When we first met her, she was knee-deep in a stack of dead people. But there's plenty of heartbreak too.Mary Roach’s curiosity is notoriously infectious. There's plenty of interesting info here, tidbits, nuggets, the archaic origins of things. "the demi-corpse " a dead soldier whose extensive and horrific internal injuries? Well, his "mustache is crooked." Just couldn't find the humor within myself to like this book. A body in the water, just attacked by sharks turns into. Plus, some of her comments fell painfully, PAINFULLY, flat. Add to that, she was probably totally in the way while she was working on the book (A submarine going to great lengths, for hours, to get her on board safely walking in a simulated combat line where she almost gets hit by a vehicle because she had just spotted a gopher).
But here we come to below-the-belt injuries, and she asks, "Didn't you wonder if your junk was still there?" The answer is: Yes, but I worried about my soldiers first. And usually I love her willingness to ask the silly questions that we always wonder about. The science of RPGs and IEDs on military vehicles? Well, we all know what that means to the men, the real men, in combat. Everything underscores the tragedy of war: ultra-fire retardant uniforms for those in tanks, just brings to mind men trapped and burning to death. And I thought that subject matter was serious, but it came off as enlightening, with a lot of chuckles. What do you get when you add humor to tragedy and top it off with wide-eyed, childlike narration? Almost unendurable glibness. She answers questions not found in any other book on the military: Why is DARPA interested in ducks? How is a wedding gown like a bomb suit? Why are shrimp more dangerous to sailors than sharks? Take a tour of duty with Roach, and you'll never see our nation's defenders in the same way again. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS Tennessee. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, we learn how diarrhea can be a threat to national security. She visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries - panic, exhaustion, heat, noise - and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Bestselling author Mary Roach explores the science of keeping human beings intact, awake, sane, uninfected, and uninfested in the bizarre and extreme circumstances of war.
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