Bestselling author Mary Roach explores the science of keeping human
beings intact, awake, sane, uninfected, and uninfested in the bizarre
and extreme circumstances of war.
Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging
adversaries--panic, exhaustion, heat, noise--and introduces us to the
scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with
the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss
and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of
U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper.
She visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare
Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp
Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, we learn how diarrhea can be a
threat to national security. Roach samples caffeinated meat, sniffs an
archival sample of a World War II stink bomb, and stays up all night
with the crew tending the missiles on the nuclear submarine USS
Tennessee. She answers questions not found in any other book on the
military: Why is DARPA interested in ducks? How is a wedding gown like a
bomb suit? Why are shrimp more dangerous to sailors than sharks? Take a
tour of duty with Roach, and you'll never see our nation's defenders in
the same way again.
