Mary Roach - Stiff

The United States Army was by no means the first to sanction the experimental plugging of civilian cadavers. The French army, wrote La Garde in his book Gunshot Injuries , had been “firing into dead bodies for the purpose of teaching the effects of gunshots in war” since around 1800.

Ditto the Germans, who went to the exquisite trouble of propping up their mock victims al fresco, at distances approximating those of an actual battlefield. Even the famously neutral Swiss sanctioned a series of military wound ballistics studies on cadavers in the late 1800s. Theodore Kocher, a Swiss professor of surgery and a member of the Swiss army militia (the Swiss prefer not to fight, but they are armed, and with more than little red pocket knife/can openers), spent a year firing Swiss Vetterli rifles into all manner of targets—bottles, books, water-filled pig intestines, oxen bones, human skulls, and, ultimately, a pair of whole human cadavers— with the aim of understanding the mechanisms of wounding from bullets.

Kocher—and to a certain extent La Garde—expressed a desire that their ballistics work with cadavers would lead to a more humanitarian form of gun battle. Kocher urged that the goal of warfare be to render the enemy not dead, but simply unable to fight. To this end, he advised limiting the size of the bullets and making them from a material of a higher melting point than lead, so that they would deform less and thus destroy less tissue.

Incapacitation—or stopping power, as it is known in munitions circles—became the Holy Grail of ballistics research. How to stop a man in his tracks, preferably without maiming or killing him, but definitely before he maimed or killed you first. Indeed, the next time Captain La Garde and his swinging cadavers took the stage, in 1904, it was in the name of improved stopping power. The topic had been high on the generals’ to-do lists following the army’s involvement in the Philippines, during the final stage of the Spanish-American War, where its Colt .38s had failed, on numerous occasions, to stop the enemy cold. While the Colt .38 was considered sufficient for “civilized” warfare—“even the stoical Japanese soldier,” wrote La Garde in Gunshot Injuries , “fell back as a rule when he was hit the first time”—such was apparently not the case with “savage tribes or a fanatical enemy.” The Moro tribesman of the Philippines was considered a bit of both: “A fanatic like a Moro, wielding a bolo in each hand who advances with leaps and bounds… must be hit with a projectile having a maximum amount of stopping power,” wrote La Garde. (The Moro were best known for their prowess with knives, not bolos, and were said to take pride in their ability to halve an opponent in a single blow.) He related the tale of one battle-enlivened tribesman who charged a U.S. Army guard unit. “When he was within 100 yards, the entire guard opened fire on him.” Nonetheless, he managed to advance some ninety-five yards toward them before finally crashing to the ground.

La Garde, at the War Department’s urging, undertook an investigation of the army’s various guns and bullets and their relative efficacy at putting a rapid halt to enemies. He decided that one way to do this would be to fire at suspended cadavers and take note of the “shock,” as estimated by “the disturbance which appeared.” In other words, how far back does the hanging torso or arm or leg swing when you shoot it? “It was based on the assumption that the momentum of hanging bodies of various weights could somehow be correlated and measured, and that it actually meant something with regard to stopping power,” says Evan Marshall, who wrote the book on handgun stopping power (it’s called Handgun Stopping Power) . “What it actually did was extrapolate questionable data from questionable tests.”

Even Captain La Garde came to realize that if you want to find out how likely a gun is to stop someone, you are best off trying it on an entity that isn’t already quite permanently stopped. In other words, a live entity.

“The animals selected were beeves about to undergo slaughter in the Chicago stock-yards,” wrote La Garde, deeply perplexing the ten or fifteen people who would be reading his book later than the 1930s, when the word “beeves,” meaning cattle, dropped from everyday discourse.

Sixteen beeves later, La Garde had his answer: Whereas the larger-caliber (.45) Colt revolver bullets caused the cattle to drop to the ground after three or four shots, the animals shot with smaller-caliber .38 bullets failed even after ten shots to drop to the ground. And ever since, the U.S. Army has gone confidently into battle, knowing that when cows attack, their men will be ready.

For the most part, it has been the lowly swine that has borne the brunt of munitions trauma research in the United States and Europe. In China—at the No. 3 Military Medical College and the China Ordnance Society, among others—it has been mongrel dogs that get shot at. In Australia, as reported in the Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Wound Ballistics, the researchers took aim at rabbits. It is tempting to surmise that a culture chooses its most reviled species for ballistics research. China occasionally eats its dogs, but doesn’t otherwise have much use or affection for them; in Australia, rabbits are considered a scourge—imported by the British for hunting, they multiplied (like rabbits) and, in a span of twenty years, wiped out two million acres of south Australian brush.

In the case of the U.S. and European research, the theory doesn’t hold.

Pigs don’t get shot at because our culture reviles them as filthy and disgusting. Pigs get shot at because their organs are a lot like ours. The heart of the pig is a particularly close match. Goats were another favorite, because their lungs are like ours. I was told this by Commander Marlene DeMaio, who studies body armor at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). Talking to DeMaio, I got the impression that it would be possible to construct an entire functioning nonhuman human from pieces of other species. “The human knee most resembles the brown bear’s,” she said at one point, following up with a surprising or not so surprising statement: “The human brain most resembles that of Jersey cows at about six months.” [22] I did not ask DeMaio about sheep and the purported similarity of portions of their reproductive anatomy to that of the human female, lest she be forced to draw conclusions about the similarity of my intellect and manners to that of the, I don’t know, boll weevil. I learned elsewhere that emu hips are dead ringers for human hips, a situation that has worked out better for humans than for emus, who, over at Iowa State University, have been lamed in a manner that mimics osteonecrosis and then shuttled in and out of CT scanners by researchers seeking to understand the disease.

Had I been calling the shots back at the War Department, I would have sanctioned a study not on why men sometimes fail to drop to the ground after being shot, but on why they so often do . If it takes ten or twelve seconds to lose consciousness from blood loss (and consequent oxygen deprivation to the brain), why, then, do people who have been shot so often collapse on the spot? It doesn’t happen just on TV.

I posed this question to Duncan MacPherson, a respected ballistics expert and consultant to the Los Angeles Police Department. MacPherson insists the effect is purely psychological. Whether or not you collapse depends on your state of mind. Animals don’t know what it means to be shot, and, accordingly, rarely exhibit the instant stop-and-drop. MacPherson points out that deer shot through the heart often run off for forty or fifty yards before collapsing. “The deer doesn’t know anything about what’s going on, so he just does his deer thing for ten seconds or so and then he can’t do it anymore. An animal with a meaner disposition will use that ten seconds to come at you.” On the flip side, there are people who are shot at but not hit—or hit with nonlethal bullets, which don’t penetrate, but just smart a lot—who will drop immediately to the ground. “There was an officer I know who took a shot at a guy and the guy just went flat, totally splat, facedown,” MacPherson told me. “He said to himself, ‘God, I was aiming for center mass like I’m supposed to, but I must have gotten a head shot by mistake. I’d better go back to the shooting range.’ Then he went to the guy and there wasn’t a mark on him. If there isn’t a central nervous system hit, anything that happens fast is all psychological.”