focus time, effort and resources on this matter".
General Stuart said he has no doubt that blast overpressure can cause damage to the brain.
"I've always accepted that, I think that's a fact … that we've learned more about over time. We've been following it and learning more about it since 2010," he said.
The Royal Commission directed that the ADF's Brain Injury program monitor and assess exposure to blast overpressure, record members' exposure to brain injury in medical records and establish a neurocognitive program suitable for serving and ex-serving members.
General Stuart says work is going on behind the scenes to ensure the research is done properly, adding that the first step is creating an effective cognitive baseline test to give soldiers on enlistment to track changes over time.
"I want it to happen as soon as possible," he said, before adding that he has enlisted an expert advisory panel including "16 of Australia's most prominent neurosurgeons, neuroscientists, traumatic brain injury specialists, rehabilitation specialists" to assist with better understanding and mitigating the risk.
"Then where we do know that people have been exposed to a level of risk, we can quickly divert them into the right medical care," he said.
General Stuart was part of some of the army's earliest research efforts, wearing a blast gauge while deployed to Afghanistan during a 2012 trial known as Project Cerebro.
It concluded personnel are exposed to potentially harmful blast effects in both combat and training and was followed by more blast gauge trials in 2016, 2019 and 2024.
"We're probably up to our fifth or sixth blast gauge trial in 13 years," said Mr Scanlan, who before leaving the ADF, became the acting Director of Diggerworks, an ADF department that looks at technological innovations in 2019.
By then, he had seen enough data to become seriously concerned that soldiers were being harmed by blast waves.
Six years later, he is regularly contacted by veterans with blast exposure who are suffering, suicidal and frustrated by a lack of action.
"I've had calls where people have essentially indicated they are committing suicide, and I've had to call the police to go and intervene," Mr Scanlan said.
"They don't feel heard. They don't feel looked after.
"For me, this is where it comes back to leadership and accountability.
"You've captured the data, we know the effects it's having and something needs to be done about it."
Finding the right medical care has been a years-long struggle for Sergeant Jennings.
He has had a battery of tests including multiple MRIs, CT scans, PET scans, lumbar puncture and everything has come back normal.
Neuropsychological testing found his memory recall and processing speed were unusually low.
Sergeant Jennings is in the process of medically separating from the defence force and last week was placed on a 28-day medical restriction as he is unfit for duty.
He said he feels let down by a system that has not been designed to protect soldiers.
"There's been a lot of talk about this for a long time. It's been a problem that defence has been aware of at least in my experience since 2013 and I don't think Defence is doing enough," he said.
He said many of his peers with repeated blast exposure had similar problems but were not seeking help.
"It becomes an issue for them to progress in their rank, but it also becomes an issue for them potentially to perform their roles and duties properly."
General Stuart said he has encouraged current and former soldiers to speak out about their experiences with brain injury.
"I think the issue that they've felt let down about is probably two-fold," he told 7.30.
"One, we haven't moved fast enough. I'm doing everything I can to shift that along, but I want to make sure we're doing the right things.
"Secondly, it's been very difficult for them to be able to get a diagnosis and to link that to their service.
General Stuart said he wants soldiers and veterans to know there is help available.
"My message is, thanks for what you've done, I'm sorry you've been affected by your service that way. But let's get you the help that you need," he said.
Sergeant Jennings said slow action on blast injuries isn't just a personal workplace health and safety issue but is also having an impact on Australia's defence capabilities.
"We are losing huge amounts of corporate knowledge because they're getting injured, they're getting broken, they're having memory issues and they're having cognitive issues," he said.
"We are losing our edge because we are not protecting our soldiers.
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