Hearing loss is silent epidemic in U.S. troops

SAN DIEGO - Large numbers of soldiers and Marines caught in roadside bombings and firefights in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home with permanent hearing loss and ringing in their ears, prompting the military to redouble its efforts to protect the troops from noise.

Hearing damage is the No. 1 disability in the war on terror, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and some experts say the true toll could take decades to become clear. Nearly 70,000 of the more than 1.3 million troops who have served in the two war zones are collecting disability for tinnitus, a potentially debilitating ringing in the ears, and more than 58,000 are on disability for hearing loss, the VA said.

[From Hearing loss is silent epidemic in U.S. troops - More health news- msnbc.com]

It's actually worse than that, since these statistics are only taking into account combat veterans that suffered damage related to either explosions, weapons fire or heavy equipment. They don't include those of us that spent our service in equipment control rooms with heavy levels of white noise that resulted in loss of hearing within particular frequency ranges.

Yes, I am including myself. I was handed a pair of earplugs during my in-processing at Fort Jackson, South Carolina when I joined the US. Army. These earplugs were color coded, each style fit a different kind of ear canal. Mine were orange and very painful to insert (you basically shoved them into the ear canal). We used these for two things: shooting and working around generators and other obviously loud equipment.

Nobody ever told us about the white noise, and it is something that most people just can't tell because it is very low.

In my case, I did not notice how loud our operations center in Germany was until the one time in my tour that we actually shut the whole place down. They had improved our commercial electricity power, and they wanted to feed us from two separate power grids in addition to the emergency generator grid. All that power is run through a complex power control system, but it is hardwired for one commercial grid, one generator grid. In order to upgrade us to having two commercial grids they had us shut completely down.

For about 8 hours we sat in that building with the air conditioning turned off, and just flash lights. The silence was horrible, it felt like a tomb. That is when most of us realized how loud that place was. Just imagine a few thousand square feet full of computers, server racks, etc. Each server rack has one or two fans. There are a half dozen commercial grade air conditioners scattered around. The floor is raised two feet, and air runs under the tiles.

Day in and day out, the whole place hums, and your brain filters it out, but your ears take the damage.

When I left the service, my very first civilian job had more or less the same arrangement, except that the controllers sat in a part that was more or less isolated from the equipment room. As long as we kept the doors closed, it was fine. Two jobs later, my boss had metal racks with about eight Dell half tower servers, with at least two UPS units. I have no idea how she could stand sitting there for more than a few minutes.