Grunt (21 page)

Changing a maggot dressing is trickier—and creepier, and
goamier
—than changing other kinds of wound dressings, because you are also changing the insects. Each dose must be completely wiped out—literally, with a piece of gauze—before the next is introduced. Overlooked maggots that continue growing will soon be gripped by an urge to pupate. After a few days of gorging, fly larvae abandon the juicy chaos of their childhood home and set out to find a dry, quiet place in which to build a cocoonlike “puparium” and become a fly.

There is an understated line in the Medical Maggots package insert: “Escaping maggots have been known to upset the hospital staff . . .” One, they’re maggots. Two, they’re about to be flies. Flies in the medical center. Flies in the operating room. Landing on open wounds. Vomiting and defecating. Moving on to other wounds, spreading the antibiotic-resistant pathogens they’ve picked up on their feet. Physician Ron Sherman, Monarch Labs’ founder, started out raising maggots in a closet at the VA hospital in Long Beach—a closet that “became quite spacious once everyone found out what I was doing.” The moment a fly would get loose, the administration jumped on him. Sherman has since moved his “living medicine” operation to a warehouse near the Irvine airport, where he raises maggots, leeches, and fecal bacteria (for transplants). I can imagine the company’s Schedule C taxable expense form simultaneously attracting and deflecting a visit from the IRS.

F
ILTH FLIES
are lured by the odor of decay: a whole body or sometimes just a part. A moist, rank, infected body opening—be it a wound or a natural cavity—is a VACANCY sign to a gravid female. When maggot infestation shows up in a medical journal, it’s generally accompanied by the technical term for it, “myiasis,” and a revolting photographic close-up of the infected, infested part: gums, a nostril, genitals.

Here again, some words from the Armed Forces Pest Management Board: “Vaginal myiasis is a concern of increased importance because of the larger numbers of women serving in deployed units. . . . Egg laying may be stimulated by discharges from diseased genitals.” In a hot climate, there might be a temptation to sleep outside uncovered, the board points out. And the kind of soldier who sleeps outside with no underpants would also, I suppose, be the kind of soldier with a genital disease. The kind headed for “dishonorable discharge” of one kind or another.

And finally, there is “accidental myiasis,” typically of the intestines. The tale unfolds like this: The patient espies maggots in or near his daily evacuation and assumes he has shat them out. He further assumes—as does his doctor—that he accidentally ate some food infested with fly eggs. One hyperventilating MD, writing in a 1947 issue of
British Medical Journal,
claimed that the “resistant chitinous coating of the egg” survives the acids and enzymes of the stomach, enabling the larvae inside to travel unharmed to the less hostile environment of the intestines, where they would hatch and set up camp.

To the rescue, in the form of a letter to the editor, comes F. I. van Emden, of the Imperial Institute of Entomology. Does it not make more sense that the larvae were hatched not inside the patient but inside—as Van Emden put it, giving toilets and bedpans the ring of religious sacrament—“a vessel used for receiving . . . the excrements”? Furthermore, Van Emden points out, insect eggs are not made of chitin. The “shell” is a fine, thin, permeable membrane. To prove his point, Emden set up an experimental tabletop stomach, a mixture of warmed gastric juices and chewed bread, into which he placed eggs and larvae of the species in question. The larvae, including those inside eggs, were killed.

To any in need of further reassurance, I give you Michael Kenney, of Governmental Medical Services for the city of Katanga in the Belgian Congo, circa 1945. Presumably the GMS was an agency providing health care for indigents. “Sixty human volunteers . . . ,” Kenney wrote, in
Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine,
“were fed living maggots” of the common housefly, encased in large gelatin capsules. It’s unclear whether the larvae—twenty per subject!—were encapsulated individually or inhabited one large community capsule, but either way it took two glasses of water to get them down. A third of the time, the capsules were vomited up shortly after they were swallowed, their passengers still for the most part alive. In the remaining two-thirds of the subjects, diarrhea with dead maggots ensued. An “occasional” maggot survived the odyssey, but that doesn’t mean the volunteer was infested. A brief transit through the alimentary canal is different from settling in and passing your childhood there. All the volunteers’ symptoms cleared up within forty-eight hours and no further maggots appeared. This suggested that, first, fly larvae “do not produce a true intestinal myiasis in man.” And second, there’s no such thing as free health care.

It’s almost 8:00 p.m. at the Peck residence. George has brought out a tray of pinned insect specimens. I’m distracted at the moment by a live one.

“George?”

“Mm?”

“You have a large, somewhat frightening insect on your shoulder.”

Peck doesn’t bother to confirm this. Without removing his gaze from the tray, he says, “It’s probably a brown marmorated stink bug.” This time of year they’re apparently everywhere. He explains that the name derives from the smell released when the bug is crushed. This one isn’t crushed but carefully escorted out the screen door into the deepening Maryland dusk. Peck sits back down at the kitchen table. “They’re beautiful under a microscope.”

S
ETTING ASIDE
George Peck—an act I’ve put off for as long as possible—most of the military’s filth fly researchers are down in Florida. The Navy Entomology Center of Excellence (NECE) is located in Jacksonville, about an hour’s drive from colleagues at the US Department of Agriculture Mosquito and Fly Research Unit. NECE serves as the military’s pest control arm. It is a job that will go on forever. Because new generations come and go in a matter of weeks, flies quickly evolve resistance to whatever new pesticide they’re hit with. There will always be some with a mutation that helps them survive, and those survivors and their rapidly proliferating spawn will repopulate the area, laughing at the humans with their misters and foggers and truck-mounted sprayers.

The flies of the Gulf wars are recalled as maddeningly persistent, a function of food’s relative scarcity in the desert. During Operation Desert Shield, Navy entomologist Joe Conlon camped with a light infantry battalion in the Saudi Arabian desert near the Kuwait border. The flies served as an unpleasant but effective alarm clock. “You’d be asleep with your mouth open. Soon as dawn came the flies would be out, looking for food and moisture. They’d fly right in your mouth. You’d wake up to the sound of Marines coughing and cursing.” USDA fly researcher Jerry Hogsette told me about a team of entomologists in Operation Desert Storm who drove off into the empty desert until they could no longer see the base, stopped, and opened a can of sardines. Within seconds, there were flies.

The fly’s tenacious commitment to humans and their filth explains the military’s enduring commitment to extermination: Soldiers constantly waving off flies are soldiers poorly focused on their job. When the job involves shooting and not getting shot, that’s a hazardous distraction. With livestock, too, the distraction can be lethal. Hogsette says a cow can become so focused on shooing flies that it forgets about eating and starves. The agricultural community uses the term “fly worry.”

The Gulf wars saw a related condition: insecticide sprayer worry. Shortly after the United States arrived in Kuwait, military intelligence determined that Saddam Hussein had purchased forty insecticide sprayers. With all the talk of “weapons of mass destruction,” paranoia was running high. Joe Conlon was brought in to assess the likelihood—and the danger—of the devices’ being used to disperse chemical or biological weapons. He deemed it unlikely. “You can’t control where the cloud goes. You’re just as likely to poison your own troops.” Conlon’s professional opinion was that Saddam Hussein wanted to kill some flies.

High-volume fly traps are a popular tool on military bases, because they’re low-maintenance. Here the artistry is in the lure. NECE has tested different wavelengths of ultraviolet light, varied background colors, and all manner of chemical attractants. There was a fleeting moment, during World War II, when fly attractants played a more strategic battlefield role. Nazis had poured into a Spanish enclave of Morocco with the aim of cutting off the Allied supply line to troops fighting Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The Pentagon called upon Stanley Lovell, director of research and development for the Office of Strategic Services or OSS (precursor to today’s CIA), to devise a way to quietly, as Lovell put it in his memoir, “take out Spanish Morocco.”

“I evolved a simulated goat dung,” Lovell wrote, improbably. Spanish Morocco being a land with “more goats than people,” the decoy dung would, he reasoned, fail to arouse suspicion. The plan was to spike the turds with both a powerful fly attractant and a cocktail of pestilent microorganisms and then drop them from planes during the night. Filth flies would take over from there: landing on the dung, picking up pathogens, and delivering their deadly payload to the Nazis’ meals.

The OSS files in the National Archives and Records Administration include dozens of entries for gadgets and weapons dreamed up by staff,
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but I found nothing under “goats,” “dung,” or Lovell’s name for the project, Operation Capricious. Lovell wrote that he and his colleagues were “well along” with it when word arrived that the Germans had withdrawn from Spanish Morocco. Perhaps. I suspected that the killing shit never made it further than the drawing board. Or, more likely, the cocktail napkin.

And then I came upon an OSS file labeled “Who, Me?” And it was clear I had underestimated Stanley Lovell.

___________

*
Insect shit.

†
Post-Vietnam-era mortuary practice forbids this, as the pesticides could interfere with the chemical and genetic analyses done as part of an autopsy. Also verboten in morgues: electric fly zappers. They cause the flies to explode, scattering their DNA and the DNA of whatever bodies they’ve been crawling on. Military morgues rely on “air curtains” to keep flies out. The air curtain is a high-tech version of the “fly curtain,” the beaded strands that hang in doorways in Middle Eastern homes, allowing breezes, but not flies, to pass. Who among the thousands of youthful 1970s doofs who hung these in their bedrooms had any clue as to the beads’ provenance as fly control? Not this doof.

‡
Tobin Rowland, the man who now holds the job, gave me the WRAIR Insect Kitchen recipe for sandfly larvae food. Mix rabbit feces, alfalfa, and water, and pour into nine large round pans. Soak for two weeks, or until mold covers entire surface, yielding what WRAIR entomology director Dan Szumlas calls a “lemon-meringue feces” appearance. Let dry and grind. Rabbit dung is used because it smells better than cow dung, not because it’s cheap. Rabbit turds are more expensive than rabbits. WRAIR’s supplier, which holds a monopoly by virtue of no one else’s having wanted or thought to compete, charges $35 a gallon.

§
Medicare reimbursement code for maggots: CPT 99070.

¶
I am inclined to like a man who creates—for a medical practice that specializes in bowl-shaped, moist red wounds—the acronym SALSA.

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My favorites, in alphabetical order: ashless paper, boosters and bursters, collapsible motorcycles, Hedy Lamarr, luminous tape, nonrattle paper, paper pipes, pocket incendiaries, punk type cigarette lighters, smatchets, sympathetic fuses, and tree climbers.

What Doesn’t Kill You Will Make You Reek

A brief history of stink bombs

T
HEY WERE MY FIRST
secret documents, and they did not disappoint. Individual pages in the file were rubberstamped “SECRET” in oversize letters, once in the top margin and again at the bottom. An additional, wordier rubber stamp warned that the document contained “information affecting the national defense of the United States of America,” and that transmission of its contents was a violation of the Espionage Act. Some of the papers were marked for delivery “by safe hand,” the hand belonging to an ambitiously vetted government courier whose fine leather satchels no Customs agent was allowed to inspect.