JEFFERSON COUNTY, N.Y. -- "I can't remember a lot of the stuff that happened. Luckily, I have a short-term memory loss and I can't remember," former Staff Sergeant Brian Wells said of his near fatal incident in Iraq.

It is the wife of Wells who has been filling in the details for him of what happened to him in Iraq nearly four years ago. He was shot in the helmet by an insurgent sniper. The bullet lodged in his skull and fragments into his brain. He, along with numerous others like him, should have been for all intents and purposes, dead. He says it's a miracle he's alive.

"We did it for our country that we obviously love," Wells said. "We got wounded and now we're stuck with something that we can't get rid of for the rest of our lives. We're doing the best we can to adjust to it."

Even after years of rehabilitation, Wells is nowhere near done, still having trouble with speech, memory and other problems associated with traumatic brain injury. He's one of 360,000 military members and veterans statewide suffering from brain injuries.

That statistic was just one of many discussed at a seminar at Bonnie Castle in Alexandria Bay Thursday called Beyond the Invisible. A days worth of topics involving everything brain injury related, including those things that might not be as obvious as Wells.

"Anxiety, depression," retired Colonel James McDonough, the NYS Division of Veteran's Affairs Director said. "Many of our service members come back looking perfectly fine. But inside the brain, inside the human body, the wounds of war both visible and invisible, the nature of this particular injury can go unnoticed."

But this injury isn't just military related. In fact, about 1.5 million new cases are detected each year with falls the number one cause, like what recently happened to actress Natasha Richardson.

Doctors say the injury is more common than anyone knows and it's important to be aware and ask questions if you feel you are suffering or know someone who might have just injured themselves.

"You see what you ask for and you ask for what you know," Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine Medical Director Steven Flanagan, M.D., said. "So if you don't know to ask these questions, you'll never find out. But hopefully someone's coming to you with complaints of decrease in memory or irritability."

And that's exactly what Wells has been doing. Asking enough about his life that he's written papers and worked with the Brain Injury Association of New York State to not only help himself, but help others. He's even the focus, along with two others, of a 30-minute documentary that talks of his life after Iraq and helps people understand brain injury from a direct point of view.

For more information on brain injuries and how to get a free copy of the documentary, visit www.bianys.org.