SETTING ASIDE George Peck—an act I’ve put off for as long as possible—most of the military’s filth fly researchers are down in Florida. The Navy Entomology Center of Excellence (NECE) is located in Jacksonville, about an hour’s drive from colleagues at the US Department of Agriculture Mosquito and Fly Research Unit. NECE serves as the military’s pest control arm. It is a job that will go on forever. Because new generations come and go in a matter of weeks, flies quickly evolve resistance to whatever new pesticide they’re hit with. There will always be some with a mutation that helps them survive, and those survivors and their rapidly proliferating spawn will repopulate the area, laughing at the humans with their misters and foggers and truck-mounted sprayers.
The flies of the Gulf wars are recalled as maddeningly persistent, a function of food’s relative scarcity in the desert. During Operation Desert Shield, Navy entomologist Joe Conlon camped with a light infantry battalion in the Saudi Arabian desert near the Kuwait border. The flies served as an unpleasant but effective alarm clock. “You’d be asleep with your mouth open. Soon as dawn came the flies would be out, looking for food and moisture. They’d fly right in your mouth. You’d wake up to the sound of Marines coughing and cursing.” USDA fly researcher Jerry Hogsette told me about a team of entomologists in Operation Desert Storm who drove off into the empty desert until they could no longer see the base, stopped, and opened a can of sardines. Within seconds, there were flies.
The fly’s tenacious commitment to humans and their filth explains the military’s enduring commitment to extermination: Soldiers constantly waving off flies are soldiers poorly focused on their job. When the job involves shooting and not getting shot, that’s a hazardous distraction. With livestock, too, the distraction can be lethal. Hogsette says a cow can become so focused on shooing flies that it forgets about eating and starves. The agricultural community uses the term “fly worry.”
The Gulf wars saw a related condition: insecticide sprayer worry. Shortly after the United States arrived in Kuwait, military intelligence determined that Saddam Hussein had purchased forty insecticide sprayers. With all the talk of “weapons of mass destruction,” paranoia was running high. Joe Conlon was brought in to assess the likelihood—and the danger—of the devices’ being used to disperse chemical or biological weapons. He deemed it unlikely. “You can’t control where the cloud goes. You’re just as likely to poison your own troops.” Conlon’s professional opinion was that Saddam Hussein wanted to kill some flies.
High-volume fly traps are a popular tool on military bases, because they’re low-maintenance. Here the artistry is in the lure. NECE has tested different wavelengths of ultraviolet light, varied background colors, and all manner of chemical attractants. There was a fleeting moment, during World War II, when fly attractants played a more strategic battlefield role. Nazis had poured into a Spanish enclave of Morocco with the aim of cutting off the Allied supply line to troops fighting Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The Pentagon called upon Stanley Lovell, director of research and development for the Office of Strategic Services or OSS (precursor to today’s CIA), to devise a way to quietly, as Lovell put it in his memoir, “take out Spanish Morocco.”
“I evolved a simulated goat dung,” Lovell wrote, improbably. Spanish Morocco being a land with “more goats than people,” the decoy dung would, he reasoned, fail to arouse suspicion. The plan was to spike the turds with both a powerful fly attractant and a cocktail of pestilent microorganisms and then drop them from planes during the night. Filth flies would take over from there: landing on the dung, picking up pathogens, and delivering their deadly payload to the Nazis’ meals.
The OSS files in the National Archives and Records Administration include dozens of entries for gadgets and weapons dreamed up by staff,# but I found nothing under “goats,” “dung,” or Lovell’s name for the project, Operation Capricious. Lovell wrote that he and his colleagues were “well along” with it when word arrived that the Germans had withdrawn from Spanish Morocco. Perhaps. I suspected that the killing shit never made it further than the drawing board. Or, more likely, the cocktail napkin.
And then I came upon an OSS file labeled “Who, Me?” And it was clear I had underestimated Stanley Lovell.
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* Insect shit.
? Post-Vietnam-era mortuary practice forbids this, as the pesticides could interfere with the chemical and genetic analyses done as part of an autopsy. Also verboten in morgues: electric fly zappers. They cause the flies to explode, scattering their DNA and the DNA of whatever bodies they’ve been crawling on. Military morgues rely on “air curtains” to keep flies out. The air curtain is a high-tech version of the “fly curtain,” the beaded strands that hang in doorways in Middle Eastern homes, allowing breezes, but not flies, to pass. Who among the thousands of youthful 1970s doofs who hung these in their bedrooms had any clue as to the beads’ provenance as fly control? Not this doof.
? Tobin Rowland, the man who now holds the job, gave me the WRAIR Insect Kitchen recipe for sandfly larvae food. Mix rabbit feces, alfalfa, and water, and pour into nine large round pans. Soak for two weeks, or until mold covers entire surface, yielding what WRAIR entomology director Dan Szumlas calls a “lemon-meringue feces” appearance. Let dry and grind. Rabbit dung is used because it smells better than cow dung, not because it’s cheap. Rabbit turds are more expensive than rabbits. WRAIR’s supplier, which holds a monopoly by virtue of no one else’s having wanted or thought to compete, charges $35 a gallon.
§ Medicare reimbursement code for maggots: CPT 99070.
? I am inclined to like a man who creates—for a medical practice that specializes in bowl-shaped, moist red wounds—the acronym SALSA.
# My favorites, in alphabetical order: ashless paper, boosters and bursters, collapsible motorcycles, Hedy Lamarr, luminous tape, nonrattle paper, paper pipes, pocket incendiaries, punk type cigarette lighters, smatchets, sympathetic fuses, and tree climbers.
What Doesn’t Kill You Will Make You Reek
A brief history of stink bombs
THEY WERE MY FIRST secret documents, and they did not disappoint. Individual pages in the file were rubberstamped “SECRET” in oversize letters, once in the top margin and again at the bottom. An additional, wordier rubber stamp warned that the document contained “information affecting the national defense of the United States of America,” and that transmission of its contents was a violation of the Espionage Act. Some of the papers were marked for delivery “by safe hand,” the hand belonging to an ambitiously vetted government courier whose fine leather satchels no Customs agent was allowed to inspect.