What did the military do to your body?
He says he went in at seven foot two and came out at six foot five. Twelve Veterans on knees, backs, ears, the ibuprofen everybody got and the bill that showed up later.
By Vegas Veteran Voices,
From Something Wasn’t Right | Delvin Bourn (US Army Veteran)
Delvin Bourn is a tall man. He would like you to know he used to be taller.
“When I went in the Army, I was 7’2. Now, I’m down to 6’5.”
That is a paratrooper’s joke, and he has earned it. Bourn is a U.S. Army Veteran who jumped with the 82nd Airborne and served in the Gulf War. Then he tells you the part that is not a joke. On one jump he broke his pelvis in three places and spent eight weeks in the hospital.
“It grew together wrong. So, I’m 6’6 on one side and I’m 6’4 on the other side. So, it evens out to 6’5.”
Fine, still a joke. Here is the sentence after it. He served about 14 years and did not choose the number.
“After I broke my pelvis, I couldn’t run and do sit-ups no more because it crushed my L4 and L5.”
That is how this subject goes with everybody we ask. The laugh, then the X-ray. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, twelve Veterans told us what service did to their knees, backs, heads and ears. We are not doctors and neither are most of them. This is what they said it has been like.
The exam on the way in
The military is choosy about bodies at the front door. Sometimes. Lucky Lopez, an Army National Guard Veteran and mechanic, was turned away after high school because of a knee surgery. Years later, with a war on, a buddy told him the screening had loosened up. Lopez went back, and at the processing station he confessed.
“I was like, ‘Well, I had knee surgery. Is that a problem?’ ‘No, no, no. Can you kneel down?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ He’s like, ‘Okay, you’re good to go.’”
Fifteen minutes, he says. Hold on to that level of medical curiosity. It comes back.
Here is some ibuprofen
Lindsay Gutierrez, a U.S. Air Force Veteran and two-time living organ donor, was in a vehicle that rolled three or four times in Djibouti and came to rest wedged between two boulders. She woke up later with what she calls the worst headache of her life and went to find a medic.
“I had a headache. And he was like, ‘You want some ibuprofen?’”
She took it. In her words, she was not diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury until two or three years after she left the Air Force.
Every branch has this joke. Motrin, water, change your socks. It is funny because it is the whole formulary, and because most of the time it works. Michael D’Angelo, a Marine Corps Veteran, machine gunner and stand-up comic, was five years into a reserve contract when his back “started getting weird.” He was told it was a pulled muscle. He got the pills and a few days off, lay down, and got worse. Eventually somebody ordered X-rays.
“They’re like, ‘Oh yeah, you got like four bulging discs.’”
“They were like, ‘Yeah, if you don’t slow down, you’re going to be in a wheelchair by the time you’re 30.’”
He was 23. He does not put all of it on the corpsmen. He was the guy who finished a run and wanted to keep going. But he noticed what nobody around him ever said.
“Nobody’s like, ‘Hey, rest and recovery is important.’ It’s pain is weakness leaving the body.”
Offered a different job or the door, he took the door in 2013. Then came the months that the motivational poster leaves out.
“I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t dress myself. I couldn’t clean myself. It was really scary.”
He had always worked with his body and suddenly could not. That, he says, is how he ended up in comedy.
Edward Haines, a retired Marine Master Sergeant, sees the start of this story every week. He is an athletic trainer at a high school now, and he knows exactly what a seventeen-year-old does with a sore joint, because he was one.
“My ankle only hurts a little bit. Yeah, I’d have kept playing for sure.”
Then that kid enlists.
What the numbers say hurts
VA publishes a list every year of the conditions it most often pays compensation for. In its report for fiscal year 2025, covering about 6.3 million Veterans, tinnitus is first, counted more than 3.5 million times. Limited bending of the knee is second. The sciatic nerve is third and back and neck strain fourth. Hearing loss is sixth.
Read that list again. It is ears, knees and backs. It is this article.
The National Institutes of Health gives the wider picture, from an analysis of national health surveys taken from 2010 to 2014: Veterans report pain more often, and more severe pain, than people who never served.
On the ears, Ross D. Bryant, a U.S. Army Veteran who leads UNLV Military and Veteran Services, has a professional opinion.
“I was on tanks for 17 years.”
“Back in my day, I fired like 3,000 tank rounds, not simulation like nowadays. But I’m sure my tinnitus has nothing to do with that.”
That is sarcasm, for the record, and it is his account, not a finding.
The ones it retired
Some people leave the service. Some are told to. Jason Brooks, a medically retired Marine who became a Recon and SERE instructor, came back from Iraq in 2003 already banged up.
“I was medically retired in 2005. I didn’t want to get out.”
Since then: three neck surgeries, plates in his lower back, and two hip replacements, twice. The first set of hips came with a 50-year promise.
“You know how Marines are, we break everything.”
He told the surgeons he does martial arts and still jumps out of airplanes. They told him not to worry, these were the same parts they put in athletes.
“Roger that. 10 years later, they broke.”
Alfred Brenner, a Purple Heart recipient, retired Marine K9 handler and author, was hit by an IED in Afghanistan and sent to Walter Reed, to the floor where the famous visitors come through.
“I met nobody, was always in surgery. They’re like, ‘Oh, you just missed Jack Black.’”
Every Tuesday and Thursday, he says, they had him back in the operating room.
And it does not take a blast. Chelsey Gray, a U.S. Marine Corps Veteran, was a parachute rigger, which means she packed parachutes and also used them. She says the landings went into her spine, knees and hip.
“I sit in pain right now, right? Like I’m in pain all the time, 100% of the time.”
She was smiling when she said it. People with this kind of pain usually are. You would never know, which is rather the problem.
Thanks, military
So was it worth it? Here our guests split, and some of them split inside a single sentence.
Billy Wiland, a Marine Corps Veteran, attorney and gym owner, was hurt in the line of duty two and a half years in and medically discharged, well short of the career he wanted. He keeps a running count.
“I had a few knee surgeries. 12 so far to date.”
He liked his doctors enough to try for medical school. He ended up a lawyer. Decades and some shoulder reconstructions later, he sends the bill and the receipt in the same breath.
“Thank you, United States Marine Corps. But I have no regrets.”
The same thought turned up, shorter, in our interview with Navy Veteran Randy Nichols, from a man explaining why somebody else was at his house laying tile.
“My knees are terrible. Thanks, military.”
One caution, because bodies also fail on their own schedule. Letoi Adams, a U.S. Army Veteran and adaptive athlete, was years out of uniform and living in Las Vegas when her back started to hurt. She was given pain pills. Two months later she was losing the use of her legs. It was cancer, on her spine. Nothing she told us ties it to her service and we are not going to. She is here for what she said about the chair.
“You throw a sport out there that people thought an individual in a chair couldn’t do and I’ll try it at least once.”
Sled hockey, cycling, shot put, javelin. The list of sports she has not tried is getting short.
The least pain you are going to be in
Juan Valdez, a Marine Corps Veteran and Purple Heart recipient, was shot through the chest by a sniper in Iraq, talked his way back onto a deployment, and was medically retired after ten years. He said this while showing us how he has to sit.
“I’m in pain every day.”
“I remember when I got out, my doctor was like, ‘This is the least amount of pain you’re going to be in.’ And she was right.”
That is about the hardest sentence anybody has handed one of our guests, and the doctor gets credit for saying it straight. What Valdez did with it is the reason he closes this piece.
“If I’m going to be in pain anyway, I might as well have another excuse to do it. So, I practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu.”
We are not recommending it. He is not either. It is one man’s arithmetic: the pain is coming regardless, so it might as well come from something he picked.
That is where most of them have landed. Not cured, not bitter. Brooks teaches. Adams throws a javelin. Bourn stands up, all six foot five of him, and makes the joke first.
Where to go from here
No advice from us on anybody’s back, and nothing here is a diagnosis. These are directions. A listing is not an endorsement.
- VA pain management. VA’s own page on how it treats pain. It describes team-based care and lists options from physical therapy and yoga to therapy for chronic pain and safer use of medication.
- North Las Vegas VA Medical Center. The main VA hospital campus for Southern Nevada, with primary care, specialty care and mental health care for Veterans enrolled in VA health care. 702-791-9000.
- Paralyzed Veterans of America, Nevada Chapter. Advocacy, benefits support and adaptive sports for Veterans with spinal cord injury, MS or ALS. (702) 646-0040.
- Veterans Service Officers at VAST Las Vegas. If any of this is a claim you have never filed, these are state officers, accredited by VA, who help at no cost. They sit inside the VA hospital in North Las Vegas. (702) 224-6025 ext. 46025.
- VA’s accredited representative search. The same kind of help anywhere in the country. VA says the services of an accredited Veterans Service Organization representative on a benefit claim are always free.
For what a rating did and did not change once it came through, we wrote that up separately: What did your rating change?
If you are a Veteran in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, call 988 and press 1, or text 838255. The Veterans Crisis Line is free and confidential, 24 hours a day.
Go hear them say it
Every quote above links to the second it was said. Start with Bourn for the height chart and Valdez for the doctor. If you are in Southern Nevada, our list of clinics, posts and services is at Veteran resources in Las Vegas.
Stories quoted in this article
- Something Wasn’t Right | Delvin Bourn (US Army Veteran)
- He Joined the National Guard to Work on Vehicles | Lucky Lopez
- She Donated Two Organs to Fellow Veterans.
- Why Do Marines Treat Dark Humor Like Therapy? Michael D’Angelo USMC 0331
- He Listened for 20 Years. Now He Tapes Ankles at a High School.
- Most Veterans Don’t Know Their Education Benefits, The Man Who’s Helped 9,000 Claim Them
- Why SERE Breaks People | Marine Recon Instructor Explains Survival Training
- Purple Heart Marine Survived IED. Losing His Combat Dog Was Worse. | Alfred Brenner USMC
- Every Marine Calls It a Brotherhood. She's Finally Saying What Hers Did. / Chelsey Gray
- Messianic Jewish Marine Veteran Overcomes PTSD, Divorce, and Addiction Through Faith | Billy Wiland
- From Navy to the Trades: How NTI Builds Careers For Veterans
- Adaptive Sports Saved My Life | Letoi Adams’ Journey
- Wounded Warrior Project: From Afghanistan to Finding Purpose with Juan Valdez