US troops still dealing with mental trauma 18 months after Iran missile attack

In January 2020, when the US assassinated Iran’s celebrated anti-terror commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, thousands of American troops at Ain al-Asad Airbase in Iraq braced for retaliation.

The occupying forces stationed at the airbase in western Anbar province thought it would be a volley of rockets with 60-pound warheads, trusting their air defense systems to intercept the imminent attack.

On Jan. 8, 2020, shortly after midnight, five days after the drone strike killed Gen. Soleimani and deputy head of Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’abi Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis near Baghdad airport, at least a dozen ballistic missiles with warheads weighing more than 1,000 pounds rained on the airbase.

It was the largest ballistic missile attack against American troops anywhere in the world in modern history and was the “first slap” for a US drone strike that killed the lynchpin of anti-Daesh resistance.

The then US President Donald Trump initially said that no Americans were harmed in the attack. The Pentagon also downplayed reports of brain injuries sustained by US troops in the attack but later admitted that more than 100 troops had been diagnosed with severe traumatic brain injuries.

The troops that were stationed at the western Iraq airbase that fateful night are still feeling the effects from Iranian ballistic missiles more than a year and a half after the attack.

‘Knocked the wind’

Recounting the horrors of that night when a barrage of missiles pounded their airbase, US troops recuperating from their brain injuries say they are still having nightmares.

In an interview with CBS News, US Army Major Alan Johnson, who was stationed at Ain al-Asad Airbase on Jan. 8, 2020, said the attack “knocked the wind” out of him.

Hours before the attack, when he was informed by a US military intelligence officer that Iran was about to hit the US airbase, Johnson looked tearfully into a cellphone camera and recorded a farewell message for his mother, wife and son.

Johnson and nearly 2,000 other US troops were stationed at the base that night.

“Words can’t even describe the amount of energy that is released by these missiles,” he was quoted as saying by CBS News. “It knocked the wind out of me, I immediately lost all my hearing, I felt like I was underwater…followed by the most putrid tasting ammonia…dust that swept through the bunker [and] coated your teeth.”

Johnson was evacuated from Iraq to Germany where he underwent physical and speech therapy. But he still suffers from daily headaches, ringing in the ears, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

‘Sci-fi movie-like attack’

Another trooper, Army Major Robert Hales, who suffered severe injuries in the attack, which the Iranian military officials asserted was not intended to kill anyone but to send out a strong message to Washington, said the attack was “sci-fi movie-like.”

The highest-ranking medical doctor at the base, Hales was in an armored vehicle at a safe distance outside the base and feared he would return to find hundreds of his fellow troops dead.