Blast

The U.S. military's most powerful weapons are wounding the soldiers who fire them. The damage is to the brain, caused not by enemy fire but by the blast overpressure of a soldier's own artillery, mortars, and heavy arms. It is an injury the military has been slow to name and slower to treat.

Blast investigates that hidden crisis through the people living it. At the Army's annual mortar competition at Fort Moore, young soldiers describe the concussion of firing as being tackled on a football field, an unsettling echo of the NFL's own reckoning with brain injury, even as basic protective protocols go ignored, and the officer in charge of every mortarman in the Army appears unaware of the danger or the safeguards meant to address it. The film follows Frank Larkin, a former Navy SEAL and Senate Sergeant at Arms, whose son Ryan, a SEAL himself, took his own life convinced that years of blast exposure had destroyed his brain. He was proven right only after his death, when his donated brain revealed the signature damage of blast injury.

That science runs through Dr. Dan Perl, the leading authority on the injury, who examined Ryan Larkin's brain and guides a tour of the Department of Defense brain bank where the evidence is kept. The human cost runs through Brady Zipoy, a Marine who fired howitzers in the campaign against ISIS, was denied the help he asked for, was discharged, and later killed a neighbor during a mental health collapse. And it runs through an active-duty Army officer, his identity concealed, who comes forward to describe how the military ends the careers of those who seek help for these invisible wounds.

Set against the century-long history of shell shock and the slow, grudging acceptance that these injuries are real, Blast is an investigation into how the armed forces have failed to protect their own from a weapon they hand them themselves.