Mary Roach: Grunt

Two months into it, the Chief of the American Intelligence Command wrote to Harold Coolidge urging him to add piranhas to the list. AIC needed better piranha intelligence. Years ago, nature filmmaker Wolfgang Bayer told me the story of the time he was sent to the Amazon to get footage of bloodthirsty piranhas devouring a capybara. Bayer strung nets across the river to trap a school of piranhas. He captured a capybara and herded it into the river. Nothing. He starved the piranhas. Still nothing. He went home.

You may have heard stories about how Julia Child’s first recipe was for shark repellent. Her OSS employment file shows that she indeed worked for the head of the shark repellent project, Harold Coolidge, in the Office of Emergency Rescue Equipment in 1944. However, her title was Senior Clerk, and her name appears nowhere in the OSS shark files. Child herself made no claim to have come up with the recipe for Shark Chaser but said merely that she followed it, mixing the ingredients “in a bathtub.” This seems odd, as none of the other repellent prototypes were produced or tested at OSS headquarters. Leading me to wonder: Did she cook up Shark Chaser, or just a good story?

The creator of the two-piece swimsuit, Louis Réard, named it “bikini” because of the explosive reaction he hoped it would generate. The false prefix “bi” has duped many over the years—including the inventors of the monokini, the tankini, the trikini—into wrongly assuming that bikini means “two pieces” in Marshallese. In fact, it means “coconut place”—making the term deliciously if inadvertently appropriate.

This one is not so bad, provided you know what you’re doing. Norwegian shipwreck survivor Kaare Karstaad, whom Harold Coolidge interviewed while working on an ocean survival booklet during World War II, knew what he was doing. He’d catch the turtles at night, when their blood was “cold and refreshing.” “Drink it right away,” he counseled, “before coagulation takes place.” Don’t shy away from body cavity fluid! A fifty-pound turtle yields “about 2 cups of ‘consommé’ which… is delicious and not extremely fishy.” Sharks, by the way, were “not particularly vicious.” (Or delicious.)

As someone for whom the phrase “top secret” has applied mainly to decoder rings and campy spy movies, I had to remind myself that these are actual security classifications. I found it hard to take seriously the sign on the chain stretched across the navigation room door saying, TOP SECRET—KEEP OUT. They may as well have added NO GIRLS ALLOWED. I saw a printer in the crew lounge labeled SECRET PRINTER. Secret printer!

Almost as good as this one, by Andrew Karam, in the cold war–era submarine memoir Rig Ship for Ultra Quiet : “Bug juice didn’t come in flavors, just colors.”

In military slang, there’s a friendly epithet for everyone. I, for example, am a “media puke.”

By weight, a submarine carries more paperwork than it does people—despite the best efforts of Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf III. Metcalf, who led the invasion of Grenada, waged an equally headstrong campaign for shipboard computerization—“a paperless ship by 1990,” he told the New York Times in 1987. He calculated that even a smaller surface warship carries 20 tons of technical manuals, logs, forms, and shelving—tonnage that could be used for fuel or ordnance. Metcalf’s battle cry (“We do not shoot paper at the enemy”) attracted some media attention and probably one or two spitballs, but—if the USS Tennessee is any indication—no serious commitment to change.

To reduce troops’ load, the Army adds caffeine to gum or mints or foods that soldiers are already carrying, like jerky. Natick public affairs officer David Accetta feeds a Caffeinated Meat Stick to reporters who visit the food lab. To me, it tasted just like you’d expect caffeinated meat to taste. Accetta was taken aback. “Brian Williams loved them.” Or did he ?

Though not, as correspondence in the Nathaniel Kleitman Papers reveals, without its challenges. To avoid “the danger of rats jumping up,” the researchers’ beds were outfitted with special five-foot-high legs with “tin rat guards.” Alas, there was no rat guard for publicity-seeking tourist attraction managers and noisome reporters. Kleitman had made clear he wanted no press involvement, but about a week into the experiment, Mammoth Cave general manager W. W. Thompson sent a note down with the evening meal saying that reporters had somehow , mysteriously , found out about it and were clamoring for access. Kleitman did not go quietly. He asked to review the copy. He made News of the Day state in writing that they would “in no way ridicule the experiment.” Life magazine got the last laugh: A “printer’s mistake,” the editors claimed in a letter of apology, caused Kleitman’s title (“Dr.”) to be “transposed” with the “Mr.” before the name of his grad student.

It’s not just alertness that waxes and wanes. Gut motility also follows a circadian pattern. Healthy humans rarely crap after midnight, unless they’ve just arrived in a distant time zone.

Female soldiers, unlike males, receive vouchers to shop for their own underthings. The US military is gearing up to buy uniforms embedded with photovoltaic panels— shirts that can recharge a radio battery —but it is not up to the task of purchasing bras for female soldiers. “I’ve done that sort of shopping with my wife,” said an Army spokesman quoted in Bloomberg Business . “It’s not easy to do.”

Usually the victim’s, but occasionally a fragment from a suicide bomber. According to Stone, there has not been a documented case in which a piece of a terrorist’s bone was the cause of death. (Medical examiners do not use the term “organic shrapnel.” That originated in Falling Man author Don DeLillo’s cranium.)