In 2009, it was Hovda who delivered the Pentagon the recommendation that because multiple concussions could cause serious long-term injury, concussions need time to heal. 

This is an Attributive Claim because the author doesn’t make the claim directly, instead the claim is stated but under the words of Hovda. 

A fight ensued. Hovda says some of the Army’s best doctors implied that if soldiers were told they needed rest after concussions, it was going to usher in an epidemic of fakers, or retired guys claiming disability way after the fact.

This is another Attributive Claim because instead of the author directly making the claim, the claim is still said but is attributed to Hovda. The claim made by Hovda is a Causal Claim because it is predicting that if rest was provided as an option, there would be an increase in fakers.

Although, the NFL was given the same memo in the 1990s, and brain damage in boxers is even older news, so it doesn’t seem like it would take a neuroscientist—or the top medical brass of an Army that builds laser cannons—to figure out that if 25 mph punches to the head cause brain damage, IED blasts that hit at 330 mph probably do too.

This is a Categorical Claim because it lumps together NFL concussions and boxing concussions, claiming that they belong to the same category as concussions in the Army. There is also an evaluative numerical claim here by drawing the conclusions from the given factual evidence backed up by numbers.

Eventually, Hovda’s cause prevailed. These days, there are MRIs in theater, assessments after blasts, mandatory rest periods after a concussion. But those reforms came seven years into the Iraq War, after Caleb and a million other soldiers were already home. 

This is a Categorical Claim because the author lists different things that have been done in response to Hovda’s case, therefore grouping them together in the same category.

When people ask Hovda if they’re gonna get better, he encourages them that they’re gonna get different. That they will never be the same—researchers “have tried hyperbaric oxygen, hundreds of clinical trials; we’re just failing miserably in trying to make a difference”—but that they should not panic. “There’s good rehabilitation strategies: learn what your deficits are, learn that you’re not going crazy, that you just can’t do what you used to do,” he says. 

This is a Recommendation or Proposal Claim by saying that Hovda “encourages them” and “that they should not panic” the author is using Hovda’s claim by way of an attributive claim to tell them how to move forward in their actions

“The human brain has an enormous amount of plasticity. New cells are born every day. New connections can be made. The good news is, teleologically speaking, if we didn’t have the ability to recover from brain injury, we’d have ended up as somebody’s breakfast.”

This is a Factual and a Causal Claim because the author describes the brain and uses the facts known about the brain. The author then uses a by way of an if then statement.