Someone else yells, "Blood sweeps!" A corpsman trainee reaches under my back and slides both hands from shoulders to hips. He looks at his hands, checking for blood, for a wound that might have been overlooked. If you don't happen to be wounded, blood sweeps feel lovely.



Mary Roach. What can I say. One of the most entertaining non-fiction writers in existence. I always, always look forward to her books and they never disappoint. She's smart, funny, and compassionate: Ed Rachles is fucking lucky a

Someone else yells, "Blood sweeps!" A corpsman trainee reaches under my back and slides both hands from shoulders to hips. He looks at his hands, checking for blood, for a wound that might have been overlooked. If you don't happen to be wounded, blood sweeps feel lovely.



Mary Roach. What can I say. One of the most entertaining non-fiction writers in existence. I always, always look forward to her books and they never disappoint. She's smart, funny, and compassionate: Ed Rachles is fucking lucky and he should be very, very thankful.



Driving back from lunch, Josh and Dan sit in the back, planning their workout. I hear Dan say, "one hundred snatches," which hits my ear like a Dr. Seuss title.



This book is Mary Roach exploring military science. But she is not interested in guns or bombs or destruction. Instead, she explores the nitty gritty details of uncomfortable life as a deployed person. Diarrhea, heat, maggots, and hearing loss are some of the topics covered here.



Until this trip, I thought of sweat as a sort of self-generated dip in the lake. But sweat isn't cool. It's warm as blood. It essentially IS blood. (A dip in the lake cools by conduction: contact with something colder. Highly effective but not always practical.) Sweat cools by evaporation: offloading your heat into the air. Like this: When you start to overheat, vessels in your skin dilate, encouraging blood to migrate there. From the capillaries of the skin, the hot plasma is offloaded through sweat glands - 2.4 million or so - onto the surface of the body to evaporate. Evaporation carries heat away from the body, in the form of water vapor.



Yes, the book isn't for everyone. Roach is infamous for pressing forward where most people would shy away. Cadavers, rot, maggots, diarrhea - nothing seems to turn her off. The hardest chapters for me to read were the two chapters on genital mutilation - males only, of course. As the book mentions, if a female soldier gets close enough to an IED to wreck her genitals - she's dead. I will not say something cliched like: "These chapters might be difficult for men to read" because I was wincing and cringing through the whole thing and I'm female.



Jezior narrates with simple anatomical vocabulary, but I can't always parse what I'm seeing in a way that matches the words. I can't even see PERSON in some of these images. I see BUTCHER SHOP. Bandages protect the psyche, too; some of these soldiers never saw what I'm seeing. Jezior had a patient who didn't see the injuries to his penis for three weeks. He clicks ahead to a slide from this man's arrival at the hospital, a close-up of the weapon-target interaction, as they say in ballistics circles. How do you prepare a patient like this for the unveiling? "We used to try to sound optimistic," Jezior says. "But when this guy finally saw it, he was like, 'Oh, my God.' It was another devastation, a second loss." Now, they're blunter. "I'll say, 'It's a severe injury. You'll have to see it.'" If there's going to be a surprise, let it be a positive one."



It was especially interesting to learn how much transgender sex operations have increased the ease and safety of rebuilding soldier's blown-off testicles and penii.



The great thing about Mary Roach is that she's so funny and charming. There are few situations she can't bring humor to. She is hilarious - it's very hard to get me to laugh out loud while reading a book, and I was laughing multiple times while reading this one. She is FUNNY. Here is a part where she discusses being on a ridealong during a military training exercise.



...but it's possible that the transcript of this mission would be somewhat irregular.



"Approaching village, over."



"Copy, Liberty. Any update from the target site?"



"You need to put some sunscreen on the back of your neck."



"This is Hammer in the overhead. We have four military-age males who appear to be orienting themselves to the objective area."



"Copy that, Hammer."



"So do the Taliban use hearing protection?"



"This is Hammer. We've got an exodus of women and children from the village. Two other military-age males messing with something under a tarp."



"Start surging assets."



"Halo, you are approved for rockets and guns, over."



"All those holes in the ground - are they from mortars, or like - "



"Prepare to attack!"



" - gophers?"



"Attack imminent!"



She talks about serious subjects and stares disgusting and traumatizing things in the face, but even in the middle of talking about something fascinating and gross, she will come up with a fun fact or an anecdote that will have me in stitches.



It is easy to get lost on the way to the Strategic Operations bathroom, and very entertaining. You might pass a rack of freshly painted excretory systems hanging in the sun to dry, or a man seated at a workbench, trimming the seams of a molded silicone Cut Suit penis. You might overhear a person say to another person, "If you use different blood, it voids the warranty." At one point I take a wrong turn and find myself in a storage area. A filing cabinet drawer is labeled "Spleens." "Aortas," another says. On top of the cabinet, Cut Suit skins are folded like blankets. When I finally find the bathroom, the sign on the door, which uses the military slang "HEAD," confuses me in a way it would ordinarily not have.



I always suggest Mary Roach to people who inform me, "I don't read non-fiction." It's kind of a gateway drug. If military science isn't your jam, she's written books on many other topics: the dead, the afterlife, the digestive system... pick your poison. She's always funny.



I also learn a lot of fun, cool, and interesting stuff from her books. She is so smart and so engaged - even with the minutiae - that she never fails to delight me and educate me. She finds so much joy in science and learning that it's impossible not to catch some of it.



One thing that was putting a smile on my face while reading this book was Roach's cute little flirting and sexual excitement of being around these Marines and Special Ops guys. She likes men, I like men, and I was enjoying how much fun she was having describing her new surroundings.



Fallon turns the class over to ArmorCorps' Craig Blasingame, a former Marine with a wide superhero jaw and muscles so big that when he walks in front of the slide projector, entire images can be viewed on his forearm. Though it's ten in the morning, Craig has a five o'clock shadow.



...Craig speaks like a bullhorn. He says this is because he lost some hearing as a Marine, but I think it's because there's so much strength coursing around in there that everything - whiskers, voice, the pectorals under his polo shirt - wants to burst forth in a powerful way.



Of course, she runs into many men she gets to admire and appreciate. In this book it is flirty and cute, but in EVERY book she has a knack for describing people in a unique, clever, and vivid way. It only happens to be provocative here because she is a straight woman plunged into this kind of environment, but in other books she just blows your mind with some of her startling ways of describing people - I often wonder what they think of it when they end up reading her book.



The Army Research Laboratory snapped up Nicole Brockhoff, premed at John Hopkins, with a graduate degree in biodefense. The youngest person to win the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Civilian Service Award. Bench presses 190. She's come down from her office in the Pentagon to attend to some things, and agreed to make me one of them. Whenever Mark takes over the explaining, Brockhoff drops back and takes out her phone. She does not seem rude, just grindingly busy and determined to stay on top of her day. I see her come and go in my peripheral vision, pacing, answering email. She gives the impression of someone for whom idleness is almost physically unbearable. She is gorgeous, articulate, fast-moving, powerful. Lesser humans are left blinking in her wake.



I highly recommend this book, or any of Roach's books. The only reason I'd hesitate is if you are squeamish. She doesn't gross you out for the sake of grossing you out, but in general I'd say the disgusting really fascinates her instead of repulses her and you should take that into account.



Her compassion and kindness always glimmer through. She despairs about the dead, especially since the dead soldiers are so young, but she doesn't bog down the book or get maudlin about it. You can see her good heart peek through all the humor and science. It's one of her (many) good qualities.



I also love learning and always walk away from a Roach book feeling a little bit more informed. She loves science and history and is able to dig up obscure facts and figures that you would never find out about on your own.



Tl;dr - Take a little trip with Mary Roach as she pulls back the curtain on the miltary's less-publicized wars: against diarrhea, heat exhaustion, flies, and hearing loss. Great book for both fiction-lovers and non-fiction-lovers. Mary Roach is funny and smart - you will find yourself grinning while reading this if not laughing outright. Highly recommended. Five stars.



Lieutenant Couturier, a circadian rhythm researcher at NSMRL, outfitted a planeload of Navy SEALs with blue light-emitting goggles on a series of flights from Guam to the East Coast of the United States, to see if it were possible to make them unattractive to females, oops, I mean, to keep them on Guam time.