Chair number 8 explains: “Guys want to go back in and do the job.” If a hearing test turns up a loss in excess of a prescribed amount, it can mean being declared unfit for duty or having to secure a waiver to get around it. These are men who, by and large, love what they do. They avoid audiologists for the same reason they avoid doctors.
“I don’t want to stop doing what I’m doing,” agrees chair 3. “When I take those tests…. How can I say this? I want to pass. So I’m like, ‘Okay, I think I hear a tone.’” Cheater!
Also? This is Special Operations. Oh, my god, I can’t hear! is not in the script. When things go kinetic, there’s a greater than 50 percent chance that a member of the team will be injured or killed. Hearing loss isn’t something they spend time worrying about. It’s a given. “You expect,” adds chair 2, “that you’re going to take some kind of degraded hearing on separation.” Fallon told us that as an artilleryman, he wanted a hearing loss, because everyone in his unit had a hearing loss. “If you didn’t have a hearing loss, that meant you hadn’t done anything.” It might also mean you were born with a robust medialolivocochlear (MO) reflex, which directs the brain to lower the volume on egregiously loud sounds. Nature’s TCAPS. Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory researcher Lynne Marshall, who is here today, has been working to develop a simple test to identify people with weak MO reflexes so they can be given extra protection.
Chair 6 chimes in: “They’re pushing TCAPS for, like, Hey, protect your ears. But for us the main function is the comms. The situational awareness.” According to a Hearing Center of Excellence fact sheet, 50 to 60 percent of one’s situational awareness comes from hearing.
Fallon calls for one last question before we leave for dinner. Again, it comes from the back row. It’s almost more of a plea: “Has an audiologist ever done anything positive for any of you?”
“Yes,” volunteers chair 5, a dark-haired, dark-eyed, just generally dark sort who hasn’t said much until now. “They fitted me for my hearing aids.”
Whomp, wha? Virile, omnipotent Special Ops man wears hearing aids? My reaction is the same mildly stunned one I had upon reading that Angelina Jolie had had her breasts removed. The man went on to question the policy of declaring someone like him unfit for duty. “We let people have devices for corrective vision. Well, I have a device that helps my hearing.” What’s the difference? It occurs to me that the US Special Operations Command may succeed at something perhaps more challenging than killing Osama bin Laden: erasing the stigma of hearing aids.
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),[16] are the biggest contributors to the $1 billion a year the Veterans Administration spends on hearing loss and tinnitus.
16
According to the Department of Defense Hearing Center of Excellence, 12 to 16 percent of American children ages six to nineteen have noise-induced hearing loss. And not from vacuuming and mowing the lawn. Full volume on an MP3 player is 112 decibels, enough to cause hearing loss after one minute. Have you seen Die Antwoord live? (120–130 decibels.) I’m sorry for your loss.