Marshall Dial sits at the picnic table and slides packages of chocolate wafers and licorice sticks to his friend, a fellow Iraq war veteran.

"They didn't have MoonPies," Dial says.

His friend looks at the packages without expression. He doesn't open them. He and Dial both have traumatic brain injuries caused by roadside bombs, and both suffer post-traumatic stress.

Two weeks earlier, Dial's friend got drunk and began cutting himself with a razor. Police referred him to a treatment program here at the Kansas City Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Same way Dial came here last year. Walk in or we'll carry you in, the police told him. Dial walked.

"Do you want a wafer?" Dial asks.

"Yeah, please."

"Do you remember when it happened to you?"

"No. I wish I did," his friend says. "People ask me and stuff, and I can't tell them."

Dial, 34, has short brown hair and a well-trimmed beard. He wears a white T-shirt and shorts, and he idly twirls the sunglasses he wore in Iraq. He compares traumatic brain injury with a head cold. Feel a little dopey, in a fog. But with a cold, eventually the fog lifts. With TBI, it doesn't.

Just this morning, he was making coffee and asked his wife, Lori, "Is it two teaspoons for every cup?"

"No," she said. "One tablespoon for every two cups."

"Isn't that the same thing?"

"No."

The memory lapses frustrate Dial. Everybody he knows holds a job except for him. That's how a guy defines himself. Work. But instead he receives disability. What do you do? people ask him. I'm a disabled vet, he replies. They question that because he doesn't appear to be injured. They can't see the damage to his brain. They've seen the news, guys who have lost their legs and now want to re-enlist, and they look at him with doubt. I'm the TBI guy, he tells them.

"I think you'd rather have had a leg blown off than your brain hurt," Lori says.

———

As the number of veterans with traumatic brain injuries continues to climb — up to 320,000 who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the latest estimates — the federal government is realizing that they need more help.

The Department of Veterans Affairs recently announced a substantial increase in disability payments for veterans who suffer from mild forms of TBI. Those with symptoms such as dizziness, headaches, ringing in the ears and sensitivity to light had received $117 a month. Now that amount could increase to $600 a month. The VA estimated the changes will total $120 million through 2017.

More than 22,000 veterans are being compensated for TBI, including almost 6,000 who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Many veterans may not realize they have TBI.

"These guys are in these explosions on a daily basis," said psychologist George Harris, who handles workers' compensation cases, including TBI. "They're like a boxer experiencing incremental injuries to the brain. You don't know anything is wrong until they try to do complex cognitive tasks."

Most of the returning vets are younger than 35, and their care could last years, says Claude Guidry, who coordinates programs for veterans of recent conflicts for the Kansas City VA hospital.

"What does long term mean?" he said. "It could be 40 years, but we have to care for them."

Dial offers his friend another wafer.

"Were you hit in your first or second tour?"

"Second. Got hit protecting a convoy. Roadside bomb."

"Were you wearing armguards and everything?"

"Yeah. In a Humvee with armor and a turret and a .50 cal."

"Where were you at?"

"A-Base, Anaconda."

"That's where I was," Dial says. "In Balad."

He pauses. Sometimes when he talks, he feels himself drifting. His voice slows and fades to a whispered monotone. He knows what he's saying, but the cart is full. Thoughts disconnecting. Circuit overload. Too much information to absorb.

"I think we've had this conversation before," he says after a moment. "We'll have it again, I'm sure."

Dial joined the Army after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It was almost an instinctive reaction. He decided to be a combat medic so he would have a skill after his enlistment.

He served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. He can't remember the date when a roadside bomb caused his brain injury. He knows it happened in summer 2005, sometime after July, but the exact date remains out of reach.

However, the details of that day remain clear. He was in the third vehicle of an Army convoy, a four-seat Humvee. Soft top, double-armored. A friend drove. Dial was listening to radio traffic when the vehicle struck a roadside bomb.

His door blew open. He recalls the driver shaking him, shouting. Dial saw his mouth moving but couldn't hear him. His ears rang. Smoke was thick. He turned around to check the guys in the back seats. It was a miracle no one was killed or burned to a crisp. His stomach, neck and back hurt. He felt a huge adrenaline rush.

Back at Anaconda, he felt sick and vomited, unaware that was a TBI symptom.

Days later, he noticed he had trouble concentrating and had to write things on his hand — the time of a convoy, schedules. His thoughts were jumbled. He understood only bits and pieces of conversation.

Some of the guys called him out on it. Still, he didn't think he had anything going on. He just had to work harder. He was in the middle of a war zone.

He has forgotten a lot of things, but not the soldier's motto: I will always place the mission first, I will never accept defeat, I will never quit and I will never leave a fallen comrade. He was not the type of person to complain. He could still shoot, walk and drive. When other soldiers were losing their arms and legs, that was good enough for him.

Lori noticed changes in her husband even before his return to the States. He quit writing letters and rambled in his phone calls, but she attributed it to stress. He did not tell her about the roadside bomb.

Back home, she realized something was not right. Her father was a Vietnam combat vet, so she recognized symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Anger, anxiety. But other behavior was just plain weird.

Dial would take Lori to the grocery store and drive off. You left Mom, the kids would tell him. He asked friends to meet him at one place, and then he drove to another. Sometimes he wouldn't come home for hours, and Lori began thinking he didn't want to be with them.

He planned to be a paramedic and trained with Metropolitan Ambulance Services Trust. But he became confused, couldn't remember the names of certain equipment. He failed his exam, took it again, failed it again. A paramedic pulled him aside. "I think you may have a head injury," the paramedic said. Dial dismissed it. He just had to work harder.

Last year, returning from a camping trip with Lori and the kids, Dial was stopped at a police checkpoint. The car's air conditioning didn't work, and Dial opened the door. An officer told him to close it. He did. Moments later, he opened it. The officer told him to shut it again. He did and then opened it once more. He couldn't remember what he had just been told.

This went on — back and forth, back and forth — for minutes at a time until the officer had had enough and grabbed Dial's arm. After an altercation that included more officers, Dial was taken to the police station.

Lori explained her husband was an Iraq war vet with post-traumatic stress disorder. An officer there also had served in Iraq. Eventually, they reached an agreement. Dial would be released providing he left the station and drove directly to the VA with no stops in between. Lori's father recommended a doctor who diagnosed her husband with traumatic brain injury.

"What are you taking?" Dial asks his friend.

"All kinds of stuff. Mainly for anxiety and depression."

"People used to say to me, 'You're depressed.' I said, 'I'm not depressed. I'm angry!' It seemed like no one understood. You leave there, come here. This is a theme park compared to over there. I wanted to grab people and shake them. 'Do you know what the real world is like?"'

"When you got hit, were you taking troops or supplies?"

"Supplies."

"You forget stuff?"

"All the time."

With counseling and therapy and medication, Dial has improved. He has prescriptions for an array of medications to help with sleep, migraine headaches and anxiety. Lori sorts them for him.

Dial carries a cell phone that beeps to remind him of appointments. A car navigation system helps him when he gets lost on familiar streets. The equipment, he jokes, is only as good as the person using it.

Still, he struggles. It might take him two or three days to cut the lawn. He gets distracted and wanders off. Or he'll change the oil in the car and not remember he changed it.

He asks Lori the same questions over and over. Is it two teaspoons for every cup? She calmly gives the same answer, but he knows he stresses her. She is his rock, the left side of his brain. But she has the children to watch over, too. She can't rely on him like she once had.

Most of the time he's fine, then something happens. She asks him to go to the grocery store and he drives to his mother's house instead. Then they both see once more how different he is and how different they are as a couple.

"One time," Dial tells his friend, "I hear this tink, tink, tink. Then boom! It was an RPG and missed us. Only people I saw was kids throwing rocks."

"They see their daddies fighting all the time, and they do it, too."

Dial reaches for the last wafer. He listens as his friend talks about a time his convoy was ambushed. He fired the .50-caliber machine gun and they kept driving until they got out of there.

"That'll do it," Dial says of the .50-caliber.

"Yeah."

"Rule number one: Come back alive."

"Yeah."

"And here we are," Dial says. "Here we are."