Strange New Wounds in US Soldiers Who Never Saw Carnage
Trauma can emerge from imagined destruction as well as witnessed violence.
Posted May 11, 2026 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Not long after returning home from deployment, in a military barracks, a 22-year-old Marine named Austin Powell pounded on his neighbour’s door in tears and cried out: “There’s something in my room! I’m hearing something in my room!”
His neighbour, Lance Corporal Brady Zipoy, went to help. He searched the room but found nothing. Then, tapping his head, Zipoy tried to reassure him: “It’s all right — I’ve been having problems, too.”
The incident was reported as part of a New York Times investigation into US troops who had been sent to serve in the campaign against the Islamic State between 2016 and 2017 and had since returned to the United States. The report drew on interviews with more than 40 gun-crew veterans across 16 US states. Most were “troops who did the firing”—service members who used long-range weapons from afar to kill Islamic State fighters. They were not in direct combat, had not suffered physical combat injuries, and did not see the damage their weapons caused.
What the Investigation Found
According to the Times :
A few gun-crew members were eventually given diagnoses of P.T.S.D., but to the crews that didn’t make much sense. They hadn’t, in most cases, even seen the enemy.
Military doctrine had assumed that firing thousands of high-explosive shells from a distance was relatively safe. These troops were far from direct combat, and none suffered physical injuries. Yet the aftermath of their deployments suggests something very different. The report argues that military authorities failed to recognise the psychological toll such warfare could produce.
Many of the troops described having nightmares, panic attacks, depression , and hallucinations. “A striking number eventually died by suicide , or tried to,” the report noted. It concluded that a “strange new wound” had emerged among troops involved in what it described as a “secret war”, alongside what it called a wall of silence from the Pentagon.”
What makes these accounts so unsettling is that many of these service members never directly witnessed the destruction caused by the weapons they fired. Their suffering may instead relate to cognitive immobility and how they draw on their episodic memory . Remembering is not a simple retrieval of past events but an act of reconstruction, shaped by meaning, emotion , fear , and anticipation (Valsiner, 2014; Awad, 2020; Valsiner et al., 2021).
Episodic memory involves reconstructing past episodes and events (Michaelian, Perrin, and Sant’Anna, 2020). There are two forms of episodic memory: the remembrance of past events that occurred, and the recollection of past events that were supposed to have occurred but did not (van Boven, Kane, and McGraw, 2009). In some cases, these imagined scenes acquire an emotional force that feels painfully real.
That these troops did not directly see the destruction caused by the tens of thousands of shells they fired does not mean they could not envision it. The repeated force of cannon blasts, powerful enough to send shock waves through their bodies, may also have intensified these mental reconstructions and embedded them deeply in memory. This argument can help explain why gun-crew members who never witnessed carnage firsthand could still develop symptoms associated with P.T.S.D.
These troops could be described as experiencing “persistent re-experience and reconstruction of past events or life experiences”, “mental immobilisation to the past”, or “a disrupted sense of identity and home”—which are the key features of cognitive immobility.
Many appear to be in what has been described as the retrieval stage of cognitive immobility. This is a stage marked by intense stress , emotional exhaustion, fixation on unresolved experiences, and an urge to escape cognitive entrapment (Olumba, 2023). Those caught in its most severe stages may experience a fractured sense of self and a sense of belonging.
When the War Returns Home
According to the report, Javier Ortiz, a US Marine who served on an artillery gun crew that killed many Islamic State fighters during a secret mission in Syria, had a similar experience. One day, after returning home, he began hallucinating in his kitchen:
… the ghost of a dead girl appeared to him in his kitchen. She was pale and covered in chalky dust, as if hit by an explosion, and her eyes stared at him with a glare as dark and heavy as oil.
Ortiz, like other gun-crew members, did not see the destruction caused by the weapons he helped fire in Syria. Yet that absence of sight did not mean an absence of psychological impact. His mind may have filled in the unseen consequences of those attacks, giving shape to images of what might have happened to those living in the targeted areas. By envisioning those scenes, sights, and sounds, he may have experienced them cognitively.
In this sense, Ortiz appears not only trapped in memories of Syria but caught in imagined reconstructions of what the weapons may have done. Such experiences suggest a disrupted sense of self and safety: The war ended geographically, but psychologically, it followed him home.
People reconstruct memories from past sights, scenes, sounds, and smells, including events they witnessed and events they believe may have happened (Olumba, 2023). This is why veterans returning with “strange new wounds” need appropriate support that recognises not only what they saw, but also what they imagine, remember, and cannot leave behind.
Awad, S. H. (2020) ‘Experiencing change: Interrelations between individual and social transformations’, in van Alphen, F. and Normann, S. (eds) Cultural psychology in communities: tensions and transformations . Information Age Publishing, pp. 147–158.
van Boven, L., Kane, J. and McGraw, A. P. (2009) ‘Temporally asymmetric constraints on mental simulation: Retrospection is more constrained than prospection’, in Markman, K. D., Klein, W. M., and Suhr, J. A. (eds) Handbook of imagination and mental simulation . New York: Psychology Press, pp. 131–149.
Michaelian, K., Perrin, D. and Sant’Anna, A. (2020) ‘Continuities and Discontinuities Between Imagination and Memory: The View from Philosophy’, in Abraham, A. (ed.) The Cambridge handbook of the Imagination . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Olumba, E. E. (2023) ‘The homeless mind in a mobile world: An autoethnographic approach on cognitive immobility in international migration’, Culture and Psychology , 29(4), pp. 769–790. doi: 10.1177/1354067X221111456.
Valsiner, J. (2014) An invitation to Cultural Psychology . London: Sage Publications. doi: doi: 10.4135/9781473905986.
Valsiner, J. et al. (2021) ‘The Inter-modal Pre-Construction Method (IMPreC): Exploring Hyper-Generalization the Inter-modal Pre-Construction Method’, Human Arenas , (0123456789). doi: 10.1007/s42087-021-00237-8.
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Ezenwa Olumba, Ph.D., is an expert in identity, memory, and immobility who introduced the concepts of cognitive immobility and aerial colonialism.
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