Mary Roach - Grunt

Craig splits us into two groups, half on the firing line and the rest, including me, a few yards back in the ready box. “Now if this isn’t for you,” Craig is saying, “if you start to freak out, you can put your weapon down, put your hand up, and say, ‘This isn’t for me.’” If only war were like that.

To get an earplug far enough in to do its job, the pinna—part of the outer ear—must be pulled out and back, an impossible task while wearing a combat helmet. No one, in the heat of a firefight, is going to pause to take off her helmet, pull back her ear, insert the plug, and repeat the whole process on the other side, and then restrap the helmet. There’s time for this on a firing range, and there might have been time on a Civil War battlefield, where soldiers got into formation before the call to charge. Back then, or out here, you knew when the mayhem was about to start, and you had time to prepare, whether that meant affixing bayonets or messing with foamies.

There’s no linear battlefield any more. The front line is everywhere. IEDs go off and things go kinetic with no warning. To protect your hearing using earplugs, you’d have to leave them in for entire thirteen-hour patrols where, 95 percent of the time, nothing loud is happening. No one does that. That’s why Fallon says, “The military doesn’t have a noise problem. It has a quiet problem.”

“Group 2,” yells Craig. That’s me. “Advance to the firing line!”

“Hey, how are you?” says my instructor. “My name’s Jack.” Jack is unlike the Special Ops guys I have met elsewhere. He’s friendly as a Labrador retriever, clean-shaven as a regional sales manager. Perhaps he’s carrying out covert ops in San Diego or Scottsdale and, like the bearded Special Operators in al-Qaeda country, needs to blend in with the local male populace. Perhaps he’s between missions.

Jack points to my helmet. “Those straps need to go over your ear cuffs. Now that’s going to make your helmet tighter, so you probably need to loosen them a little bit.” One of the problems with over-the-ear TCAPS is not the equipment per se but the order in which gear is distributed. Helmet fittings used to happen before TCAPS gear was handed out. Guys would try to put their helmet on with the TCAPS headset and now it would be too tight. This seemingly minor planning boner has cost a lot of men a lot of hearing. The one time an IED exploded near Jack, he wasn’t wearing his TCAPS. “It was hot, and they were giving me a headache, so I opted not to wear them on that one patrol. And that was the one I got blown up on and had significant hearing loss. Aaron had the same thing.”

To my right, an extremely lethal hearing professional has already emptied his first magazine. I’m still battling my helmet straps. “Let me help you,” Jack says. I drop my hands to my lap and let him take over. “Oops, I don’t want to pull your hair.” The gentle sniper.

Jack passes me the M16. “Have you shot a gun like this before?” I shake my very heavy head. He hands me a magazine and shows me where to load it. I’ve seen this in movies—the quick slap with the heel of the hand.

Hmm.

“Other way. So the bullets are facing forward.”

The M16 has a scope with a small red arrow in the center of the sight. You align the arrow with what or (jeez) whom you wish to shoot and squeeze the trigger. Both “squeeze” and “pull” are exaggerations of the motion applied to this trigger. It’s a trivial, tiny movement, the twitch of a dreaming child. So quick and so effortless is it that it’s hard for me to associate it with any but the most inconsequential of acts. Flipping a page. Typing an M . Scratching an itch. Ending a life wants a little more muscle.

The crack of an M16 is around 160 decibels. Jack estimates he’s fired a hundred thousand rounds in his ten-plus years in Special Operations. Weapons and explosions, rather than ongoing “steady-state” noise from vehicle engines and rotors (and MP3 players), [16] According to the Department of Defense Hearing Center of Excellence, 12 to 16 percent of American children ages six to nineteen have noise-induced hearing loss. And not from vacuuming and mowing the lawn. Full volume on an MP3 player is 112 decibels, enough to cause hearing loss after one minute. Have you seen Die Antwoord live? (120–130 decibels.) I’m sorry for your loss. are the biggest contributors to the $1 billion a year the Veterans Administration spends on hearing loss and tinnitus.

Most of those hundred thousand rounds may not even have registered, not because Jack had hearing protection on but because his attention was elsewhere. “When you get in a gun fight and you’re up close and personal,” he says, “your mind triages what’s most important to you.” It’s a survival mechanism, called auditory exclusion. The possibility that you may lose a little hearing doesn’t make the cut.

A sniper also doesn’t, I’m guessing, pay much mind to the kind of thing I’m focused on right now: that raising your arms to hold a rifle while lying on your belly causes your ballistic vest to ride up and hit the back of your helmet, tilting it down over your forehead so that it pushes on your eye protection, causing the lenses to knife into your cheeks.

“How do you do this job?” The petulant writer. Jack doesn’t answer for a moment. He must get this question a fair amount, and most of the people asking are not thinking about the aggravations of incompatible ballistic protection items.

“There’s a lot to get used to.”

IIMAGINE THE Special Operators were paid for their time today, but it’s also possible they did it for the steak. The Camp Pendleton catering staff have placed in front of Jack and myself a filet mignon the size of a grenade. Fallon got the fish. He looks like he’s about to cry.

“You know what the hardest thing for us is?” [17] Apparently nothing. In 2008, a team of psychologists asked nineteen snipers who had served in Afghanistan what they’d found most troubling. Ninety to 95 percent reported having little or no trouble with killing an enemy, handling or uncovering human remains, engaging in hand-to-hand combat, being wounded, having a buddy shot nearby, or “seeing dead Canadians.” (It was a Canadian study.) Jack glances around the table. “This right here.”

“Yeah.” I get it. Strangers with their questions and assumptions.

It turns out Jack wasn’t referring to any of that. By “us” he didn’t mean snipers or Special Operators. He meant the hard of hearing. And “this right here” meant a loud dinner table. Jack says some of his peers cope by asking a lot of questions and pretending to hear the answers. “You see them sitting there nodding, going, ‘Uh huh, uh huh.’” Others just withdraw from the interaction.

A version of this withdrawal happens in combat. I tell Jack and Fallon about the work of a team of researchers with Walter Reed’s National Military Audiology and Speech Center. Doug Brungart and Ben Sheffield have been documenting the effects of hearing loss on lethality and survivability. (Because the data-gathering requires Sheffield, with his clipboard, to run around in the midst of the action, military exercises stand in for actual combat.) Members of the 101st Airborne Division agreed to wear special helmets rigged with hearing loss simulators. Among the top-performing teams, even mild hearing loss caused a 50 percent decrease in “kill ratio” (the number of enemies eliminated divided by the number of surviving teammates). Not so much because their difficulty hearing was causing them to shoot or run in the wrong direction, but because they were unsure of what was going on. With their ability to communicate compromised, their actions were more tentative.