Fox News had called, asking why the Brits had bombproof underpants and our guys didn’t. “No such thing,” Accetta told the reporter. He said they were working on something else, and then he got off the call and dialed the Natick ballistic protection guys. What in fact were they working on? Silk underwear, said the ballistics guys. No, really, they said. Unlike other naturally breathable textiles—cotton, say—silk doesn’t fragment and riddle a wound with bits of fiber that can seed infection. It’s surprisingly strong. Spider silk, specifically, has a better strength-to-density ratio than steel. (Natick at one time had a “spider room” in the basement of Building 4 and a team of scientists working to parse the unique protein structure of spider webbing in order to synthesize it.)
Despite its strength, silk doesn’t inspire confidence. Kevlar does that. People don’t realize that a khaki-weight Kevlar (or its newer cousins Spectra and Dyneema) doesn’t stop bits of metal packed into improvised explosives. For that you’d need fifteen to forty plies—far too heavy for underwear. What Blast Boxers stop is dirt and sand launched by buried bombs. That is important, because dirt carries fungi and bacteria that can cause deeplying, hard-to-conquer infections in a wound. Blast Boxers are excellent. But they are most assuredly not, as the advertising material implied, bombproof. “Honestly,” Accetta says, “if the insurgents can make a bomb big enough to blow up a seventy-ton M1 tank, they can certainly make a bomb that’s going to blow up your underwear.”
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* Natick Labs and precursor the Quartermaster Subsistence Research Laboratory have extended shelf lives to near immortality. They currently make a sandwich that keeps for three years. Meat, in particular, has come a long way since the Revolutionary and Civil wars, when beef came fresh off cattle driven alongside the troops. During World War II, the aptly named subsistence lab developed partly hydrogenated, no-melt “war lard” and heavily salted and cured, extra-dry “war hams” that kept for six months without refrigeration and earned the not exactly over-the-moon descriptors “palatable and satisfactory.” I quote there the July–August 1943 Breeder’s Gazette, sister publication of the Poultry Tribune, a newspaper either about or for barnyard fowl.
? Misspelled as “Uoellette” on the Natick Building Inventory, and “Oullette” on the sign outside the building. Somebody burned for that one.
? I went on the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System to find you a figure for the number of burns caused each year by pantyhose. Alas, NEISS doesn’t break clothing injuries down by specific garment. I skimmed “thermal burns, daywear” until I ran out of patience, somewhere around the thirty-seven-year-old man who tried to iron his pants while wearing them.
§ Including the skin of children whose parents, like mine, collected the mercury from broken thermometers and put it in a plastic margarine tub for them to play with. The sixties sure were different.
? Is it possible for an organization to have enough hook-and-loop fastener concerns to merit a whole agenda? When that organization is the US Army, it is. The US Army has enough hook-and-loop fastener concerns to merit an entire Hook and Loop Task Group (a sub-subcommittee of the Combat Clothing Utility Subcommittee).
# Defense Department facial hair policy is so complex that the Army saw fit to create visual aids for identifying Unauthorized Male Mustaches and Unauthorized Male Sideburns. Grids are overlaid on drawings of faces with labeled letter points, A, B, C, D. No such aid or information is provided for unauthorized female or transgender facial hair, and I encourage all such enlistees to begin growing their Fu Manchus and muttonchops now.
** The Cold Weather Trigger Finger Mitten Insert, a component of the Extreme Cold Weather Mitten Set. As opposed to the Intermediate Cold Wet Glove or the almost fashionable-sounding Summer Flyer’s Glove.
?? Referred to casually as the “combat diaper” or “blast diaper.” But not “codpiece.” Possibly because codpieces likely had nothing to do with genital protection—or fashion, for that matter, or cod. C. S. Reed, writing in the Occasional Medical History Series of the Internal Medicine Journal, speculates that codpieces were worn to cover syphilitic buboes (swollen, inflamed lymph nodes) and the “bulky woolen wads” used to absorb the “foul and large volumes of mixed pus and blood . . . discharged from the genital organs.” It’s all speculative, because the fabric codpieces, the pus, and the woolens have all disintegrated in the intervening centuries. We do have Henry VIII’s suit of armor, which features a codpiece like the nose of a Cessna, but historians now say there’s no evidence the king had syphilis. The only thing I can say for sure is that Bubo (in Kuwait City) is an even less appealing name for an eating establishment than Bursa (San Francisco).
Boom Box
Automotive safety for people who drive on bombs
AS SOMETIMES HAPPENS IN rural America, someone has shot up a road sign. The sign—a right-turn arrow on a yellow background—stands on a paved lane along the edge of Chesapeake Bay. Given the gape of the hole and the fact that the road traverses Aberdeen Proving Ground, there’s a good chance it wasn’t made by a bullet. A proving ground is a spread of high-security acreage set aside for testing weapons and the vehicles meant to withstand them. In the words of the next sign up the road: Extreme Noise Area.
I’m headed for Aberdeen’s Building 336, where combat vehicles come to be up-armored—as the military likes to up-say it—against the latest threats. Mark Roman, my host this morning, oversees the Stryker “family” of armored combat vehicles. He’ll be using them for an impromptu tutorial in personnel vulnerability: the art and science of keeping people safe in a vehicle that other people are trying to blow up.
My extremely uneducated guess is that some sort of shaped charge hit that sign. A shaped charge is an explosive double whammy used for breaching the hulls of vehicles and harming the people inside them. The first blast propels the murderous package to its target. On arrival, the impact detonates a wad of explosives packed inside. The blast slams a metal disc positioned in front of the explosives. Combined with the weapon’s contour, the energy of the blast shapes the metal into an extremely fast, close-range projectile that can punch through the hull of an armored vehicle with little trouble. RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) are the ones most people have heard of, though there are ever bigger, deadlier iterations. Defense Industries of Iran is said to have one that can push through 14 inches of steel. Shooting a traffic sign with a shaped charge is like using a leather punch on a Kleenex.