Grunt (5 page)

Brockhoff offers to show me another anti-IED modification: the energy attenuating seat. We climb inside the passenger compartment of a Stryker infantry carrier, which does not have a door but rather a drop-down ramp, like a circus boxcar. The first good thing about these new seats is that they are no longer bolted to the floor. Second, they ride on special shock-absorbing pistons. What’s special are the collapsible, replaceable metal inserts that slow the seat’s downstroke and keep it from bottoming out. The catch is that in order for passengers to protect their feet and lower legs, they need to keep them off the floor. The footrests on the base of each seat are for the person sitting directly across. Meaning that one soldier has to straddle the other’s knees for hours at a time. Mark, who has joined us, adds that having the knees up like that tends to make the butt go numb. “Like when you’re reading on the toilet too long. And you get toilet palsy.”

The last two words hover, finding nowhere to touch down. “Man thing,” Brockhoff decides.

On a long drive, fighters’ feet surely stray from the safety of the footrests. But their commanders likely know which parts of the route are riskiest and can give a heads-up.

Speaking of heads and up, I ask about airbags on the ceilings, to prevent brain injury. Unfortunately, automotive airbags don’t respond quickly enough to get the jump on a blast. Early on in her tenure at the Pentagon, Brockhoff found herself talking to a general about the challenges of high-speed energy mitigation. He suggested she talk to NASCAR.

“I said, ‘With all due respect, General. . . .’” The bottom of a personnel carrier is traveling many, many times faster than a NASCAR race car. And unleashing a force of many times greater magnitude. Besides, NASCAR’s approach won’t work for combat vehicles. Race car drivers are packed in their seats like mail-order stemware. Heads are braced and supported, so necks don’t break and brains don’t ricochet against skulls. Danica Patrick can’t even look out the driver-side window and wink at the pit crew. That’s no good for combat vehicles. Drivers and gunners need to be scanning in all directions, looking out for suspicious elements: piles of trash or dead goats that might be hiding bombs, people holding cell phones that might be wireless detonators, children with their fingers in their ears.

At the same time that the Army was working to make existing vehicles safer, they were scrambling to evaluate the new MRAPs. When Brockhoff arrived, her colleagues were using the crash test dummy that the auto industry uses: the Hybrid III. First, because that’s what there is. And second, because it makes some sense. Both a car crash and an underbody blast cause blunt force trauma: the sorts of injuries you get from slamming into pieces of a vehicle’s interior. (As opposed to injuries caused by a blast pressure wave passing through you—rupturing organs and eardrums and the like—which a vehicle largely protects against.)

Here’s the problem: automotive crash test dummies were designed for measuring force mainly along two axes—front to back (for head-on impact), and side to side (for “T-bone” crashes). With a blast coming up from below, the axis of impact runs vertically through the body: heels to head. “This doesn’t,” Brockhoff told her colleagues gently, “seem like it’s going to be sufficient moving forward.” To make the point, a Hybrid III was filmed alongside a cadaver in a controlled blast. It is clear, from the slow-motion footage, that this dummy wasn’t built for this. It’s like watching an elderly, arthritic man try to follow along in a Zumba class. Compared with the flailing arms of the cadaver, the dummy’s barely move. When the real head comes down, the dummy’s is coming up. Its thighs rise a third as high off the seat as the cadaver’s, and its ankles barely flex.

The Hybrid III captures the basic pattern of injury—feet, lower legs, spine—but it doesn’t provide the level of detail Brockhoff’s team needed. “We were missing a lot of nuance about the severity of the injury. We needed to know, at what point do you go from a treatable injury that’s recoverable to something life-altering and incapacitating and potentially fatal? We need to be able to make those distinctions when we’re testing these trucks. And we can’t right now.”

So the Army is building a dummy of its own. WIAMan—the Warrior Injury Assessment Manikin—will be specifically tailored for underbody explosions. The project employs about a hundred people (most of whom, as far as I’ve been able to determine, have never watched
Jackass
and thus had no knowledge of the dwarf cast member Wee Man).

WIAMan is starting the way the automotive crash test dummy people started: with cadavers and bioengineers and controlled blasts of varying magnitude, followed by autopsies to document the injuries. Before they could start any of that, they had to build a blast rig, something robust enough to withstand an explosion directly below it. The tower, as it is conversationally known, stands in a meadow near what the mapmakers call Bear Point and the Aberdeen Explosive Effects Branch calls Experimental Facility 13. I am headed over to EF13 after lunch. The cadavers are there already, sitting in seats on the tower platform. They arrived a day ago from bioengineering labs at three universities. Some made the trip in a modified horse trailer, disappointing the children in passing cars craning their necks for a glimpse of tail or rump.

E
F13 IS
lovely this time of year. A late October sun softens the chill and highlights the white butterflies that flit around the bioengineers as they work. The clearing is edged by oaks, changing their outfits before dropping them to the floor. The cadavers too, wear fall colors, one in an orange Lycra bodysuit
*
and one in yellow. For now, they sit slumped in their seats, chins on their chests, like dozing subway commuters.
†
Because the setup takes two days, the dead men spent the night in the meadow. A portable weather shelter was erected to protect the electronics, and a pair of guards took turns watching from a truck parked nearby. Bear Point may not have bears anymore, but it does have coyotes, and neither death nor Lycra dampens a coyote’s enthusiasm for meat.

Under the platform is a small plot of simulated Middle East: engineered soil that has been heated and moistened as per protocol. Consistency and repeatability being key elements of the work. At around 2:30 p.m., a pickup truck will arrive with a few pounds of the explosive C-4, which everyone here has been referring to as “the threat.” Around 2:45, the bioengineers and investigators and hangers-on like me will be escorted to a nearby bunker while the threat is buried in the special dirt and a detonating wire is attached. Then the wood staircase to the tower platform will be pulled away (so the carpenters don’t have to keep rebuilding it), and an alarm will sound three times. After which the threat becomes the event. The Tower, the Threat, the Event. It’s like a tarot deck out here.

It’s just past noon now. The cadavers are having their connectivity rechecked after the long drive in. Data will be gathered from sensors mounted on their bones and then transmitted along wires laid down along the insides of their limbs and spines—a sort of man-made nervous system. As with the real deal, the nerves lead to a brain, in this case the WIAMan Data Acquisition System. A bundle of wires exit at the back of each specimen’s neck and feed into the system.

After the blast, the cadavers will be autopsied and the injuries documented. This is the information that will allow vehicle evaluators to interpret the g-forces and strains and accelerations that WIAMan’s sensors will register. Because of the cadavers’ contributions, WIAMan will be able to predict what kind and what degree of injury these different magnitudes of force would be likely to cause in an actual explosion. WIAMan won’t be done until 2021, but in the meantime, the cadaver injury data can be used to create a transfer function, a sort of auto-translate program for the Hybrid III.

By now the cadavers have been coaxed into a straight-backed dinner-table posture, some duct tape keeping them from slumping. (In coming months, data will be gathered for more realistic positions—legs stretched out in front or angled back under the seat.) A bioengineer holds one of the heads in his hands, like a man in a movie preparing to kiss his co-star. Another strings thin wires to hold the head in that eyes-right position, though not so firmly that it interferes with its movements, which will be captured on video cameras set up in bunkers on all four sides. There’s a protocol for everything: the angle of the cadavers’ knees, the position of their hands on their thighs, the newtons of force with which their boots are laced.

The bucolic calm of the setting belies the pressure everyone’s under to get the bodies prepped on schedule. A butterfly lands, unnoticed, on a bioengineer’s shoulder. Jays converse, or seem to, with the scratchy calls of duct tape being pulled from the roll. The hover and fuss of the scientists exaggerates the abiding stillness of the bodies. They’re like anchormen sitting for their makeup. How nice for them to be outdoors on this fine, crisp autumn day, I find myself thinking. How nice to be in the company of people who appreciate what they’ve agreed to do, this strange job that only they, as dead people, are qualified to do. To feel no pain, to accept broken bones without care or consequence, is a kind of superpower. The form-fitting Lycra costumes, it occurs to me, are utterly appropriate.

Not everyone feels the way I do. In 2007, someone at the Pentagon complained to the Secretary of the Army about a preliminary WIAMan test. “I’ll never forget,” says Randy Coates, WIAMan’s project director until his retirement in 2015. “It was a Wednesday evening, about seven o’clock. I got a call from a colonel over at Aberdeen, where we were going to run the test. He says, ‘The Secretary of the Army has shut down the test.’ We had three cadavers and a team of people who’d been working on them around the clock for days.” As Brockhoff recalls it, “Someone felt their personal beliefs had been affronted.” Her boss went to the Secretary and tried to explain: You can’t build a human surrogate without understanding how the human responds. And then he got mad. To shut down the project at the last moment like that would be not only an extravagant waste of money but a waste of the donors’ bodies. Sometime on Friday, the last possible day before decomposition would have invalidated the results, the test was cleared to go forward—surely the first cadaveric research venture with multiple two- and three-star generals in attendance.

Jason Tice, who oversees WIAMan live-fire testing, pointed out that the sudden, intense scrutiny may have had a silver lining. “It’s been informing leadership about the risks they’re subjecting soldiers to.” In other words, my words, maybe they’ll worry a little less about the dead and a little more about the living.

The downside to the Pentagonal hullabaloo is a newly bloated approval process. The protocol for research involving cadavers has to be approved by the head of the Army Research Laboratory and by ARL’s overseeing organization, the Research, Development and Engineering Command. From there it goes to the commanding general of the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, which in turn passes it on to the Surgeon General of the Army, who sends it to Congress. Who have two weeks to respond. And if no one along the way takes issue, then and only then can the work begin. The whole process can take as much as six months.

The other fallout is a newly drafted “sensitive use” policy. Potential body donors are required to have given specific consent for research or testing that may involve, as the document lays it out, “impacts, blasts, ballistics testing, crash testing and other destructive forces.”

Who would sign such a thing? Plenty of people. Sometimes, Coates says, it’s people who like the idea of doing something to help keep military personnel safe. It’s a way of serving your country without actually enlisting. I can imagine there are people who, while drawn to the nobility of risking life and limb for a greater cause, would prefer to do so while already dead. Mostly, I’m guessing, it’s the same sorts of people who donate their remains for any other worthy endeavor that relies on the contributions of the insensate. If you’re fine with a medical student dissecting every inch of you to learn anatomy, or with a surgeon practicing a new procedure or trying out a new device on you, then you are probably fine riding the blast rig.
I won’t be needing it,
is the typical donor attitude toward his or her remains.
Do what you have to do to make good from it.

I
N WORLD
War II they called it deck-slap. Explosions from underwater mines and torpedoes would propel a ship’s decks upward, smashing sailors’ heel bones. Like “combat fatigue” for post-traumatic stress disorder, it was a cavalier toss-off of a name for what would often turn out to be a life-altering condition. The calcaneus (the heel) is tough to break, tougher still to repair. By one early paper’s count, eighty-four different approaches had been tried and discussed in medical journals. Dressings of lint and cottage cheese. “Benign neglect.” “Mallet strikes to break up fracture fragments” followed by “manual molding” to recreate a heel-like shape. Few statistics from the era exist, but one paper cites an amputation rate of 25 percent.

Underbody blasts have brought heels back to the attention of military surgeons. The mallets and lint have been replaced with surgery and pins, but the amputation rate for deck-slap injuries is higher than ever—45 percent, in one recent review of forty cases. Part of the problem has to do with fat, not bone. The calcaneal fat pad keeps the bone from abrading the skin on the underside of the heel. It’s an extremely dense, fibrous fat found nowhere else in the body. (There’s enough squish there to merit the cobbler’s term “breast of the heel.”) Fat pads are frequently damaged in underbody blasts, sometimes badly enough that they have to be removed. Without the padding, the pain of walking is acute. When vitamin A poisoning caused the soles of Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson’s feet to slough off, he stuffed them in the bottom of his boots like Dr. Scholl’s cushioning insoles. It was the only way he could go on.

Can’t something be put in to replace a damaged fat pad? I spoke to orthopedic surgeon Kyle Potter, who works with these patients at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “You mean like a small silicone breast implant?” I wasn’t actually thinking that, but sure.