@bigheadfred
Fred,I would be happy to do so if I could find it. I have never been able to figure out how to find old posts or threads here.
BTW,you don't have to be in the military to have suffered TBI. I first got it from flat-track racing a motorcycle on Okinawa. Flipped it end for end several times running maybe 70 MPH,and skidding a considerable distance down the track on my head according to witnesses. The funny part is once I got back on my feet,I stumbled over to the motorcycle,started it up,and finished the race,bent frame,bent handlebars,and bent front forks and all. I was told everybody thought I was ok and a lot of them thought it was funny,but then after the race was over they noticed nobody could find me,so they had the crowd out beating the bushes to see where I had got off to. They did find me walking around mumbling nonsense,and loaded me on a ambulance and took me to the army hospital. Had amnesia for several months. I could remember my name and where I lived,but that was about it.
I went to VN less than a year later,and was blown off my feet by explosions a couple of times while I was there. No big deal. If you survived it,you didn't worry about it. One time I had shrapnel in the bottom of one of my boots,and another time I ended up picking a large chunk of shrapnel out of my rucksack. Normally no big deal,but I had a anti-tank mine in the rucksack. The NVA were running around in tanks in Laos at the time,and I wanted to kill a tank.
Truth to tell,I am not sure there was such a diagnosis as TBI in the 60's,and don't think it was ever determined I had it
I think they just called it a "concussion".
Nothing so spectacular for me, I got my bell rung when a van (doing 55 in a residential area, failed to yield) t-boned my '70 Dodge Coronet, hitting it right behind my seat. Knocked the car 4 feet sideways, by the tire marks, before it spun down the side street I had been crossing. I caught my head on the third bounce off the side window glass (which somehow didn't break despite being bent over 4 inches with the door) thinking "If the glass breaks, I'm dead". Everything was in slow motion at that point.
Short term memory shot, I had to take a year comprehensive 5-hour Calculus exam five days later (I flunked it). I couldn't keep the thread of logic for what was going on long enough to work the problems. They would not let me postpone the exam.
Thankfully, I had already interviewed for a job starting later that month. I drove what was left of the car out to the west side of ND later that month to go to work in the oil patch, and wore out a 3,000 mile old set of tires (to the cords) in under 400 miles, just to get there By then, the fog had lifted, for the most part, and I got on okay, but for a guy who could memorize the drawing numbers for three or four different pieces to go pull the blueprints, (working summers as a structural steel fitter), I still can't recall things like I used to. I have to work at it a little bit.
I'll find that episode and watch it. I watched the show for a while, but haven't seen it since a childhood (and lifelong) friend who was in the teams died.
