IT IS an interesting fact that retired four-star general David Petraeus was shot in the chest on a firing range but not, at the moment, a comforting one. Not that it’s Craig Blasingame’s job to be comforting. His job here at the Camp Pendleton firing range, and he’s doing it nicely, is to knock out of us any complacence that might be lingering after the run-through of the nearest helicopter medevac points and what to do if searing hot bullet fragments fly down the back of our shirt while we’re firing our semiautomatic M16A4 assault rifle. (“Just say, ‘Hey, I got some brass.’”)
The Special Ops guys will be serving as our shooting tutors. We’ll be firing two magazines of ammo each, one with earplugs, one with TCAPS. Ostensibly, this is to demonstrate how hard it is to hear commands while shooting with passive hearing protection in place. It was also, I’m guessing, audiologist bait: Come shoot M16s with the men of Special Operations! (Worked on me.)
Craig splits us into two groups, half on the firing line and the rest, including me, a few yards back in the ready box. “Now if this isn’t for you,” Craig is saying, “if you start to freak out, you can put your weapon down, put your hand up, and say, ‘This isn’t for me.’” If only war were like that.
To get an earplug far enough in to do its job, the pinna—part of the outer ear—must be pulled out and back, an impossible task while wearing a combat helmet. No one, in the heat of a firefight, is going to pause to take off her helmet, pull back her ear, insert the plug, and repeat the whole process on the other side, and then restrap the helmet. There’s time for this on a firing range, and there might have been time on a Civil War battlefield, where soldiers got into formation before the call to charge. Back then, or out here, you knew when the mayhem was about to start, and you had time to prepare, whether that meant affixing bayonets or messing with foamies.
There’s no linear battlefield any more. The front line is everywhere. IEDs go off and things go kinetic with no warning. To protect your hearing using earplugs, you’d have to leave them in for entire thirteen-hour patrols where, 95 percent of the time, nothing loud is happening. No one does that. That’s why Fallon says, “The military doesn’t have a noise problem. It has a quiet problem.”
“Group 2,” yells Craig. That’s me. “Advance to the firing line!”
“Hey, how are you?” says my instructor. “My name’s Jack.” Jack is unlike the Special Ops guys I have met elsewhere. He’s friendly as a Labrador retriever, clean-shaven as a regional sales manager. Perhaps he’s carrying out covert ops in San Diego or Scottsdale and, like the bearded Special Operators in al-Qaeda country, needs to blend in with the local male populace. Perhaps he’s between missions.
Jack points to my helmet. “Those straps need to go over your ear cuffs. Now that’s going to make your helmet tighter, so you probably need to loosen them a little bit.” One of the problems with over-the-ear TCAPS is not the equipment per se but the order in which gear is distributed. Helmet fittings used to happen before TCAPS gear was handed out. Guys would try to put their helmet on with the TCAPS headset and now it would be too tight. This seemingly minor planning boner has cost a lot of men a lot of hearing. The one time an IED exploded near Jack, he wasn’t wearing his TCAPS. “It was hot, and they were giving me a headache, so I opted not to wear them on that one patrol. And that was the one I got blown up on and had significant hearing loss. Aaron had the same thing.”
To my right, an extremely lethal hearing professional has already emptied his first magazine. I’m still battling my helmet straps. “Let me help you,” Jack says. I drop my hands to my lap and let him take over. “Oops, I don’t want to pull your hair.” The gentle sniper.
Jack passes me the M16. “Have you shot a gun like this before?” I shake my very heavy head. He hands me a magazine and shows me where to load it. I’ve seen this in movies—the quick slap with the heel of the hand.
Hmm.
“Other way. So the bullets are facing forward.”
The M16 has a scope with a small red arrow in the center of the sight. You align the arrow with what or (jeez) whom you wish to shoot and squeeze the trigger. Both “squeeze” and “pull” are exaggerations of the motion applied to this trigger. It’s a trivial, tiny movement, the twitch of a dreaming child. So quick and so effortless is it that it’s hard for me to associate it with any but the most inconsequential of acts. Flipping a page. Typing an M. Scratching an itch. Ending a life wants a little more muscle.
The crack of an M16 is around 160 decibels. Jack estimates he’s fired a hundred thousand rounds in his ten-plus years in Special Operations. Weapons and explosions, rather than ongoing “steady-state” noise from vehicle engines and rotors (and MP3 players),§ are the biggest contributors to the $1 billion a year the Veterans Administration spends on hearing loss and tinnitus.
Most of those hundred thousand rounds may not even have registered, not because Jack had hearing protection on but because his attention was elsewhere. “When you get in a gun fight and you’re up close and personal,” he says, “your mind triages what’s most important to you.” It’s a survival mechanism, called auditory exclusion. The possibility that you may lose a little hearing doesn’t make the cut.
A sniper also doesn’t, I’m guessing, pay much mind to the kind of thing I’m focused on right now: that raising your arms to hold a rifle while lying on your belly causes your ballistic vest to ride up and hit the back of your helmet, tilting it down over your forehead so that it pushes on your eye protection, causing the lenses to knife into your cheeks.
“How do you do this job?” The petulant writer. Jack doesn’t answer for a moment. He must get this question a fair amount, and most of the people asking are not thinking about the aggravations of incompatible ballistic protection items.
“There’s a lot to get used to.”
I IMAGINE THE Special Operators were paid for their time today, but it’s also possible they did it for the steak. The Camp Pendleton catering staff have placed in front of Jack and myself a filet mignon the size of a grenade. Fallon got the fish. He looks like he’s about to cry.
“You know what the hardest thing for us is?”? Jack glances around the table. “This right here.”
“Yeah.” I get it. Strangers with their questions and assumptions.