AUSTIN, Texas — A playback of explosions, gun shots and helicopters is a constant for soldiers, both in training and in combat.
To protect their hearing, they rely on ear plugs.
However, the roughly 250,000 soldiers who served in the U.S. military from 2003 to 2015 in Iraq and Afghanistan claim ear plugs by 3M did the opposite and instead left them with hearing loss.
This week, the Minnesota-based manufacturing company agreed to pay $6 billion to settle those hundreds of thousands of lawsuits.
In a release, 3M said the agreement wasn't an admission of liability, and the ear plugs are "safe and effective when used properly."
James Wood, an Austin-based attorney, represents five of the people involved in the lawsuit.
The five are in their 30s, local first responders and, according to Wood, suffer from hearing loss.
"I don't think I really appreciated the significance of it until I had a 30-something-year-old officer come into my office wearing hearing aids," Wood said.
Wood added, "They were volunteering to go to the frontlines, and this equipment failed them and sacrificed their health and hearing. And so, that's really heartbreaking for me."
The payouts will be distributed between 2023 and 2029, according to 3M.
Wood elaborated that while the settlement is a step in the right direction, he isn't sure if the reward is justified just yet due to the long timeframe of payouts.
Wood explained that a major question raised was if this was a problem back in the early 2000s, why was a solution just now found more than two decades later? He believes part of the problem was the amount of lawsuits filed across the country that had to go though the courts.
It was a legal battle that, Wood said, many supported to reimburse veterans and service members.
"This is not the kind of lawsuit where we're hearing two sides of the story," Wood said. "We're really just hearing support for the veterans because they volunteered to help us, and we want them to be paid back."