This book is a salute to the scientists and the surgeons, running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping. Building safer tanks, waging war on filth flies. Understanding turkey vultures.I've only read one other Mary Roach (Stiff, which I remembered as worthwhile, but rereading my review for it just now, I realise that I wasn't that impressed by it at the time), and Grunt follows the familiar path: Roach is given free access to the scientists working behind the scenes on a topic (in this case the topic is “the curious science of humans at war”), and as she follows her own interest trail (quipping and keeping everything light), the reader get vicarious glimpses at those squirmy things we're glad others are doing instead of us. While there was something universally interesting about Stiff (after all, we will all die eventually and our bodies will need to be dealt with), I didn't feel the same way about Grunt: and it's not just because I'm not an American, and it's not just because I'm not a “human at war” – there was simply very little of interest to me about the science behind the material used for combat fatigues; nothing universally instructive about the future of penis transplants; little point to a chapter on the failed history of shark repellents which concludes that the US Navy has had no real problems with shark attacks. Roach's writing is interesting enough, and I was impressed by the access she was able to gain (to military hospitals, bases, even riding along on a nuclear sub for a week), but ultimately, Grunt didn't do much for me.
As before, I got the sense that Roach had a lot of affection for the scientists that opened their labs and offices to her. And, as before, her descriptions of these scientists are always charming, as in:
Jerry Lamb is a droll, upbeat soul, his essential good cheer yellowed but slightly by two and a half decades with the Navy.And:
Nabors carries the evocative title Diving Officer, and seems built in keeping. His hair is buzzed to a half millimeter, his wedding band tattooed. Nothing disrupts the hydrodynamic flow of Eric Nabors in a wetsuit.And, as before, Roach uses footnotes to make quirky asides; often at her own expense:
As someone for whom the phrase “top secret” has applied mainly to decoder rings and campy spy movies, I had to remind myself that these were actual security classifications. I found it hard to take seriously the sign on the chain stretched across the navigation room door saying, TOP SECRET – KEEP OUT. They may as well have added NO GIRLS ALLOWED. I saw a printer in the crew lounge labeled SECRET PRINTER. Secret printer!Early on Roach explains that this book is not about guns or other weapons, but about the safety equipment that is constantly in development for the Armed Forces. She covers everything from toilet paper to ear plugs, and along the way, takes a close look at battlefield diarrhea and the exploding lungs of those who surface too quickly during a submarine evacuation. Poignantly, she ends the book in the mortuary where autopsies are done on all who die during their service, and when she asks about the presence of a stepladder, she's told that it's for the photographer:
The autopsy photographers need to get up high to get the whole body in the frame. I guess war is like that. A thousand points of light, as they say. Only when you step back and view the sum, only then are you able to grasp the worth, the justification for extinguishing any single point. Right at the moment, it's tough to get that perspective. It's tough to imagine a stepladder high enough.Grunt was interesting enough to keep me reading, but ultimately, I could have given it a pass. Yet, I wouldn't be against giving Mary Roach another go.
