A physiologist from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research will visit Fort Jackson later this summer to study the effects of poorly launched live hand grenades on the training cadre.
The study will be the first on a grenade range by Gary Kamimori, who has spent seven years studying the concussive effects of weaponry blasts on Soldiers. As part of the Environmental Sensors in Training phase of a study commissioned by the deputy chief of staff of the Army, Kamimori has studied the effects of mortar blasts at Fort Benning, Georgia, and artillery fire at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
"Most of injuries (in the Army) occur in training, not in combat," Kamimori said Friday. His studies examine how those injuries can occur by outfitting Soldiers with sensors, keeping track of their physical complaints and running tests on such things as the ability to maintain balance.
Fort Jackson holds allure for Kamimori because it has the only fan-shaped grenade range in the Army and because raw recruits often misthrow the deadly projectiles after they pull the firing pins.
"We call those the head-ringers," said Sgt. 1st Class Steven Berry of the 171st Infantry Brigade, the non-commissioned officer in charge of the post range. "Trainees are the ones who give us the Soldier's Medals" when cadre members prevent casualties from misthrown grenades. Since January alone, two Fort Jackson Soldiers have received medals for preventing injuries from misfired grenades.
Rattled trainees have launched potentially deadly errant grenades six times in the past two years, Berry said, but none since he took over the range in March.
Sometimes trainees throw the live grenades straight up into the air, sometimes not far enough away. During every training exercise, he said, 50 to 70 grenades fall "close to the wall" -- within 15 meters of the safety bunker and far too close for comfort.
As a result of so-called overpressure exposure from the resulting blasts, both cadre members and trainees can suffer headaches, irritability, excessive fatigue, nausea or -- in the worst cases -- brain injury.
Fort Jackson's fan-shaped grenade range holds an unknown potential for injury since trainers and trainees are concentrated in one spot and not in lanes. That means the potential for concussive shock can come not just from blasts to the left and right, but from blasts from behind, too.
"If you don't hear the warning in time" when a grenade is mislaunched, "you might not get down," he said. That danger may be more pronounced on a fan-shaped range.
In past studies, Kamimori has planted sensors on firing ranges, and asked Soldiers to wear devices on their bodies. The same will occur at Fort Jackson's grenade range, after Kamimori performs his initial walk-through, command briefing and observations of Basic Training Soldiers -- tentatively, at the end of August.
He will return some weeks later for the actual tests of overpressure exposure.
Three to six months after that, he will make recommendations to limit overpressure exposure -- perhaps training rotations based on exposure limits, not the number of troops to be trained.
"This is a project that's pretty wide at this point because we really just don't know" what studies will find or recommendations will be made, Kamimori said. "If someone's complaining and they're exposed to a lot, we need to be looking at them."
The study will be part of the Army's ESIT program, which measures and evaluates overpressure exposure and suggests procedures to reduce it without hampering training.
"You can get an idea where the blast pressure is" most profound by placing sensors on the range, as well as on Soldiers, said Maj. Elaine Paszkowski, deputy project manager of the Science and Technology Objective-Brain in Combat program with the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. ESIT is phase one of STO-Brain in Combat.
The emphasis of the Fort Jackson study will be on the cadre, who experience blasts repeatedly during training. Blasts can cause one-time harm, but their effects also can accumulate over time.
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