Mary Roach - Grunt

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I quote the paper “What Can Birds Hear?” The author, Robert Beason, notes that acoustic signals work best when “reinforced with activities that produce death or a painful experience…” He meant for some members of the flock, whereupon the rest would presumably take note. As would animal rights activists, producing a painful experience for public affairs staff.

Kelley’s furthest foray outside the box came at a 1994 Wright Laboratory brainstorming session on nonlethal weapons. In the category of “chemicals to spray on enemy positions,” he came up with “strong aphrodisiacs.” Was the idea to develop a compound that would generate feelings of love for the enemy? “No,” Kelley said. “The idea was to ruin their morale because they’re worried their buddy is going to come in their foxhole and make fond advances.” And come in their foxhole.

Natick Labs and precursor the Quartermaster Subsistence Research Laboratory have extended shelf lives to near immortality. They currently make a sandwich that keeps for three years. Meat, in particular, has come a long way since the Revolutionary and Civil wars, when beef came fresh off cattle driven alongside the troops. During World War II, the aptly named subsistence lab developed partly hydrogenated, no-melt “war lard” and heavily salted and cured, extra-dry “war hams” that kept for six months without refrigeration and earned the not exactly over-the-moon descriptors “palatable and satisfactory.” I quote there the July–August 1943 Breeder’s Gazette , sister publication of the Poultry Tribune , a newspaper either about or for barnyard fowl.

Misspelled as “Uoellette” on the Natick Building Inventory, and “Oullette” on the sign outside the building. Somebody burned for that one.

I went on the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System to find you a figure for the number of burns caused each year by pantyhose. Alas, NEISS doesn’t break clothing injuries down by specific garment. I skimmed “thermal burns, daywear” until I ran out of patience, somewhere around the thirty-seven-year-old man who tried to iron his pants while wearing them.

Including the skin of children whose parents, like mine, collected the mercury from broken thermometers and put it in a plastic margarine tub for them to play with. The sixties sure were different.

Is it possible for an organization to have enough hook-and-loop fastener concerns to merit a whole agenda? When that organization is the US Army, it is. The US Army has enough hook-and-loop fastener concerns to merit an entire Hook and Loop Task Group (a sub-subcommittee of the Combat Clothing Utility Subcommittee).

Defense Department facial hair policy is so complex that the Army saw fit to create visual aids for identifying Unauthorized Male Mustaches and Unauthorized Male Sideburns. Grids are overlaid on drawings of faces with labeled letter points, A, B, C, D. No such aid or information is provided for unauthorized female or transgender facial hair, and I encourage all such enlistees to begin growing their Fu Manchus and muttonchops now.

The Cold Weather Trigger Finger Mitten Insert, a component of the Extreme Cold Weather Mitten Set. As opposed to the Intermediate Cold Wet Glove or the almost fashionable-sounding Summer Flyer’s Glove.

Referred to casually as the “combat diaper” or “blast diaper.” But not “codpiece.” Possibly because codpieces likely had nothing to do with genital protection—or fashion, for that matter, or cod. C. S. Reed, writing in the Occasional Medical History Series of the Internal Medicine Journal , speculates that codpieces were worn to cover syphilitic buboes (swollen, inflamed lymph nodes) and the “bulky woolen wads” used to absorb the “foul and large volumes of mixed pus and blood… discharged from the genital organs.” It’s all speculative, because the fabric codpieces, the pus, and the woolens have all disintegrated in the intervening centuries. We do have Henry VIII’s suit of armor, which features a codpiece like the nose of a Cessna, but historians now say there’s no evidence the king had syphilis. The only thing I can say for sure is that Bubo (in Kuwait City) is an even less appealing name for an eating establishment than Bursa (San Francisco).

I emailed Vandue Corp, one of the companies that sell full-body Lycra suits, to see if they were aware of having tapped the cadaver apparel market. The customer care person replied that they were not. Though word had reached them that their product had caught on with bank robbers, as the face is covered but allows the wearer (if living) to see out. Presumably the felon, unlike the Halloween revelers and sports fans who more routinely don Lycra suits, wore some clothing over his. Though I hope not. And I further hope he selected the Sock Monkey pattern.

Sleeping subway riders, conversely, look exactly like dead men—a fact born out by the regular appearance of news items about commuters who quietly die and then sit, slumped and unnoticed, through several round-trip circuits of the route. As a passenger quoted in “Corpse Rode the No. 1 Train for Hours” attests, “He just looked like he was asleep.”

And, though you didn’t ask for it, here’s one more similarity between bullets and earplugs: Both have been used by physicians to protect their ears from screams. The Army Medical Department Journal states that the real reason soldiers in the pre-anesthesia era were given a bullet to bite was not to help them endure the pain but to quiet their screams. And from a paper called “The History and Development of the E-A-R Foam Earplug” we learn that emergency room docs use foamies “to block the screams of children during difficult procedures.” This was part of a section on “unusual applications,” none of which were especially unusual. I may have had unreasonable expectations for the history of the foam earplug.

“It’s almost like he knows you,” said the researcher.

In Afghanistan, this means twelve and up, a designation we in the West innocently reserve for toys and board games.

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.

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.)