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* I quote the paper “What Can Birds Hear?” The author, Robert Beason, notes that acoustic signals work best when “reinforced with activities that produce death or a painful experience . . .” He meant for some members of the flock, whereupon the rest would presumably take note. As would animal rights activists, producing a painful experience for public affairs staff.
? Kelley’s furthest foray outside the box came at a 1994 Wright Laboratory brainstorming session on nonlethal weapons. In the category of “chemicals to spray on enemy positions,” he came up with “strong aphrodisiacs.” Was the idea to develop a compound that would generate feelings of love for the enemy? “No,” Kelley said. “The idea was to ruin their morale because they’re worried their buddy is going to come in their foxhole and make fond advances.” And come in their foxhole.
Second Skin
What to wear to war
AN ARMY CHAPLAIN IS a man of the cloth, but which cloth? If he’s traveling with a field artillery unit, he is a man of moderately flame-resistant, insect-repellent rayon-nylon with 25 percent Kevlar for added durability. Inside a tank, he’s a man of Nomex—highly flame-resistant but too expensive for everyday wear. In the relative safety of a large base, the chaplain is a man of 50/50 nylon-cotton—the cloth of the basic Army Combat Uniform, as well as the camouflage-print vestments that hang in the chaplain’s office here at Natick Labs.
The full and formal title of the complex of labs known casually as “Natick” is US Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center. Everything a soldier wears, eats, sleeps on, or lives in is developed or at least tested here. That has included, over the years and through the various incarnations of this place: self-heating parkas, freeze-dried coffee, Gore-Tex, Kevlar, permethrin, concealable body armor, synthetic goose down, recombinant spider silk, restructured steaks, radappertized ham, and an emergency ration chocolate bar with a dash of kerosene to prevent ad libitum snacking. Natick chaplains, for their part, have devised portable confessionals, containerized chapels, and extended shelf life* communion wafers.
It’s a balmy 68 degrees at Natick this afternoon. It may, at the same time, be 70 below zero with horizontally blown snow or 110 in the shade, depending on what’s being tested over in the Doriot. The Doriot Climatic Chambers were the centerpiece of the complex when it opened in 1954. Never again would troops be sent to the Aleutian Islands with seeping, uninsulated boots or to equatorial jungles with no mildew-proofing on their tents. Soldiers fight on their stomachs, but also on their toes and fingers and a decent night’s sleep.
These days, the snow and rain machines are rented out to L.L. Bean or Cabela’s as often as they’re used to test military outerwear. Repelling the elements is the least of what the US Army needs its uniforms to do. If possible, the army would like to dress its men and women in uniforms that protect them against all that modern warfare has to throw at them: flames, explosives, bullets, lasers, bomb-blasted dirt, blister agents, anthrax, sand fleas. They would like these same uniforms to keep soldiers cool and dry in extreme heat, to stand up to the ruthless rigors of the Army field laundry, to feel good against the skin, to look smart, and to come in under budget. It might be easier to resolve the conflicts in the Middle East.
LET US begin at Building 110, which is what everyone calls it. Officially it was christened the Ouellette? Thermal Test Facility, lending a flirtatious French flair to lethal explosions and disfiguring burns. The head textile technologist is a slim, classy, fiftyish woman of fine-grained good looks, dressed today in a cream-colored cable-knit wool tunic. I took her to be the Ouellette, and then she opened her mouth to speak and a hammered-flat Boston accent flew out and slammed into my ear. She is an Auerbach, Margaret Auerbach, but around 110 she’s just Peggy, or “flame goddess.”
When someone in industry thinks they’ve built a better flame-resistant fabric, a sample comes to Auerbach for testing. Some people submit swatches; others optimistically ship off whole bolts. Their hopes may be undone by a single strand of thread. “To see what our guys might be inhaling,” Auerbach heats a few centimeters of thread to around 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. The fumes produced by this are identified by gas chromatography. Flame-resistant textiles—some, anyway—work via heat-released chemicals. Auerbach needs to be sure the chemicals aren’t more dangerous than the flames themselves.
Once it’s established that the textile is nontoxic, Auerbach sets about testing its flame-stopping mettle. This is done in part with a Big Scary Laser (as the sticker on its side reads). Auerbach places a swatch in the laser’s sights. And here is the best part: To activate this laser, you push a giant red button. The beam is calibrated to deliver a scaled-down burst of energy representative of an insurgent’s bomb—a teacup IED. A sensor behind the swatch measures the heat passing through, yielding a figure for how much protection the fabric provides and what degree burn would result.
Auerbach switches on a vacuum pump that sucks the swatch tight against the sensor. This is done to approximate an explosion’s pressure wave—the dense pileup of accelerated air that can knock a person flat. More subtly, it forces clothing flush against the skin, which can heighten the heat transfer and worsen the burn. One of the winning attributes of Defender M, the textile of the current Flame Resistant Army Combat Uniform, or FR ACU (“the guys call it ‘frack you’”), is that it balloons away from the body as it burns.
The downside to Defender M has been that it tears easily. (They’re working on this.) The same thing that keeps it comfortable in hot weather also makes it weaker; it’s mostly rayon, which draws moisture but has low “wet strength.” If a garment tears open in the chaos of an explosion, now the protective thermal barrier is gone. Now you’re toast. The manufacturer throws a little Kevlar in, but it still isn’t as strong as Nomex, a fiber often used for firefighter uniforms. Nomex also has superior flame resistance: It buys you at least five seconds before your clothes ignite.
Auerbach explains that this is especially important for crews inside tanks and aircraft. “Where they can’t roll, drop, and . . .” She rewinds. “Drop, stop . . . what is it?”
“Stop, drop, and roll?”
“Thank you.”