Most of those hundred thousand rounds may not even have registered, not because Jack had hearing protection on but because his attention was elsewhere. “When you get in a gun fight and you’re up close and personal,” he says, “your mind triages what’s most important to you.” It’s a survival mechanism, called auditory exclusion. The possibility that you may lose a little hearing doesn’t make the cut.
A sniper also doesn’t, I’m guessing, pay much mind to the kind of thing I’m focused on right now: that raising your arms to hold a rifle while lying on your belly causes your ballistic vest to ride up and hit the back of your helmet, tilting it down over your forehead so that it pushes on your eye protection, causing the lenses to knife into your cheeks.
“How do you do this job?” The petulant writer. Jack doesn’t answer for a moment. He must get this question a fair amount, and most of the people asking are not thinking about the aggravations of incompatible ballistic protection items.
“There’s a lot to get used to.”
I IMAGINE THE Special Operators were paid for their time today, but it’s also possible they did it for the steak. The Camp Pendleton catering staff have placed in front of Jack and myself a filet mignon the size of a grenade. Fallon got the fish. He looks like he’s about to cry.
“You know what the hardest thing for us is?”[17] Jack glances around the table. “This right here.”
“Yeah.” I get it. Strangers with their questions and assumptions.
It turns out Jack wasn’t referring to any of that. By “us” he didn’t mean snipers or Special Operators. He meant the hard of hearing. And “this right here” meant a loud dinner table. Jack says some of his peers cope by asking a lot of questions and pretending to hear the answers. “You see them sitting there nodding, going, ‘Uh huh, uh huh.’” Others just withdraw from the interaction.
A version of this withdrawal happens in combat. I tell Jack and Fallon about the work of a team of researchers with Walter Reed’s National Military Audiology and Speech Center. Doug Brungart and Ben Sheffield have been documenting the effects of hearing loss on lethality and survivability. (Because the data-gathering requires Sheffield, with his clipboard, to run around in the midst of the action, military exercises stand in for actual combat.) Members of the 101st Airborne Division agreed to wear special helmets rigged with hearing loss simulators. Among the top-performing teams, even mild hearing loss caused a 50 percent decrease in “kill ratio” (the number of enemies eliminated divided by the number of surviving teammates). Not so much because their difficulty hearing was causing them to shoot or run in the wrong direction, but because they were unsure of what was going on. With their ability to communicate compromised, their actions were more tentative.
Withdrawal carries over to the home front. Brungart told me about a Marine he’d worked with who had lost an arm and a leg and ruptured both eardrums in a blast. “He told me far and away the worst of the injuries was the hearing loss, because he couldn’t communicate with his wife and kids.” Despite or possibly because of their low profile, the less visible injuries of war can be the hardest kind to have.
4. BELOW THE BELT
The Cruelest Shot of All
THE AMPUTEES WEAR SHORTS. I see them crossing the Walter Reed lobby, chatting with the security guy, standing in line at this or that café. It’s not shorts weather. It’s December 4, in Maryland. Christmas music ever in the background—jingle bells, holly jolly, Frank Sinatra agitating for snow. While it is true that a prosthetic leg is immune to the cold, this baring of limbs is about something else, I think. It’s an avowal of normalcy, of moving through the world with your hardware on show, no self-consciousness, no big deal. The era of the sad, stiff flesh-tone appendage is over.
Between a man’s carbon-fiber, vertical shock-absorbing, microprocessor-controlled prosthetics, it’s another matter. You don’t hear much about the injuries collectively known as urotrauma, or the techniques used to deal with them. Partly it’s the numbers: 300 genito-urological patients for 18,000 limb amputees. It’s not that insurgents don’t make big enough bombs. It’s that bombs that big create corpses, not patients. Advances in combat casualty care, swifter medevacs, and field hospitals closer to the action have meant that more men are surviving who need genital reconstruction. The work remains relatively low-profile, though, because genitals themselves are low-profile.
The clocks on the lobby wall say it’s 9:00 a.m. here in Bethesda (and 6:00 a.m. in Los Angeles, and midnight in Guam). I’ve been passing time in a café before heading up to Urology. A Navy officer practices his Spanish on a woman refilling the condiments caddy. “Thank God it’s viernes!” A stooped veteran looks at CNN—an Emirates airliner blown sideways during takeoff. “I’ve done that before,” he says to no one specific. Walter Reed is officially categorized as a national military medical center, but it has more the feel of a small indoor town. The larger corridors have been given names: Liberty Lane, Heroes Way, a Main Street with a post office and some fast food outlets. A poster board propped on an easel outside Dunkin’ Donuts announces that Colin Powell is doing a book signing at 11:00 a.m.
While General Powell is putting a Sharpie to the pages of It Worked for Me, while Guam sleeps, Gavin Kent White will be having his urethra rebuilt. Captain White, a 2011 graduate of West Point, stepped on an IED in Afghanistan. It Didn’t Work as Well for Him.
THEY ARE buried in twos and threes: one IED to kill the people in the vehicle, the others to kill the people who come to help. White saw the first blast from his lookout in the command and control vehicle on a route clearance mission on a heavily booby-trapped stretch of road in Kandahar Province. He was leading a platoon of combat engineers—specialists in construction and demolition: roads, walls, bunkers, bridges. A Humvee carrying Afghan National Army soldiers, partners of the US and NATO in the conflict, had ignored White’s warning not to drive on ahead. Three were killed, three wounded. The vehicle landed on its side, blocking the road, and it fell to the engineers to move it. White’s footstep on a buried pressure plate set off the second explosion—a twenty-pound “victim-operated” IED. I asked him what he remembers.
White lies in a hospital bed, propped against pillows but on top of the bedclothes, on the fourth floor of Walter Reed. The view is impressive, but after four months, you imagine he’s fairly well through with it. It began, he says, with intense red-orange in his field of vision and a feeling of lifting into the air. “I sat up, took out my tourniquet, and put it on my right leg, which I saw was missing.” The full length of White’s other leg remains, but the calf was blown off. He was unaware of this at the time. Because his boot and the front of his pant leg were intact, he assumed the leg was, too.
You sometimes hear that the first words of a man in White’s situation go essentially like this: Is my junk okay? White’s first concern was his soldiers: Was anyone bleeding to death? “I started calling out, ‘Who’s hit? Who’s hit?’” White was their commander, but any soldier’s first thoughts, post-explosion, are likely to be of fellow soldiers. Walter Reed surgeon Rob Dean, a colonel who served in Iraq, confirmed this. “The first thing they ask is, ‘Where’s my buddy? Is he okay?’ ” Which could, I supposed aloud, be a reference to one’s penis. “No,” Dean said. “Because the second thing they say is, ‘Is my penis there?’”
17
Apparently nothing. In 2008, a team of psychologists asked nineteen snipers who had served in Afghanistan what they’d found most troubling. Ninety to 95 percent reported having little or no trouble with killing an enemy, handling or uncovering human remains, engaging in hand-to-hand combat, being wounded, having a buddy shot nearby, or “seeing dead Canadians.” (It was a Canadian study.)