St. Charles County native receives Purple Heart for brain injury suffered in Afghanistan

Nearly four years ago, Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Johnson was on the phone with his wife while he was stationed at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

“I heard an explosion, and then I felt crinkles in the building,” Johnson said. “And then I felt this weird tipping motion. I felt like I was in a container that was tipping over.”

Other soldiers reported that the shock wave alone made the room look like a tornado had come through, breaking windows, buckling walls and caving in the ceiling. A truck carrying an improvised explosive device had detonated about 350 feet from their sleeping quarters.

Johnson hung up the phone, finished getting dressed and joined his fellow soldiers fighting off an attack by the Taliban.

For Johnson, the attack led to a monthslong process of diagnosis and treatment for a traumatic brain injury, which ultimately led the Army to award him a Purple Heart. He received it Friday at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri's Ozarks, where he is now on an assignment as a drill sergeant.

The Purple Heart is a U.S. military decoration awarded to those wounded or killed while serving.

The extent of Johnson’s injury was not immediately obvious, but his fellow soldiers noticed something wasn’t right.

“He routinely seemed disoriented and easily irritated, without being able to explain the cause,” Sgt. Matthew Burns wrote in a statement that was part of Johnson’s Purple Heart review.