Good morning. President Trump said his “Board of Peace” had reached a disarmament deal in Gaza. “For the first time, Hamas officially has committed to an actionable plan for relinquishing all its weapons, which will be followed by Israeli withdrawal from Gaza,” the board said. Neither side commented publicly. We have more news below. I’m going to start with the United States Coast Guard.
In the surfDave Philipps, who covers the United States military and veterans for The Times, has spent the past few years focused on the brain injuries suffered by members of elite and specialized units. He’s written about artillery crews who repeatedly fire high-powered cannons and about SEALs who do the same with shoulder-fired rockets. He’s written about what happens to the brains of fighter pilots who catapult from aircraft carriers, and to those of fast-boat crews who pound across the ocean. And now he’s turned his attention to the crews of Coast Guard rescue boats, who work and train in heavy, crashing seas in order to save lives. They’re called surfmen, and their work is among the most challenging and dangerous jobs in the service. It is work that comes at a cost, Dave reports. They take a beating from the ocean. Many veteran surfmen experience headaches, memory lapses, anxiety attacks, nightmares, mood swings and cognitive problems that can be symptoms of brain injuries. “A 20-foot wave breaking on you is like being in a car crash,” a surfman named Aaron Harris told him. “If you are out training in big surf, that’s like 20 car accidents a day.” Harris was on the boats for 22 years, before retiring in 2024. The surfmen are alone, Dave discovered. The Coast Guard has no regular testing protocol for brain injuries. It delivers no formal briefings on the dangers of pounding waves. The website it maintains on brain injuries is more than 10 years old. Dave found that many of the links that appear under a heading reading “Where to get help” are inactive. The surfmen suffer, and their families suffer, and the results can be fatal. Brett Bonner, 1982-2025
Dave’s story explores the life and death of a surfman named Brett Bonner, who saved hundreds of lives during his 21 years driving rescue boats. Bonner developed post-traumatic stress disorder during his service, and his life unraveled after he retired in 2022. Here’s Dave: He struggled to make decisions. Even ordering at a drive-through was overwhelming. He grew paranoid. He was sure his father-in-law, who lived next door, was out to get him and punched him over a minor disagreement about new closet doors. In February 2025, Bonner shot himself. His wife and four children saw it happen. He left no note. Bonner’s eldest child, Kayleigh, is now 18. After her father’s death, she did something remarkable. Seeking some understanding of what had happened to her dad, and whether it had anything to do with his work in the unrelenting surf, she decided to send questionnaires to as many surfmen as she could locate. Her survey asked 36 questions about their time in the service and their health during and after it.
Nearly 80 active and retired surfmen responded, and a vast majority reported symptoms similar to her father’s. They had headaches. Sleeplessness. Their memories were shot. Anxiety stalked them. Their moods swung, hard. Some were getting worse. “My brain has started to fail me. I feel it, I see it,” one responder in his early 50s wrote. “It is difficult to do things that used to be natural to me.” “It has been a struggle for me to keep my life together,” another in his mid-40s wrote. Kayleigh wrote up the results of her study as a senior-year high school research project. It earned an A. (I’d have gone A+.) Dave reports that she plans to share her findings with the Coast Guard. Breaking the cycleYesterday I reached out to Dave to ask him what to make of his reporting. Not just about the Coast Guard surfmen, but also about the Navy pilots and boat skippers and SEALS and Army mortar soldiers and all those who’ve been exposed, repeatedly, to concussive blasts in service to the nation, and who’ve been left with injured brains. Here’s what he told me: I think the big takeaway is that these injuries are preventable. There never needs to be another story like Brett Bonner’s, even if we will always need Coast Guard crews to brave rough waters. On these motor lifeboats, most of the damaging exposure occurs during training, not in emergencies. The same is true in the rest of the military. That is both infuriating and a stroke of good luck, because training is a controlled environment. We can change it to limit damage. If anything is going to change, though, the first step is recognizing that there is a problem. That has been tricky because these types of brain injuries develop slowly and often resemble other mental health problems. For decades the military has been stuck in a cycle where it doesn’t see these injuries as a problem, and therefore isn’t on the lookout for them. I hope the reporting The Times has done can break that cycle. Please read the complete article here. I’ve only scratched its surface. (Not a subscriber? Not a problem. The click is free.)
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