A decade after Micheal Barnes returned from a tour of Afghanistan, he woke up one morning and threatened to assault a motorist on his way to work.
“I’ve come very close to pulling someone out the window of their car … driving to work one day,” the former navy clearance diver said.
The 47-year-old said the rage boiled up out of nowhere and was “very irrational”, but at the time, he couldn’t stop it.
Micheal Barnes has always had a great love for the water. (ABC News: Cason Ho)
“To walk down to someone’s car because they’re driving too close to you and threaten to hurt them … like when you think about it, who does that?” he said.
Mr Barnes’s mum, Sue Barnes, said she noticed her kind and caring son started to get uncharacteristically angry “over the littlest things.”
“He’d get angry because you didn’t wipe the dishes with a tea towel. It’s hard to explain, but it’s just these constant little things, and they progressively got worse.”
Mr Barnes also remembers yelling at his young daughters for minor indiscretions and losing his temper at his wife – but the road-rage incident was the tipping point for the former warrant officer of the clearance diving team.
“I went to work, and I raised the flag that, you know, there might be something going on here,” he said.
“About three days later, I’d seen a psychiatrist.”
A decade earlier he was deployed to the Middle East as an explosives ordinance disposal expert, and required to detonate hundreds of explosive devices in less than a year.
“I was extremely close to a lot of the detonations that I did by virtue of the fact there were enemies present,” he said.
The shock waves from the blasts were sometimes so strong, he said, at times he felt like he’d been punched in the face.
Sue Barnes is very proud of her son, but says something is now “just not right” with him. (ABC News: Nico White)
Rage was one of a string of recurrent symptoms Mr Barnes had experienced following his deployment, along with chronic headaches, ringing in his ears, dizzy spells and short-term memory loss.
“My long term-memory seems to be okay. But what I did five minutes ago, I couldn’t tell you,” he said.
During a recent visit with her son, his mother noticed he had absolutely no recollection of conversations they’d had just a few weeks earlier.
“He just looked at me and said ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’,” Sue said.
Put simply, she said, after nearly three decades of service, her son’s once-brilliant brain was “just not right”.
‘Stuff doesn’t add up’
The Royal Australian Navy’s clearance divers are no strangers to risk. The unit was founded in the 1950s to help clear unexploded bombs after World War II.
Now the role is more diverse and includes maritime tactical operations and underwater mine disposal.
Some clearance divers are also attached to the special forces Tactical Assault Group, where they train with heavy weapons and explosives.
Clearance divers like Mr Barnes willingly signed up despite the risk to their lives, but they couldn’t anticipate the prospect that years later, their service could lead to a subtle and pervasive form of brain injury.
Blast over-pressure occurs when a weapon is fired, and the explosion creates an invisible high pressure shock wave which travels through the body — including the brain.
That can deform the delicate jelly-like material and stiff structures within the brain, said neurologist David Rosen.
“The brain is momentarily deformed, compressed, expanded. That deformation has a physical effect on the structures within the jelly.”
That damage often can’t be seen on standard scans, Dr Rosen added. It’s only after death when the brain is dissected that damage and scarring can be seen under the microscope.
The symptoms can take years to manifest and be subtle and hard to pinpoint, but include headaches, short term memory loss, and personality changes like uncharacteristic impulsivity and rage.
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“I have no doubt that repetitive blast over-pressure does lead to functional abnormalities within the brain,” said Dr Ben Dunkley, a cognitive neuroscientist who has been working with the Department of National Defense in Canada for more than a decade.
Dr Dunkley has been using new kinds of brain imaging known as magneto encephalography (MEG) to compare the brains of living Canadian service personnel exposed to different levels of blast.
“I don’t think at this stage we can categorically say that it’s causal,” he said.
“But we can certainly say that, in those that have more blast, they show greater brain functional abnormalities and a more severe set of symptoms.”
The ABC has spoken to more than 60 current and former ADF personnel who described symptoms of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) in themselves or their colleagues that they attributed to blast exposure.
Among them were more than 20 former navy clearance divers who worked with explosives and heavy weapons.
They described a consistent pattern of chronic headaches, memory loss, tinnitus and sudden uncharacteristic outbursts of rage amongst themselves and their colleagues.
Many questioned whether effects of explosions combined with the physiological stress of deep sea diving could increase the impacts on the brain.
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