There are still no reports that any U.S. or Iraqi service members died in the attacks.
At a joint news conference Thursday with Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Milley explained one major reason why the injury toll continues to creep upward. “In this particular case, TBI, that takes some time to manifest itself,” he said. “It’s not an immediate thing, necessarily. Some cases it is, some cases it’s not.”
In recent years, researchers with the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have developed a new perspective on the sort of brain injuries that troops have reported this month. Since 2000, hundreds of thousands of service members have been diagnosed with TBIs, which have been linked with depression, memory and coordination loss, and long-term changes in brain function.
“Your brain is a very fragile part of your body even though it’s encased inside your skull,” Milley said Thursday. “The injuries to the brain, the unseen wounds of war, for example, those can be serious or not so serious — depends on the individual, depends on proximity to the blast. And sometimes they are lifelong, sometimes they resolve themselves in weeks or months.”