What a Concussion in Combat Feels Like
The moment of impact is a disorienting surge of chaos.
One second you're focused, adrenaline surging as you engage, and the next, a force slams into you - whether from an explosion, a strike, or a fall.
Everything goes blank for a split second.
It’s not a clean blackout like you’d imagine; instead, it feels like reality just slips away. There's no time to brace for it, no chance to prepare. It hits you all at once. The noise, the light, the violence of whatever made contact.
The first sensation that registers afterward is a strange, overwhelming silence, even if the world around you is still roaring.
When awareness begins to creep back in, it's like being underwater. Your hearing is muffled - voices, gunfire, orders from your team - they’re distant, echoing, as if through thick glass. You might hear a high-pitched ringing in your ears, like tinnitus, and it's maddening.
Your vision is blurred, sometimes with a tunnel effect, like you're staring through a narrow lens while everything around the periphery swims. Even when you try to focus, it's as if the world is spinning or shifting beneath you. You try to get up or orient yourself, but your balance is gone, legs like rubber.
Then the nausea hits. It’s a deep, unsettling feeling that rises from your gut, making you feel like you could throw up at any second. Your head pounds - an intense, splitting headache that makes even the slightest noise feel like a hammer to the skull.
Each pulse of blood through your temples is like a fresh wave of pain. The dizziness gets worse if you move too fast, so you instinctively slow down, even though the environment is demanding the opposite.
The battlefield doesn't care that you're concussed, but in that moment, it's all you can feel - an all-consuming haze that threatens to overwhelm your focus.
Mentally, things are worse. You’re confused - sometimes about where you are or what just happened. There’s this strange detachment, like the world around you is happening in slow motion, but your thoughts are racing, trying to keep up.
Memory becomes slippery. Something as simple as recalling orders or what you were doing moments before the concussion takes effort, as if your brain is stuck in first gear. You know you should be doing something, moving, acting, but your body isn’t responding the way it should, like there’s a delay between what you think and what you can actually make happen.
The emotional side of it is just as disorienting. There’s frustration because, as an operator, you’re trained to maintain control in any situation, but a concussion strips that away.
You're vulnerable in a way that’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Anger follows - you want to snap back into the fight, to push through it, but your body won't cooperate.
Fear lurks just beneath the surface too, especially in combat, because you know that even a moment of delay or disorientation could be deadly. But you push it down, telling yourself to focus, to survive.
As you start to regain some control, you feel disconnected from the action. The fog lifts slowly, but not entirely. You’re on autopilot now, relying purely on muscle memory and years of training to get through the next few minutes.
But that lingering dullness, the ringing in your ears, the throbbing headache - they remind you that you’re not fully back.
There’s a vulnerability that you can’t shake, but you move forward anyway because that’s what you’re trained to do: adapt, survive, and complete the mission, even when your own body is betraying you.