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Connecting the DOTs: How Wave Slamming Is Quietly Injuring Our Military Fast Boat Operators

By Michael Anthony Smith | 13 July 2025
Former SWCC Operator

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Every day, military fast boat operators—Special Warfare Combatant Crewmen (SWCC), Coast Guard members, Navy Riverine crews, Royal Marines (SBS), Australian Special Boat Operators, and others—are riding a hidden rollercoaster of trauma. While the missions vary, the outcome is the same: brain damage, spinal degeneration, and a long list of injuries that come not from enemy fire, but from the ocean itself.

I’m not talking about drowning or hypothermia. I’m talking about wave slamming—when a high-speed boat hits a wave and slams down with brutal force, over and over, for hours on end.

What Is Wave Slamming?

A wave slamming event happens when a high-speed boat launches off a wave and crashes back down, sending shock forces through every part of your body—especially your spine and brain. Depending on sea conditions, this can happen every second, or every few seconds, for 8 to 16 hours a day.

I once did a 52-hour training op. That’s not a typo. That’s over 180,000 slams in just one evolution.

Conservatively, let’s say 8 hours/day × 5 days/week × 4 weeks = 160 hours/month. If your boat slams every 5 seconds, that’s:

• 12 wave impacts/minute
• 720 per hour
• 115,200 per month

And at an average 10 g’s per impact, we’re talking about over 1.1 million g-force load events on your body (brain) per month.

This Isn't Just About Bruises—This Is About Brain Damage, misdiagnosed as PTSD, and in some cases has led to suicide.

The late 90s and early 2000s gave us early warning signs:

• Roesch (1994) measured repeated boat shocks up to 28 g’s.
• Gollwitzer (1995) described debilitating symptoms that sound exactly like modern TBI: annoyance, fatigue, sleepiness, discomfort, anxiety, nausea, loss of visual acuity and hand and eye coordination, abdominal pain or discomfort, testicular pain, headache and other head symptoms, chest pain, back pain, sprains, torn ligaments, broken ankles and legs, damaged vertebrae, and damage to internal organs.
• Whalen (1995) found a 100% injury rate among SWCCs by year 10.
• Kearns (2001) from MIT confirmed that high-speed boat operations result in severe mechanical shock, leading to injuries across the board.
• Dobbins (2008) recorded 1000+ impacts in 3 hours.
• Myers (2010) found Royal Marines taking 614 impacts/hour—nearly 2 million over a deployment cycle.

And then there’s my cohort of SWCC.

In 1998–99, we were at SBU-12—young, averaging 190 pounds, in great shape, and tactical athletes. Fast-forward to now: this same cohort is plagued with TBI, spinal damage, memory issues, visual problems, fatigue, chronic pain, and other symptoms you’ll hear echoed by over 1000 operators I have communicated with via independent research spanning four years. Many are nearing 20+ years post-ops, and the toll is staggering. The ironic thing is that researchers in the 1990s and early 2000s stated that SWCC were in top athletic shape, and their bodies would be able to handle the wave slamming shock and vibration. However, time and time again, we see individuals broken within 5-10 years of fast boat service, regardless of their initial physical fitness.

My recent April 2023 SWCC TBI Survey confirmed what we all knew in our guts: 100% of respondents had TBI, and the average operator had 30+ co-morbidities related to brain, spinal, and orthopedic injury. And this constellation of injuries is chronic, with a duration of 20 years ± 10 years.

How Much Is Too Much?

Human brain tissue begins to shear at a strain of 15–18%. Lateral wave slams can create rotational forces 4.75x higher than linear impact (Zaman et al., 2024). That means a “mild” 10 g vertical hit could be producing a 47 g rotational torque on your brainstem, cerebellum, and cortical tissue.

Multiply that by 100,000 impacts per month.

Now multiply that by a 10- or 20-year career.

We are surpassing the encephalopathy threshold by 70x or more. In plain English? This job breaks brains and bodies.

The VA Must Make Wave Slamming Injuries Presumptive for SWCC, USCG, Navy Riverine & Security Forces, USMC Boat Operators, and even LCAC operators.

We’re calling for what should’ve happened years ago:

• Mandatory annual TBI screenings for all active duty fast boat operators. I've talked with SWCCs who were denied access to Nicoe due to a conflict with leadership.
• My generation did not have access to Nicoe.
• VA presumptive status for brain, spine, whiplash, and musculoskeletal disorders.
• Transparency in reporting before Congress on the 3 Sep 2014 NSW study "Participation in Naval Special Warfare Operator Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Study" that revealed 40 g sustained impacts with 64 g peaks.
• Funding for longitudinal brain imaging and wearable impact monitors.
• Research-backed care like HBOT, TMS, and VNS (annually as preventive brain maintenance). All teams should have multi-chamber facilities that can treat 50 operators daily, following the Hyperoxic-Hypoxic Paradox established by Dr. Shai Efrati from Israel in 2021.
• Recognition that this injury profile is unique and severe.
• Allow all boat builders to compete with ideas for different hull designs and shock mitigation.
• Ensure the best suspension seats are used on all boats.
• Free access to Neuroinflammation protocols, DHA/EPA Omega 3s, SPMs, and other expensive modalities of treatment.

This Is a Hidden Epidemic—And We Have the Data

We’re not guessing. We have peer-reviewed studies, biomechanics models, survey data, and personal experience all pointing in the same direction:
Wave slamming is a chronic, cumulative injury mechanism that destroys the body from the inside out.

It’s time the military, the VA, and Congress start paying attention.

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References:

The Hyperoxic-Hypoxic Paradox. Hadanny & Efrati, 2021.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32630465/

A biomechanical study of neck strength and impact dynamics on head and neck injury

parameters. Zaman et al. (2024) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.05192

Myers, SD., Dobbins, T., King, S., Hall, B., Ayling, RR., Holmes, S., Gunston, T., Dyson, R.

(2010). Physiological consequences of military high-speed boat transits. European

journal of applied physiology. 111. 2041-9. 10.1007/s00421-010-1765-3

Whalen, T. (1995). Optimal Deadrise Hull Analysis and Design Space Study of Naval

Special Warfare Planing Boats. Master Thesis submitted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/8132/51757721-MIT.pdf

Roesch, J. (1994, Sep). Sudden Impacts of Naval Special Warfare Boats.

http://www.warboats.org/images/pdf/Sudden%20Impacts.Sept.94.pdf

Kearns, S. (2001). Analysis and Mitigation of Mechanical Shock Effects on High

Speed Planing Boats. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/8235

Dobbins, T., Myers, S., and Dyson, R., (2008). High Speed Craft Motion Analysis – Impact

Count Index. https://ullmandynamics.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/4-HSC-MOTION-ANALYSIS-ICI-Dobbins-et-al.pdf

Gollwitzer, R. & Peterson, R. (1995). Repeated Water Entry Shocks on High-Speed Planing

Boats. Dahlgren Division Naval Surface Warfare Center, Panama City, FL. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA317132.pdf