Josh stares out the window. “I love you too, Ma. No shame.”
A few words in defense of military scientists. I agree that squad leaders are in the best position to know what and how much their men and women need to bring on a given mission. But you want those squad leaders to be armed with knowledge, and not all knowledge comes from experience. Sometimes it comes from a pogue at USUHS who’s been investigating the specific and potentially deadly consequences of a bodybuilding supplement. Or an army physiologist who puts men adrift in life rafts off the dock at a Florida air base and discovers that wetting your uniform cools you enough to conserve 74 percent more of your body fluids per hour. Or the Navy researcher who comes up with a way to speed the recovery time from travelers’ diarrhea. These things matter when it’s 115 degrees and you’re trying to keep your troops from dehydrating to the point of collapse. There’s no glory in the work. No one wins a medal. And maybe someone should.
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* Kuno and his team spent a great deal of time exploring the differences between thermal and emotional sweating, the latter wetting the palms and soles and the former, everything but. One researcher excised a patch of leg skin and grafted it to his palm. Would the patch henceforth, unlike normal leg real estate, sweat when the man was nervous ? (Yes.) Would it remain dry in emotionally trying circumstances, such as when colleagues tittered over the sudden and suggestive appearance of hair on one’s palms? (No.) The emotional sweat work conferred a corollary talent for lab-based sadism. The researchers invented and delivered terrible news to their subjects. They tasked them with oral arithmetic problems. They threatened to administer painful shocks, provoking “the uneasiness of expecting pain.” Kuno was the Stanley Milgram of perspiration.
? The human head sweats like a mother. As the cradle of the brain, it’s served by a lot of blood vessels, and those vessels, unlike the vessels of the body’s other extremities, don’t constrict. Thus head wounds bleed readily and faces flush and sweat. But it’s misleading to say, as one so often hears, that people lose 90 percent of their body heat via their head. “My father-in-law, when he sees me go out in winter with no hat, always tells me that,” says military research physiologist Sam Cheuvront. “I say, ‘If that’s true then I should be able to put on a tassel cap and go outside naked and retain 90 percent of my body heat.’” When in fact, he’d be losing heat through his exposed body parts. Though gaining my affection.
? Charms used to be part of ground rations, too. They were removed partly because of a persistent belief that they brought bad luck. No one at the Natick Labs Combat Feeding Directorate knows the origins of the unlucky-Charms superstition. I like this guess best, from the gun-enthusiast website AR15.com: “Because the plastic wrapper sticks . . . and results in you getting drilled in the brainpan because you were picking at a piece of candy and not paying attention.”
Leaky SEALs
Diarrhea as a threat to national security
SHOULD YOU ONE DAY travel to the overlooked desert nation of Djibouti, you will see from the window, as you land, what appears to be a large construction site adjacent to the airport. In fact, it’s a US military base, Camp Lemonnier: 3,500 people who live and work in retrofitted shipping containers, some stacked, some side by side, a Tetris of unadorned rectangular boxes. Other than the shrubs that grow in the drip from the air-conditioning units, there is no landscaping. Interior décor takes the form of emergency instruction placards (“Stop and listen to the Giant Voice . . .”) and framed chain-of-command portraits. In three days on base, I’ve seen a single item that one might class as luxury: one indulgent, cushy, costly item shipped here for no other reason than to add a little comfort to a soldier or sailor or airman’s life. Captain Mark Riddle requisitions Charmin Ultra Soft for the container that belongs to Naval Medical Research Unit 3. The sign on the door explains it: Diarrhea Clinical Trial.
The word alone makes people want to laugh: diarrhea. Riddle doesn’t fight this. On the contrary. He recruits study subjects through GOT DIARRHEA? signs on the backs of restroom stall doors. One of the photographs on the Stool Grading Visual Aid he created for participants in the current study comes from a Campbell’s Chunky soup ad. (“Look closely,” he’ll confide, “there’s a spoon sticking out.”) Nevertheless, for reasons you will come to understand, Riddle takes diarrhea very seriously. As he has put it, intending nothing funny, “I live and breathe this stuff.” I have heard him use the word sacred to describe a collection of frozen stool samples. Riddle would like military brass to take it seriously, too.
In past centuries, this took no convincing. Dysentery “has been more fatal to soldiers than powder and shot,” wrote William “Father of Modern Medicine” Osler in 1892. (“Dysentery” is an umbrella term for infections in which the pathogens invade the lining of the intestine, causing cells and capillaries to ooze their contents and creating dysentery’s hallmark symptom, the one that sounds like British profanity: bloody diarrhea.) For every American killed by battle injuries during the Mexican War of 1848, seven died of disease, mostly diarrheal. During the American Civil War, 95,000 soldiers died from diarrhea or dysentery. During the Vietnam War, hospital admissions for diarrheal diseases outnumbered those for malaria by nearly four to one.