Mary Roach: Grunt

Other bases require this at 4:30 or 5:00 p.m., when the flag is taken in. When the music begins playing, you stop what you’re doing and face the flag. I was at Natick Labs when this happened. Without explanation, my hosts stopped talking, turned, and solemnly faced a display model of a new containerized latrine standing in the sight lines of the flag. Having heard about the horrors of open-bay toileting, it seemed wholly appropriate for us to direct some respect, however unintended, to the Expeditionary Tricon Latrine System.

Tips for hole-living: Double-bag your peanut butter sandwiches in gallon Ziplocs, as the bags serve double-duty as the toilet. Bring cat litter to put in the bags in case diarrhea strikes, which it does reliably enough that the man who told me this, an air strike controller just back from Niger, was confronted by his commander wanting to know why Special Operations Command was requisitioning kitty litter.

The clean-shaving rule began with the gas attacks of World War I. Whiskers compromise the airtight seal of a gas mask. (Special Operators are exempt because they may need to blend in with bearded Muslim locals, and because they’re Special.) There were also some hygiene concerns. In 1967, the Department of the Army undertook an investigation entitled “Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men.” To see whether bearded sixties bio-warfare lab workers might be putting their family members at risk via “intimate contact,” the researchers fashioned some human hair beards, contaminated them with deadly pathogens, and attached them to manikin heads. The heads then became intimate with some chicks. “Each of three 6-week-old chickens was held with its head alternately nestled in the beard and stroked across one-third of the beard (one chicken on each side and one on the chin).” When the beards were washed according to lab safety protocol, none of the nine chicks exposed to the highest concentration of the virus became infected. The heads with unwashed beards, however, transmitted deadly disease to the chicks with whom they’d been intimate. The chicks died, and the heads were never really the same after that.

Dale Smith, a historian of military medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, is dubious. Bollet, he says, drew the conclusion from one man’s story. Certainly no such etiquette prevails among military historians, who take any opportunity to shoot each other down.

How did Mexico become the poster child for travelers’ diarrhea? One hypothesis, mine, points a finger at the godfather of diarrhea research, Herbert DuPont. For almost thirty years, DuPont ran studies out of Guadalajara, Mexico. If you plug “Guadalajara” and “diarrhea” into the PubMed database, you get forty-five journal articles and a persuasive argument for changing your holiday destination to Switzerland. (“Enteric pathogens in Mexican sauces in popular restaurants in Guadalajara…”; “Coliform contamination of vegetables obtained from popular restaurants in Guadalajara…”; “Coliform and E. coli contamination of desserts served in public restaurants in Guadalajara…”)

There has been at least one well-intentioned effort to clear Mexico’s name. The author of a paper in California Medicine had read that Mexicans often get travelers’ diarrhea when they visit California. She wondered if perhaps the stress of travel, rather than poor sanitation, was to blame. She interviewed 215 foreign UCLA freshmen and 238 American freshmen about “changes in frequency and consistency of stools.” None of the foreign students appeared to have had travelers’ diarrhea, though it was difficult to tell because many “did not understand the interviewer’s terms.” You can see where “watery stool” or “explosive diarrhea” might be confusing, frightening even, for the non-native speaker.

Insect shit.

Post-Vietnam-era mortuary practice forbids this, as the pesticides could interfere with the chemical and genetic analyses done as part of an autopsy. Also verboten in morgues: electric fly zappers. They cause the flies to explode, scattering their DNA and the DNA of whatever bodies they’ve been crawling on. Military morgues rely on “air curtains” to keep flies out. The air curtain is a high-tech version of the “fly curtain,” the beaded strands that hang in doorways in Middle Eastern homes, allowing breezes, but not flies, to pass. Who among the thousands of youthful 1970s doofs who hung these in their bedrooms had any clue as to the beads’ provenance as fly control? Not this doof.

Tobin Rowland, the man who now holds the job, gave me the WRAIR Insect Kitchen recipe for sandfly larvae food. Mix rabbit feces, alfalfa, and water, and pour into nine large round pans. Soak for two weeks, or until mold covers entire surface, yielding what WRAIR entomology director Dan Szumlas calls a “lemon-meringue feces” appearance. Let dry and grind. Rabbit dung is used because it smells better than cow dung, not because it’s cheap. Rabbit turds are more expensive than rabbits. WRAIR’s supplier, which holds a monopoly by virtue of no one else’s having wanted or thought to compete, charges $35 a gallon.

Medicare reimbursement code for maggots: CPT 99070.

I am inclined to like a man who creates—for a medical practice that specializes in bowl-shaped, moist red wounds—the acronym SALSA.

My favorites, in alphabetical order: ashless paper, boosters and bursters, collapsible motorcycles, Hedy Lamarr, luminous tape, nonrattle paper, paper pipes, pocket incendiaries, punk type cigarette lighters, smatchets, sympathetic fuses, and tree climbers.

Including—attention, aging M*A*S*H fans—a Major Frank Burns. I nursed a fleeting hope that a Major Houlihan would appear on a CC list alongside him, but it was not to be.

For years, the most-requested scent at eclectic fragrance firm Demeter was newborn baby’s head. So they isolated and synthesized it. (Weird? Not for Demeter. Their line also includes Laundromat, Mildew, Paint, Play-Doh, Dirt, and Pruning Shears.) Baby’s Head did not test well. Outside the context of a baby, it turns out, newborn scalp odor isn’t well liked. The firm added baby powder and citrus notes and changed the name to New Baby. Baby’s Head perhaps making some people uncomfortable, what with Pruning Shears right next door.

In highly dilute form, skatole adds a flowery note to perfumes and artificial raspberry and vanilla flavors. This I learned from HMDB, the Human Metabolome Database, which I consult the way normal people consult IMDb.

This is not the reason International Flavors and Fragrances developed a proprietary vomit scent. They did so at the request of a company that planned to market it as a diet aid, a stick-up odor dispenser that would discourage you from eating by making your refrigerator stink like vomit. The item was never produced, because in tests, a certain percentage of people, particularly if they were hungry, had a positive response to the smell. They wanted to have it as a snack.

As opposed to a “stale-uriney BO smell,” the smell my stepdaughter Phoebe, as a little girl growing up in a big city, called hobo pee. Monell Chemical Senses Center BO expert Chris Mauté surmises that “hobo pee” is the smell of sweat and sebum that has been extensively broken down by bacteria: “the kimchee of body odor.”