CNRM’s New Director says USU Training Prepared Him for Success

By Ian Neligh

Without warning, the military hospital filled with wounded on March 11, 2020, as Camp Taji, north of Baghdad, was hit with a rocket attack.

Uniformed Services University (USU) graduate and neurosurgeon Army Lt. Col. (Dr.) Bradley Dengler was serving his second tour in Iraq when the mass casualty incident occurred. With limited resources, Dengler worked to help manage the influx of injured military personnel.

A USU 2009 graduate, Army Lt. Col. (Dr.) Bradley Dengler is also
the associate program director for the Neurosurgery residency program
at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and the
Neurosurgery consultant to the Army Surgeon General. (Photo
credit: Tom Balfour, USU)

He says the incident made him recall his medical field training as a student at USU taking part in the Bushmaster practicum. Bushmaster introduces students to the chaotic scenarios they might face in medical emergencies, especially when they are in austere environments — which was exactly what was happening in Iraq. 

“All these people are coming in,” Dengler says. “… and it’s just me and my USU classmate, Air Force Maj. (Dr.)
Mark Liu, in the trauma resuscitation bay being like, ‘this is Bushmaster all over again — but it’s real-life now.’”

Dengler says he’s taken the many lessons learned during his time at USU into his successful career as a military physician and now his experiences have come full circle as he steps into his new role as the university’s director of its Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine (CNRM).

CNRM is a traumatic brain injury research program organized in a partnership between USU and the National Institutes of Health. 

Dengler, a 2009 USU School of Medicine graduate, is also the associate program director for the neurosurgery residency program at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and the neurosurgery consultant to the Army surgeon general. 

Dengler previously served as the military advisor to CNRM. He also served in the role of Brigade Surgeon for the 41st Fires Brigade at Fort Hood, and as chief of Neurosurgery for Task Force Med 10 and Task Force Med 14 in Iraq during deployments in 2018 and 2019-2020. 

“OK, watch this” 

Originally from the small town of Fleetwood, Penn., Dengler says his high school graduating class consisted only of a small group of students. As he grew up, his grandfather, a World War II veteran, encouraged his grandchildren to attend West Point because of a military academy graduate who inspired him during the conflict.

“He had been “beating” this into all of us, so I guess I was the most viable candidate and said ‘okay sounds like a good idea,’” Dengler says. “I distinctly remember my guidance counselor in tenth grade of high school when I said I wanted to go to West Point. She said, ‘Oh, we don’t send people there from our school.’ So I was like ‘OK, watch this.’”

Dengler was accepted and started attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 2001. He said during his USMA education he found he naturally gravitated toward science, engineering, and biology and thought after graduation medical school would be a logical choice.

One day Dengler says he was speaking with a life science program manager at West Point about applying for medical school and he was told it would be too difficult to be accepted because only two percent of the graduating class went on to medical school.

“And I was like, ‘OK, watch this.’ So now I’m motivated to make that happen,” Dengler says, adding he then began applying to different medical schools.

“I liked (USU) the best; I was already at West Point and didn’t want to have a break in my service and it just made sense,” says Dengler. “I was going to have a long commitment no matter what… I thought it was way more friendly when I interviewed at USU, and way more collaborative, and everyone was there to help each other out.”

This wasn’t always the case at the other universities he looked at after graduating from West Point.

“It was more cutthroat, and I felt overall USU was a better fit and I think that turned out to be absolutely true for me,” says Dengler, adding he also met his wife at USU, a 2008 graduate.

Lessons of Bushmaster

Not long after graduation from USU, Dengler became the brigade surgeon at Fort Hood for the 41st Fires Brigade. He says some of the West Point experience was helpful during this time but found that by far what he learned during USU’s Bushmaster practicum was often the most helpful.

“Soon after I got (to Fort Hood) we had to go on a field exercise with the whole brigade and figure out how we were going to move all the equipment and all the medical chests…,” says Dengler. He soon discovered the way things were being organized onto the trucks was wildly inefficient.

Army Lt. Col. (Dr.) Bradley Dengler is the new director of its
Center for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine (CNRM).
The USU alumnus, dual-trained neurosurgeon and neurointensivist
has incorporated USU lessons learned into his career as a military
doctor. [Photo credit: Lt. Col. (Dr.) Bradley Dengler, U.S. Army]

“I remembered being tortured about this by the cadre at Bushmaster:  ‘Have a load plan. How are you going to load it?
What are you going to put on first? What are you going to get off if you have casualties? How are you going to do it?’”

Under Dengler’s leadership, they completely revamped the way the brigade dealt with medical items on convoys, making them more efficient. 

After Ft. Hood, he says he went on and completed his neurosurgery residency, later becoming the only dual-trained neurosurgeon, and neurointensivist in the DOD.

During his two deployments to Iraq, he says his USU education and training also prepared him to deal with some of the unexpected situations that came up.

“No one had done a craniotomy in Iraq in, like, two years because it just wasn’t that busy,” says Dengler, adding he trained his team on what to do in case it should happen anyway. One day, they admitted a member of the Spanish special forces with a congenital cyst that had ruptured, causing a significant amount of bleeding on his brain.

“I did the first craniotomy in Iraq in two years because this Spanish special forces guy had this weird anomaly of a congenital cyst that ruptured and he blew a pupil, essentially, in our CT scanner,” says Dengler. 

Because of the training, they saved the man’s life.  

“I go back to all the USU preparation, and Bushmaster’s ‘train, train, train’ because you don’t want to be figuring this out for the first time in the middle of everything,” says Dengler. “West Point instilled some of that and USU reinforced all those things.”

During his second deployment in late 2019, he went with an active-duty team out of Fort Bragg and the first night they got there they were hit with indirect fire. It was only about a month later when Ayn al-Asad airbase was hit with an Iranian missile barrage.

According to Dengler, one of the most important lessons he learned at USU and used in the field is the importance of staying calm under pressure and under fire.

“We had a hundred-some(-odd) people that have all these concussion symptoms come into the Role II at Ayn al-Asad and we had the only CT scanner that was about a 45-minute MEDEVAC flight. So it was a constant back and forth of who are we going to fly from Ayn al-Asad to where we were and determine who needs what,” says Dengler. “For me, it identified a huge gap in our forward care and our medical knowledge which led to my current line of research efforts:  ‘How do we objectively diagnose those injuries and then predict who can be returned to duty?’”

Next steps

Dengler says all of his experiences in the field inspired him to work toward creating a neuroscience trauma unit, which would be the first clinical research unit of CNRM for severe traumatic brain injury (TBI.)

“I’d like to build a small network of both severe TBI trauma centers along with getting more involved with mild TBI stuff at West Point, Fort Bragg and Fort Hood,” Dengler says. “… and start building a network where we can collect data and evaluate new technologies to help diagnose TBI.”

Incorporating the lessons learned at USU into his career, Dengler is now returning to take his experiences back to the university and a new generation of students.