Knowing Is Half the Battle

摘要

I've been doing it again-indulging that primal human imperative to stitch together a narrative, to see connections even when they don't necessarily exist. In "Shock to the System" [page 48], author Eric Hager-man investigates a mystery: Why are such a startling number of Iraq vets suffering memory loss and cognitive deficiencies? Reading along, there camerna point-probably just after I'd gotten through the litany of bomb blasts a soldier had incurred during his tour in Iraq-when I found myself wanting to scream at the page, the way you yell at the screen when the clueless TV gumshoe can't connect dot one to dot two. "This guy's been blownrnup six times!" is how my internal rant was shaping up. "Sixty-two percent of returning vets have been rocked by at least two explosions! They've got brain injuries! It's obvious!"