A better ?brain bucket?

[thedrifter]

Issue Date: December 15, 2003

A better ?brain bucket?
Improving helmets becomes a priority

By David Wood
Newhouse News Service

Marine Cpl. Jesus Vidana was walking combat patrol in Baghdad, Iraq, when his platoon started taking sniper fire and a rocket-propelled grenade exploded nearby. Jagged, red-hot shrapnel sliced through his helmet and into his head, and he fell senseless.
Vidana, 25, was wearing his Kevlar combat helmet. Its use is mandatory for U.S. soldiers and Marines on and off combat duty.

At daily risk from snipers? bullets, firefights, car bombs, rocket-propelled grenade attacks, land mines and roadside bombs, troops in Iraq are relearning an old lesson: The heavy, hot and cumbersome helmets provide some protection, but they?re not bulletproof ? or even shrapnel-proof.

Vidana, 25, survived the April 8 attack. But he is lucky. U.S. military medical experts say most of those who suffer penetrating head wounds die, and die quickly.

?When we got Marines with head wounds, they were universally fatal,? said a combat surgeon, Navy Capt. (Dr.) Lynn Welling, who led a shock trauma platoon with I Marine Expeditionary Force during the assault on Baghdad last spring.

?That?s one thing we?ve got to work on,? he said.

Indeed, while there have been dramatic advances in the technology of killing, including satellite-guided bombs and ?brilliant? munitions that hunt preprogrammed targets with dart-filled ?bomblets,? progress in protecting infantrymen against the low-tech risks common in Iraq today has been modest.

New body armor using ceramic plates has reduced injuries to troops? torsos, officials said. And a newer version of the Kevlar helmet, said to offer some protection against lighter 9mm rounds and shrapnel, debuted earlier this year.

But officials said even the newer version of the Kevlar provides little protection against the heavy AK-47 automatic rifle fire common in Iraq, and they stressed there is no ?bulletproof? helmet on the horizon ? mainly because a helmet heavy enough to stop a bullet would be too heavy to wear.

Moreover, said Steve Pinter, a former infantryman who buys soldier gear for the Army, ?The force of stopping a bullet would break your neck.?

Pinter acknowledged that, at least until recently in Iraq, ?there?s been a perception in the field that these helmets are bulletproof.?

Vidana is at home in Los Angeles undergoing occupational therapy. ?I have trouble with my field of vision,? he said in a telephone interview. As for the incident in which he was wounded, he said, ?I was wearing my helmet, all right, but I don?t remember much about getting hit.?

Finding ways to reduce the number of deaths due to head wounds is a high priority, said Air Force Lt. Col. Linda Lawrence, commandant of the school of medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md.

In Iraq, head wounds were suffered by 21 percent of those injured in battle but resulted in 31 percent of combat deaths.

The other main cause of combat deaths was injury to the torso from bullets or shrapnel that penetrated between the ceramic plates or other gaps in the body armor. About 25 percent of service members who died in combat suffered torso wounds so extreme they could not be saved, Lawrence said. She presented her data at a recent conference of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Kevlar helmets, named for the material developed by DuPont, are made from fiber woven into dense fabric and soaked in resin before being hardened into a shell with a shape reminiscent of the Nazi combat helmet of World War II. The new version of the Kevlar helmet weighs 8 ounces less than the 3?-pound current version and provides some additional ballistic protection.

David Wood can be contacted at david.wood@newhouse.com.


http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/sto...PER-2445962.php


Sempers,

Roger