Grunt and Gulp Mary Roach Collection 2 Books Bundle - the Curious Science of Humans at War, Travels Around the Gut by Roach Mary

Author:Roach, Mary [Roach, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789123514199
Amazon: 9123514191
Goodreads: 42608029
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

AT CAMP Lemonnier there is often a quicker route to where you’re going, but to follow it you’d need to be shot. You’d need to scale a twelve-foot-high Cyclone fence and the barbed-wire Slinky along top of it, ignore the sign—Stop! Deadly Force Authorized!—and cross into the secure zone. Camp Lemonnier is the hub of counter-extremism activities in north Africa and Yemen. A fleet of drones resides in the zone, along with Navy SEALs and other Special Operations ghosts who pass in and out on their way from one classified gig to the next.

These are the people I want to speak with. I’m interested in diarrhea as a threat to national security. How would the takedown of Osama bin Laden have played out had one of the SEALs been fighting the forces of extreme urgency? How often is food poisoning the cause of a “mission fail”?

Yesterday I convinced the droll and adorable Camp Lemonnier public affairs officer, Lieutenant Seamus Nelson, to put a request in the daily email feed that goes out to everyone on base. (“. . . Mary is looking for individuals who would be willing to share a story about how a case of diarrhea has impacted them while engaged in operations. . . .”) Because really, how do you step into that conversation? The men of Special Operations are easy to spot—the beards, the build, the air of stony omnipotence—but they are not easy to talk to. They keep solidly to themselves. You don’t find them in the bar or the Combat Café. No one from Special Ops showed up at the LGBT barbeque or competed in the Fourth of July Cardboard Boat Regatta. Nor will you find them at the gym. They have their own equipment and trainers inside the zone.

“They only come out to eat,” says Riddle. We are sitting in Seamus’s office, waiting to talk to one of the four people who replied to the now infamous diarrhea email.

Seamus nods. “And to steal our women.”

The interviews have been scheduled back-to-back, one man coming in as another leaves, the Public Affairs container having taken on the quiet, hangdog air of a Catholic confessional. We just listened to the commanding officer of an inshore boat unit that protects Navy ships from USS Cole–type terrorist attacks in the port of Djibouti City. He demonstrated the maneuvers using Seamus’s stapler as the “high-value asset” kept safe by a tape dispenser and a bottle of allergy pills, zigzagging across each other’s paths. An inopportune bathroom break would leave the stapler vulnerable to attack. Even if crew stick to their posts, their vigilance is compromised; “illness preoccupation” is an overlooked military liability of diarrhea.

We heard a similar tale from a bombardier. On a long sortie out of Diego Garcia island, the only crew member capable of operating the plane’s defensive equipment abruptly left his post to use the chemical toilet—while flying over Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. On the return flight, a faulty seal combined with the pressure differential between the toilet’s tiered chambers caused the contents to spew into the crew cabin.

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