“You are a Special Operations team heading into a village in Afghanistan,” he begins. “The mission is to make a liaison with the village elders. Engage the elders, ask about Taliban activity in the area. Ask them about their quality of life. What their problems are.” Perhaps fit them for hearing aids. “In support of the operation, we have a Predator drone in the overhead, and quick access to an assault weapons team: Cobras or Hueys. If things go kinetic we can call them up for supporting fire.” Going kinetic is military shorthand for people are firing guns at you. In this case, they’re imaginary people, but the Spec Ops guys will be shooting back anyway, because this is an exercise about communicating in the chaos and clamor of combat.
We’re instructed to turn our radios to channel 7 and line up behind one of the Special Ops guys, two of us per guy, as close as possible without hitting his boot heels. “If he runs, you run,” says Aaron. “If he takes a knee, you take a knee.” Myself and a middle-aged audiologist with braids poking down from her helmet get behind a short man who is hard to describe because all distinguishing features except his nose are obscured by gear of some kind. He introduces himself and says hi.
“Hi, I’m Mary,” says the audiologist.
Me too, I say. “I’m also Mary.”
“Well,” says our Special Ops guy, clearly unaccustomed to so much Mary. “That does make it easy for me.”
We set off into the scrub. Camp Pendleton is two hundred square miles, with seventeen miles of California coastline, much of it left wild for practice invasions and amphibious assaults. It’s like a national park reserved for the U.S. Marine Corps and a lot of twitchy wildlife. (The grunts are forbidden to shoot the animals, but I’m guessing it happens. I’m guessing this because I recently visited the Camp Pendleton paintball range and asked to be shot to see what it feels like. Fifteen Marines volunteered. The one who did the deed—from 70 feet, hitting me precisely where he wanted to—can be heard in the background of a researcher’s video going, “That was very satisfying.”)?
As we make our way across the terrain, a multiparty conversation unfolds in my ear cuffs. One man is talking with the drone operator, and someone else is communicating with the Cobra pilot and the attack controller. Everyone, including the President of the United States, if he wished to, can switch their comms to channel 7 and listen in. (When Navy SEALs stormed Osama bin Laden’s compound, they were wearing TCAPS, and President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were listening in.)
I don’t know how often our guy has his talk button pressed and how far my voice behind him carries, but it’s possible that the transcript of this mission would be somewhat irregular:
“Approaching village, over.”
“Copy, Liberty. Any update from the target site?”
“You need to put some sunscreen on the back of your neck.”
“This is Hammer in the overhead. We have four military-age? males who appear to be orienting themselves to the objective area.”
“Copy that, Hammer.”
“So do the Taliban use hearing protection?”
“This is Hammer. We’ve got an exodus of women and children from the village. Two other military-age males messing with something under a tarp.”
“Start surging assets.”
“Halo, you are approved for rockets and guns, over.”
“All these holes in the ground—are they from mortars or, like—”
“Prepare to attack!”
“—gophers?”
“Attack imminent!”
Simulated kinetics ensues. With Mary right behind me, I scramble to stay as close to our guy’s back as possible without rear-ending him when he stops to shoot. I try to picture what the group of us must look like, but my brain can’t decide between Zero Dark Thirty and the Bunny Hop. I imagine officers walking back from lunch, one nudging the other: “What’s going on out there?”
“Audiologists.”
The mission ends back by the classroom. We turn in our gear and head inside for a Q&A session with the Special Operations men. They sit in mismatched office chairs in a row at the front of the room. “How many of you,” the first question goes, “have hearing loss?” All twelve raise a hand. By one (pre-TCAPS) study, Special Operators, as they are called, had the highest rates of hearing loss in the Army. Both in training and on the job, they spend a greater than average amount of time around explosives and large, noisy artillery. Unless they’re snipers. They’re either very loud or very quiet, these men.
“I don’t understand,” says a voice from the back row. “As an audiologist, I never have people come in to my clinic going, ‘Oh, my god, I can’t hear! I had an incident, and now my hearing is diminished.’”
Chair number 8 explains: “Guys want to go back in and do the job.” If a hearing test turns up a loss in excess of a prescribed amount, it can mean being declared unfit for duty or having to secure a waiver to get around it. These are men who, by and large, love what they do. They avoid audiologists for the same reason they avoid doctors.
“I don’t want to stop doing what I’m doing,” agrees chair 3. “When I take those tests. . . . How can I say this? I want to pass. So I’m like, ‘Okay, I think I hear a tone.’” Cheater!
Also? This is Special Operations. Oh, my god, I can’t hear! is not in the script. When things go kinetic, there’s a greater than 50 percent chance that a member of the team will be injured or killed. Hearing loss isn’t something they spend time worrying about. It’s a given. “You expect,” adds chair 2, “that you’re going to take some kind of degraded hearing on separation.” Fallon told us that as an artilleryman, he wanted a hearing loss, because everyone in his unit had a hearing loss. “If you didn’t have a hearing loss, that meant you hadn’t done anything.” It might also mean you were born with a robust medialolivocochlear (MO) reflex, which directs the brain to lower the volume on egregiously loud sounds. Nature’s TCAPS. Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory researcher Lynne Marshall, who is here today, has been working to develop a simple test to identify people with weak MO reflexes so they can be given extra protection.
Chair 6 chimes in: “They’re pushing TCAPS for, like, Hey, protect your ears. But for us the main function is the comms. The situational awareness.” According to a Hearing Center of Excellence fact sheet, 50 to 60 percent of one’s situational awareness comes from hearing.
Fallon calls for one last question before we leave for dinner. Again, it comes from the back row. It’s almost more of a plea: “Has an audiologist ever done anything positive for any of you?”
“Yes,” volunteers chair 5, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, just generally dark sort who hasn’t said much until now. “They fitted me for my hearing aids.”
Whomp, wha? Virile, omnipotent Special Ops man wears hearing aids? My reaction is the same mildly stunned one I had upon reading that Angelina Jolie had had her breasts removed. The man went on to question the policy of declaring someone like him unfit for duty. “We let people have devices for corrective vision. Well, I have a device that helps my hearing.” What’s the difference? It occurs to me that the US Special Operations Command may succeed at something perhaps more challenging than killing Osama bin Laden: erasing the stigma of hearing aids.