“Heroism doesn’t always happen in a burst of glory. Sometimes small triumphs and large hearts change the course of history. Sometimes a chicken can save a man’s life.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“Sometimes courage is nothing more than a willingness to think differently than those around you. In a culture of conformity, that’s braver than it sounds.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“How about suicide rate. And what a shame to lose them after they’ve made it back. We keep them alive, but we don’t teach them how to live.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“This book is a salute to the scientists and the surgeons, running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping. Building safer tanks, waging war on filth flies. Understanding turkey vultures. T”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“On top of its other charms, the maggot breathes through its ass. It”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“I am not, by trade or character, a spotlight operator. I’m the goober with a flashlight, stumbling into corners and crannies, not looking for anything specific but knowing when I’ve found it.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“Navy personnel began clamoring for it. To the embarrassment of many, the current Navy working uniform is a blue camouflage print. Unsure whether perhaps I was missing the point, I asked a Navy commander about the rationale. He looked down at his trousers and sighed. “That’s so no one can see you if you fall overboard.” No”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“The technical term for fuckin’ tunnel vision is attentional narrowing. It’s another prehistorically helpful but now potentially disastrous feature of the survival stress response. One focuses on the threat to the exclusion of almost everything else. Bruce Siddle tells a story about a doctor who had some fun with an anxious intern. He sent him across the emergency room to sew up a car crash victim’s lacerations. The intern was so intent on his stitching that he failed to notice his patient was dead.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“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.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“A wedding gown entails multilayering of expensive specialty fabrics for an outfit whose useful lifespan may come and go in a single afternoon. Much like a bomb suit.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“A few words in defense of military scientists. I agree that squad leaders are in the best position to know what and how much their men and women need to bring on a given mission. But you want those squad leaders to be armed with knowledge, and not all knowledge comes from experience. Sometimes it comes from a pogue at USUHS who’s been investigating the specific and potentially deadly consequences of a bodybuilding supplement. Or an army physiologist who puts men adrift in life rafts off the dock at a Florida air base and discovers that wetting your uniform cools you enough to conserve 74 percent more of your body fluids per hour. Or the Navy researcher who comes up with a way to speed the recovery time from travelers’ diarrhea. These things matter when it’s 115 degrees and you’re trying to keep your troops from dehydrating to the point of collapse. There’s no glory in the work. No one wins a medal. And maybe someone should.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“Every now and then in life, a compliment is tucked so seamlessly into a insult that it’s impossible to know how to react.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“Riddle traveled a lot in his twenties and recalls being hit by a realization. So much of people’s lives—their opportunities, their health and longevity—comes down to where they were born. “It’s so random,” he says.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“For every twenty-four hours awake, Belenky told me, people lose 25 percent of their capacity for useful mental work.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“The driving aesthetic of military style is uniformity. Whence the word uniform. From first inspection to Arlington National Cemetery, soldiers look like those around them: same hat, same boots, identical white grave marker. They are discouraged from looking unique, because that would encourage them to feel unique, to feel like an individual. The problem with individuals is that they think for themselves and of themselves, rather than for and of their unit. They’re the lone goldfish on the old Pepperidge Farm bags, swimming the other way. They’re a problem.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“The other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, will persist.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“Not a single one was shipped to the field. Why? Because the National Defense Research Committee had been working on a far more lasting and penetrative weapon for use against the Japanese. Seventeen days before the second and final Final Report on Who, Me? was released, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. O”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“At an Italian deli counter, a whiff of butyric acid reads as parmesan cheese; elsewhere, vomit.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“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.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“If you don’t have a pair of cadaver shoes, you’re not doing enough research.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“The torpedo launch console has big square plastic buttons—Flood Tube, Open Shuttle, Ready to Fire—that flash red or green, like something Q would have built into James Bond’s Aston Martin. The missile compartment has similarly retro-looking panels of buttons. They provided the setup for one of the more quotable things Murray said to me—a line that, were fewer precautions in place, could have joined “Houston, we’ve had a problem” or “Watch this” in the pantheon of understated taglines for calamity: “I wouldn’t lean on that.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“What does this tell us about sharks? Should women be worried? Hard to say. How crazy are sharks for seal meat? Do dead groupers smell like used tampons? Unknown. I’d stay in my deck chair, if I were menstruating you.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“Caffeine is safe and effective but not without a downside. Depending on one’s sensitivity, it has a half-life of six to eight hours. Even if you have no trouble falling asleep after drinking coffee late in the day, you may wake more easily during the night because your nervous system is still aroused, your brain attuned to sounds and other stimuli that would otherwise go unheeded. The more poorly you sleep, the more caffeine you tend to consume the next day, and the more lightly you sleep the following night. And so on.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“Anything perceived as a threat trips the amygdala—the brain’s hand-wringing sentry—to set in motion the biochemical cascade known as the fight-or-flight response. Bruce Siddle, who consults in this area and sits on the board of Strategic Operations, prefers the term “survival stress response.” Whatever you wish to call it, here is a nice, concise summary, courtesy of Siddle: “You become fast, strong, and dumb.” Our hardwired survival strategy evolved back when threats took the form of man-eating mammals, when hurling a rock superhumanly hard or climbing a tree superhumanly fast gave you the edge that might keep you alive. A burst of adrenaline prompts a cortisol dump to the bloodstream. The cortisol sends the lungs into overdrive to bring in more oxygen, and the heart rate doubles or triples to deliver it more swiftly. Meanwhile the liver spews glucose, more fuel for the feats at hand. To get the goods where the body assumes they’re needed, blood vessels in the large muscles of the arms and legs dilate, while vessels serving lower-priority organs (the gut, for example, and the skin) constrict. The prefrontal cortex, a major blood guzzler, also gets rationed. Good-bye, reasoning and analysis. See you later, fine motor skills. None of that mattered much to early man. You don’t need to weigh your options in the face of a snarling predator, and you don’t have time.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“Sudden loud noise triggers a cluster of split-second protective reflexes known as the startle pattern. You blink to protect your eyes, while your upper body swivels toward the sound to assess the threat. The arms bend and retract to the chest, the shoulders hunch, and the knees bend, all of which combine to make you a smaller, less noticeable target. Snapping the limbs in tight to the torso may also serve to protect your vital innards.‡ You are your own human shield. Siddle says hunching may have evolved to protect the neck: a holdover from caveman days. “A big cat stalking prey will jump the last twenty feet and come down on the back and shoulders and bite through the neck.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“You mean like a small silicone breast implant?” I wasn’t actually thinking that, but sure.”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“If you’re dying of thirst in the desert, drinking your urine won’t help you. The proteins and salts are by that point so concentrated that the body needs to pull fluid from the tissues to dilute them, which puts you back where you began, only worse, because now you are saddled with the memory of drinking your own murky, stinking pee. Rhabdomyolysis”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“Sunlight triggers a cutoff of melatonin, bringing on wakefulness. (Indoor light—particularly the light from tablets and smartphones—can also suppress melatonin, but nowhere near as dramatically as sunlight.) This is why night shift workers who drive home in the morning through sunlight and then struggle to fall asleep may find relief by buying amber-lensed Bono-style glasses that block the sun’s blue light wavelengths. NSMRL”
Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
