In Pursuit of Silence (9 page)

When Jason Everman spearheaded the Third Infantry in the invasion of Iraq, he and his team were fitted with state-of-the-art noise-canceling headphones that had two radios, one internal and one external. He was never comfortable with them because of the auditory isolation they created. He always wanted to be, he said,
“totally tuned in
to the ambient sound.” Every noise a soldier hears on a special operation can be a clue to the situation he’s approaching. Everman didn’t want to miss a single auditory clue, and so he often just cupped one side of the headphones to his ear as he walked. He was also never comfortable with the modified Toyota trucks he and his team drove around in because, he said, “they were like an enclosed bubble, and if someone wanted to shoot at me, I wanted to hear it.”

Everman has a certain sparkle in his light eyes and a beard that flows in great scrolls, making him appear rather like a better-groomed version of Santa Claus, if Santa Claus were given to
dying his hair ginger-gold and wearing exotic finger rings. He is listed as second guitarist on
Bleach
, Nirvana’s debut album. (Kurt Cobain later said that Everman didn’t actually play on the album but was credited as a thank-you gesture for having paid the $606.17 recording-session fee.) While he was in high school, Everman read Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, and resolved to make a project of developing the artist, warrior, and philosopher facets of his personality, in accordance with the Renaissance ideal. Having completed a stint as a grunge guitarist and service with the U.S. Airborne Rangers, he is now studying philosophy at Columbia University. Everman is not to be monkeyed with. When he met me at a dim SoHo wine bar, the slowness of his movements made me anxious. It was as though a big-game animal had wandered into a petting farm and might accelerate from zero to a throat-ripping sixty at a heartbeat.

Silence, Everman told me, was at the crux of all his work in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of his special-operations activities involved long walks, since news about the liftoff and progress of helicopters, and even of their reconfigured Toyotas, would often be relayed via cell phone from village to village, far in advance of their movements. Engine noise eliminated the possibility of surprise. And for the same reason that they avoided vehicular transport, he and his unit almost always moved at night. Even with their night-vision goggles, hearing was the primary sense they employed as they closed in on a target. “In an assault on a compound, everyone would be listening as hard as they could—and straining to be as quiet as possible. Without silence, the teeter-totter of success will tilt in the bad guy’s favor.”

Soldiers are taught the acronym SLLS, which stands for
stop, look, listen, smell. But since operations are normally done at night, Everman continued, “the vision part is impaired. And I think the smell part really comes from Vietnam days, you know—the smell of rice cooking. It wasn’t too applicable to my experience. But you’re definitely listening. And you’re definitely being quiet.”

Even when you’re being as quiet as you can, Everman said, you still make sounds. He and his team would try to fasten down any loose gear with rubber bands to prevent rattling. But even if they succeeded, their own motion would often be loud enough to mask important warnings. And on top of these “regular sounds,” he went on, “you’re moving at night, over rough terrain. Everyone’s going to fall down. It’s not like in the movies. I’ve taken a lot of diggers.” After someone falls, they all freeze, listen, make sure there aren’t any new sounds indicating they’ve been heard.

The other element Everman’s unit had to contend with was also an acoustical threat: barking dogs. “That’s why nomadic, pastoralist cultures keep dogs,” he noted. “They’re a good early-warning system. But dogs bark so much,” Everman added. “It’s like sirens here in New York. Especially in a village, when one dog barks all the other dogs start barking …”

There was one aspect of Everman’s experience that I figured would ignore silence: the actual assault on a compound; the deafening volleys of bullets released when they took out “the bad guys.” But here a mysterious combination of psychology and physiology kicked in to counter my expectations.

Everman reduces the essence of combat to two principles: stress management and problem solving. At their core is yet another dimension of silence. “When a gunfight kicks off, it’s fucking
loud
,” he told me. “But every time, the real
cracks
are
over in the first few seconds. Then it’s just”—Everman lifted his hands up by the sides of his head and then suctioned them violently into his ears—“
whooosh
. It’s like that scene at the opening of
Saving Private Ryan
. The first thing that goes is your hearing—partly because you’re blasting your eardrum or whatever, but there’s something else happening as well. The way it goes silent allows me to focus on solving the problem. You’re not going to be able to solve any problems if you’re not managing stress, and aural exclusion is a key part of stress management. It puts you in a Zen state. I’ve never been more in the moment than I have in combat situations.”

The mind, it seems, can create silence where actual silence is least present. For Everman, the switch to silence, entering what he described as a Zen state, meant the changeover from listening to seeing. “Once the gunfire starts, I’m always cued into muzzle flashes rather than sound,” he said.

At the end of our conversation, I asked Everman what his most powerful “sound memory” was of his time as a soldier. At first, he spoke of how, in Afghanistan, if you took away the AK-47s and the cell phones, the noise of the place was “completely biblical. What you heard were goats, donkeys, livestock.” But then he told me there was one thing that did stand out above everything. He was stationed for a time in Kandahar, next to a mosque where someone kept pigeons and attached tiny bells to the birds’ feet. “Once in a while, they’d take the flocks out, and you’d just hear hundreds of bells up in the sky.” It was, Everman said, one of the most transfixing sounds he’d ever heard.

My conversation with Everman underscored the centrality of silence to life in a biosystem based on predation. His experience approaching a gunfight neatly diagrammed two primary effects of silence: enabling us to gather critical information about our environment (where threats and targets are positioned in space) and placing us in a state of calm that maximizes our ability to respond appropriately to the environment. But if the natural world was all about trying to be as quiet as possible, why did it become necessary to evolve the middle-ear noise-abatement function? I called Heffner again.

She sounded testy. I asked whether this was an alright time for her to talk.

“If you want to learn something about sound-pressure levels and evolutionary psychology, you should have been at my house last night,” she said. “They’re doing repairs on the train tracks.” I made a clicking sound with my lips. “But it wasn’t the actual work on the tracks that was the problem.”

“No?”

“No! It was the guys driving the railroad construction vehicles. They have air horns. They don’t get to blow them very often I guess, because they were making a symphony. It’s not directional at all. They’ll blow their horns as they approach, and sometimes when they’re 200 yards past. Do they really need to keep that up at 2
AM
?”

After a sympathetic pause, I ventured my question. “Dr. Heffner, since the evolution of hearing seems to be concerned mostly with trying to hear as much as possible as clearly as possible, why did we ever develop the ear shutter in the first place?”

“Because of the loudness of an animal’s own voice,” Heffner shot back. As an animal gets ready to vocalize, the middle-ear reflex will often kick in to provide protection from the noise made by the beast itself. No wonder the initial theological notion of silence involved closing one’s own trap.

There’s a suggestive symmetry in the idea that our built-in hearing protection exists to block the noise we expel from our own lips. In evolutionary terms, our middle ears and our mouths share a lot of history. Zhe-Xi Luo, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, recently led an expedition into the Yan Mountains some three thousand kilometers outside Beijing on which he
made a remarkable discovery
: the intact skull of a
Yanoconodon
—a hitherto unknown feisty little five-inch-long mammal from the Mesozoic era. The fossil provides a snapshot of a key step in the evolution of hearing.

“What was most revealing
for me here,” said Luo, “was that the middle-ear bone was still attached to the jawbone, but its shape was already quite similar to that of the modern platypus.”

Some people believe that after Beethoven went completely deaf he hacked the legs off his piano so that it rested directly on the floor, then placed his ear against the lid so that he could feel the vibrations of the notes. Thomas Edison, who lost his hearing as a child, enjoyed chomping into the wooden box of his gramophone as a way of listening to music.
“I bite my teeth
in the wood good and hard, then I get it good and strong,” he declared, and even went so far as to claim that his ability to hear “splendidly” through skull and teeth gave him an advantage because the
sound waves then traveled
“almost direct to my brain
,” protected by deafness itself “from the millions of noises that dim the hearing of ears that hear everything.” Both Beethoven and Edison were resorting to forms of auditory perception that predate the evolution of a middle ear by some 125 million years. The amphibians and reptiles that crawled out of the watery deep with their heads flush to the earth, and the early mammals as well, heard the world largely through their bones.

Luo described for me a process which went something like this: When bone conduction was the primary mode of sound perception,
Yanoconodon
’s ancestors were among those who made much use of the lower jaw in picking up vibrations. Unlike humans today, the bottom jaw of the primitive mammal was itself divided into two parts, the dentary (where the teeth were) and the post-dentary (the back, toothless part of the jaw). Around 250 million years ago, the protomammals had some ability to register sound waves in the back of the jaw, along with limited innovation in the inner ear. If we could see a fast-motion film clip of the next 125 million years, we’d see the post-dentary bone shrinking and becoming more sensitive as its role in feeding diminished and its utility as a hearing apparatus became more pronounced. At the same time, the dentary bone expanded to establish a new, powerful hinge connecting it with the rest of the jaw. Exempted from chewing, the post-dentary bone gets even smaller and more sensitive until, not long before
Yanoconodon
enters the stage, the bone performs an astonishing grand jeté—splitting off from the lower jaw and rising up into the cranium. With
Yanoconodon
, although the bone has soared almost all the
way up into the skull to find its place among the auditory ensemble in the ear, the attachment to the lower jaw is still visible. But soon after
Yanoconodon
leaves the stage, the bone will sever its last ties to the mouth and hover suspended in the cranium where we find the middle ear today.

When I asked Luo what message the latest discoveries about the evolution of mammalian hearing suggested to him, he said, “All that hearing mechanism took 200 million years to build up! You better take care of it!” He laughed. “Don’t listen to too much rock and roll!”

For Luo, and many other scientists whose work focuses on the era in which mammals were establishing their viability as a life form, hearing may in fact be
the
sensory factor determining evolutionary sustainability. Only by being able to operate effectively at night were the pint-size early mammals able to evade the depredations of their giant forerunners on dry land.