In the year before Troy Norrell died, he grew convinced that the government had somehow infiltrated his brain. And in a way, he was right.
The 44-year-old was a rising star in the Navy’s Special Boat Teams — an elite group of stealth speedboat crews who can race over rough seas at 60 miles an hour to deliver Navy SEALs to their targets. But after years of pounding across the waves, he was barely able to function. He grew forgetful and confused. He struggled with insomnia, alcohol abuse and rage. On a training trip, he smashed a rearview mirror and started cutting his chest with the glass.
He was forced to medically retire in 2017 after 12 years in uniform.
As a civilian, he grew delusional and paranoid, and started to believe that the government had bugged his phone, then his kitchen walls and finally his own skull.
“There’s only a little piece of me left,” he told a neighbor in 2021, tapping his head. “They got the rest.”
A few days later, he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a field near his home in the San Diego suburbs.
An autopsy revealed that his brain was riddled with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a progressive disease often associated with football players who suffer repeated blows to the head.
A Defense Department neurologist who analyzed samples of Mr. Norrell’s brain wrote that his C.T.E. probably came from years of impacts with waves. The neurologist alerted the Navy that other sailors in the Special Boat Teams might face the same risk.
As if to underline the point, six weeks after Mr. Norrell’s death, another boat team member in the grip of paranoid delusions, Travis Carter, 33, died by suicide a few miles away.
Seeking an edge in combat, the Navy has created boats so powerful that riding in them can destroy sailors’ brains, several former senior members of the Special Boat Teams said.
In interviews, 12 former boat team leaders — nearly all chiefs or senior chiefs — said the damage piles up almost unnoticed for years, and then cascades, often around the time sailors move into leadership roles. Rock-solid sailors like Mr. Norrell become erratic, impulsive and violent. Many develop alcohol problems, get arrested for bar fights or domestic violence, or become suicidal. One was charged with threatening to kill President Barack Obama.
“Over and over and over, high-performing guys spiral down and fall apart,” said Robert Fredrich, 44, a retired senior chief who served in the teams from 2001 to 2023. “It happened to me, it happened to most of my friends. When it does, they kick us out or force us to retire, but never address the real issue.”
Every boat crew veteran interviewed by The New York Times said they had seen the pattern play out repeatedly.
It is unclear how many sailors have been injured. There is no public data from the Navy, and even if there were, no blood test or brain scan exists that can definitively detect in a living sailor the type of damage that an autopsy found in Mr. Norrell.
In a questionnaire sent to boat team veterans by one retired chief, nearly all who replied — about 300 — said they had experienced concussion symptoms from riding on the boats, and most were still experiencing symptoms years later. Nearly a quarter said they had been suicidal.
The widespread reports of injuries point to a problem with implications that go beyond one small, specialized Navy unit: In its push for ever more powerful equipment, the military may have exceeded what many human brains can handle.
The Pentagon has started to acknowledge that repeatedly firing weapons like howitzers and rocket launchers may cause serious injuries to troops’ brains. But the experience of the Special Boat Teams suggests that the problem may extend beyond blast exposure to include getting jolted and knocked about in high-performance vehicles.
In other parts of the military, post-traumatic stress disorder from combat is often seen as a driving factor when top performers fall apart. In the boat teams, though, few sailors ever see combat. Not knowing what else could be behind the epidemic of behavioral issues, veterans said, leaders have repeatedly blamed the sailors themselves.
In interviews, a number of former senior chiefs said that at the point when they were promoted to positions overseeing critical missions, they were already stumbling over words, losing their trains of thought, and getting distracted by family lives that were falling apart.
“The problem is, we have dudes with brain injuries leading dudes with brain injuries, and they are unable to fully comprehend what is going on,” Mr. Fredrich said.
The Navy and the Defense Department have been tight-lipped about what they know. The Defense Department brain lab that found C.T.E. in Mr. Norrell refused to say how many boat team members’ brains it has examined, or what it has found in them. More than 70 current and former boat crew members have participated in a brain injury study at Tulane University, but the Navy and Tulane each declined to describe the findings.
A spokeswoman for Naval Special Warfare, which oversees the boat teams, said in a written response to questions that the risks to the boat crews “are well recognized,” but would not address whether those risks include brain damage.
The spokeswoman disputed that leaders may be particularly affected, noting that they undergo extensive testing and are chosen for their “sustained superior performance.”
In 2021, medical staff members at Naval Special Warfare started slipping a memorandum into crewmen’s files, warning future medical providers that the crews were “subject to large shock and vibration forces,” and that their heads experienced sudden jerks of up to 64 Gs (64 times the force of gravity). Fighter pilots typically experience a maximum of about nine Gs.
The medical memorandum suggests that some in the Navy are concerned about the risk of brain damage. The Navy has made changes in recent years to improve detection and treatment of brain injuries.
But veterans say operations have continued unchanged, and any lessons from the suicide deaths seem to have been missed.
“No one was asking, ‘What the hell is going on here?’” said Mr. Fredrich, who was still in the teams when Mr. Norrell and Mr. Carter died. “It was just, ‘Well, what a tragedy. Now get back in the boats.’”
The Special Boat Teams were established in the late 1980s to speed Navy SEALs to their targets. The Navy had been using small patrol boats since World War II, but those boats topped out at about 30 miles an hour, and the crews serving on them usually stayed only a few years before moving to other assignments. The new teams acquired high-powered racing boats and trained a new class of career operators known as Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen, or SWCCs, who stayed for their entire careers.
Several former crewmen said skipping over big waves and hitting the faces of the next ones was like being in repeated car crashes.
“The first hit weakens you, and you are still trying to recover when the next one hits,” said Steve Chance, who served in the first generation of boats in the 1990s. “You do that for hours, and it feels like someone worked you over with a pool cue. Sometimes you’d slam so hard you’d have a headache for a week.”
Almost immediately, crews started reporting high injury rates. In 1994, a Navy study put sensors on boats and found that crews experienced more than 120 whiplash events per hour. The force of the hits, the study said, was “a challenge to human tolerances.”
The Navy added better shock absorbers to the seats of some boats in the 2000s, but former sailors said the boats hit the waves with such force that those seats often broke.
“It was so violent,” said Anthony Smith, who joined the boat teams in 1996 and rose to the rank of chief. “You couldn’t think straight, your back hurt, your neck hurt, and all the guys would have blood in their urine.”
Repeated jolts to the head can fray neurons over time, leading to impulsive decisions, violent reactions, depression and psychosis. Sailors often saw the battering as part of the job and endured it without complaint, unaware of the long-term consequences.
After eight years on boats, Mr. Smith developed an overwhelming sensation that he was existing outside his own body. He had crippling depression and panic attacks. In 2004, he had a seizure with convulsions so strong that his shoulder dislocated. Like many others, he was quietly retired from the Navy on medical grounds.
“No one in the Navy ever said the words ‘brain injury,’” he said. “The psychologist told me I was depressed because I didn’t want to leave the Navy.”
Determined to learn whether others were having similar troubles, Mr. Smith recently started sending questionnaires and found nearly all were reporting issues.
The Navy introduced a new generation of boats about a decade ago, in part to try to smooth the ride, but sailors say the improved technology just allowed crews to go faster, and the slamming continued.
One new model was the 2,500-horsepower, $11 million Combatant Craft Medium, and one of the first sailors to man it was Travis Carter, who died by suicide in 2021. Sailors said the boat performed well, but the pounding across the waves continued at faster speeds.
“We all got destroyed,” said Mr. Fredrich, the retired senior chief, who worked with Mr. Carter.
Mr. Carter’s memory started to crumble and his moods swung so violently that his wife thought he was bipolar. He was racked by delusions and would boil with rage, smash things in his house and then act as if nothing had happened.
“He was two completely different people, and he was getting violent to the point where it was scary,” his widow, Nichole Carter, said in an interview.
The boat teams pulled Mr. Carter from a leadership position in 2021 because of his strange behavior. Though the military has a world-class brain injury clinic only a few miles from his base near San Diego, the boat teams didn’t send him there because he was about to deploy for a fourth time. He died five days before he was due to leave.
“He knew there was something really, really wrong, but the Navy said they were going to deal with it when he got back,” Ms. Carter said.
The medical examiner in San Diego sent Mr. Carter’s brain to the Defense Department brain lab in 2021. This October, his family finally got a letter about the results. The letter was clear on what the lab had not found — no C.T.E., it said — but it was vague about whether the lab had found other damage.
All the boat crew veterans interviewed by The Times said they repeatedly saw squared-away sailors like Mr. Carter unravel as they climbed in rank. Chiefs who once seemed flawless went blank during briefings, wrecked boats or landed in jail.
“It is far too common to be a coincidence,” said Kyle Zellhoefer, who served for 20 years in the Navy. “I’ve seen it happen over and over. It happened to me.”
By the time Mr. Zellhoefer reached the rank of chief in 2017, he was having headaches so debilitating that his vision would blur and he was screaming at people, just as he had seen chiefs before him do. A shoving match with a master chief in 2019 led to formal punishment and stalled his career. He transferred out of the boat teams, and then retired from the Navy over the summer.
“It probably saved my life to get pushed out when I did,” he said. “I’ve seen how others have ended up.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States.
The post Chronic Brain Trauma Is Extensive in Navy’s Elite Speedboat Crews appeared first on New York Times.
