Chronic Brain Trauma Is Extensive in Navy’s Elite Speedboat Crews
The New York Times
The pounding that sailors’ brains take from years of high-speed wave-slamming in the Special Boat Teams can cause symptoms that wreck their careers — and their lives.
In the year before Troy Norrell died, he grew convinced that the government had somehow infiltrated his brain. And in a way, he was right.
The 44-year-old was a rising star in the Navy’s Special Boat Teams — an elite group of stealth speedboat crews who can race over rough seas at 60 miles an hour to deliver Navy SEALs to their targets. But after years of pounding across the waves, he was barely able to function. He grew forgetful and confused. He struggled with insomnia, alcohol abuse and rage. On a training trip, he smashed a rearview mirror and started cutting his chest with the glass.
He was forced to medically retire in 2017 after 12 years in uniform.
As a civilian, he grew delusional and paranoid, and started to believe that the government had bugged his phone, then his kitchen walls and finally his own skull.
“There’s only a little piece of me left,” he told a neighbor in 2021, tapping his head. “They got the rest.”
A few days later, he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a field near his home in the San Diego suburbs.
