Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

by Mary Roach

  “In discussions with a Navy physician who had dealt a great deal with Oriental peoples,” reads the Arthur D. Little company’s February 19, 1945, Supplement to Final Report on Who, Me?, “the conclusion was reached that only two types of foulness could be counted upon as certainly objectionable: skunky odors and cadaverous odors. “With ‘Who, Me?’ as a pattern, but with skunkiness substituted for fecal odor, we produced ‘Who, Me?– II.’ This preparation has an atrocious odor, with pronounced penetrative and lasting qualities. It is reasonably certain that it will fill all Japanese requirements.” Five hundred Who, Me? and one hundred Mark II Oriental Who, Me? tubes were finally manufactured.

  Not a single one was shipped to the field. Why? Because the National Defense Research Committee had been working on a far more lasting and penetrative weapon for use against the Japanese. Seventeen days before the second and final Final Report on Who, Me? was released, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

  ON A fifteen-hour flight, it is not unusual to notice an unpleasant bathroom odor or even, depending on how much turbulence there’s been, the smell of vomit. It is unusual, though, to notice these smells emanating from an overhead compartment. Six hours into a flight to South Africa, that is what began to happen to Pam Dalton. “I had stood up for the first time, to go to the restroom, so my nose was right about at that height. I thought, Holy shit, those are my odors.”

  The year was 1998. Dalton was undertaking research for the US military, still hot in pursuit of the Holy Grail of malodors, the “universally condemned smell.” She was traveling to Africa on an unrelated project and had decided to bring an assortment of malodors to test on Xhosa residents in a nearby township: one more culture weighing in. In her carry-on were bottles labeled Vomit, Sewage, Burned Hair, and US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor. Dalton had sealed and double-bagged the bottles but failed to take into account the change in cabin pressure. The liquids had expanded and leaked around the edges of their paraffin seals. Fortunately the overhead bin contained only her and her companion’s luggage. “I told him, ‘You can’t get anything out of the overhead compartment. Everything here at our feet is all we can have for the entire flight.’” As long as the compartment stayed closed, the odors would be largely contained—until the plane landed. And then what? “Here was my cleverness. I didn’t open the compartment until they had opened the doors of the plane. I figured that way people could blame it on something coming in from outside.”

  Prior to her work with the Xhosa subjects, Dalton had exposed Asians, Hispanics, African Americans, and Caucasians to these same smells. The stand-out winner? US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor. “People hated it. They really, really hated it, and they thought it was dangerous.” Ernest Crocker was wrong about the Japanese. Among Dalton’s Asian subjects, comprising Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese, 88 percent—the highest percentage among all the ethnic categories—described it as an odor that would make them “feel bad.” It took the top slot in an Odor Repellency Ranking among all five ethnic categories. It repelled, by and large, everyone, with the exception of one unusually open-minded individual who judged US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor to be a “wearable” scent.

  None of Dalton’s other bottled vilenesses approached a workable criterion of universality. Sewage Odor was no good at all. Fourteen percent of Hispanic subjects described it as an odor that would make them feel good. Around 20 percent of Caucasians, Asians, and black South Africans thought it smelled edible. Vomit Odor made a similarly poor showing, with 27 percent of Xhosa subjects describing it as a feel-good smell and 3 percent of Caucasians being willing to wear it as a scent.§

  Dalton’s colleague Gary Beauchamp, Monell’s director at the time I visited, had had high hopes for Burned Hair, a stand-in for burning human flesh—an odor he felt confident all cultures would detest. What atrocities had Beauchamp spent time downwind of that he would have had this insight? “Nothing like that,” said Dalton. “He told me he used to peel skin off his fingers and put it on his coworkers’ lightbulbs, as a practical joke.” When the bulb was turned on, the heated peelings would start to smell. “I said, ‘Well that’s a side of you I didn’t know.’”

  Unlike Vomit and US Government Standard Bathroom—malodors that exist ready-made—burned flesh/hair odor had to be concocted from scratch. Dalton convinced her hairdresser to collect a bag of floor sweepings, which she brought to the lab and pyrolized—pyrolization being a science lab version of leaving it on someone’s lightbulb. A mineral oil was infused with the collected vapors, and this is what subjects sniffed. Forty-two percent of Dalton’s Caucasian subjects thought Burned Hair smelled edible. Six percent of the Xhosa would wear it as a scent.

  No one, it seems, wants to eat, wear, or be anywhere near the smell of a military field latrine. And so it was that Standard Bathroom Malodor became the starting point for Stench Soup. How has the smell served its country in the years since? Dalton shrugs. “I gave them the recipe. I have no idea what they did with it.”

  IF YOU ever visit the Monell Center, chances are good you’ll be pressed into service as an “odor donor.” Someone will want to collect your breath or sniff your earwax or gather the gases exuding from your underarms. Chances are also decent that the study for which you have donated your aroma is funded by the United States Department of Defense. Of late, the military has taken an interest in the smell of stress. Were there a signature scent consistent from one stressed person to the next, something a sensor could pick out amid the clamor of perfume and cigarette smoke and last night’s garlic fries, then a sort of BO profiling could be undertaken. Sensors could be set up in airport security to identify suspected terrorists—though care would have to be taken to distinguish bombers from nervous fliers.

  Body odors might also be used to monitor the stress level of personnel in high-pressure, high-risk jobs. A chemical sensor could be part of a so-called smart uniform. If stress compounds could be reliably detected on breath as well, the sensor could be part of a helmet mouthpiece. “We’re doing a pilot study for the Air Force,” Mauté told me. A pilot pilot study.

  The goal would be intervention. If you hit a level of stress likely to compromise your ability to complete a task safely, an alert could be sent wirelessly to superiors. Your BO quietly turning you in. Alternatively, some kind of automatic intervention—say, a cutoff of the equipment—could be triggered.

  I donated some stress smell earlier. Mauté had me put gauze pads in my armpits and count backwards by 13 from 200 while he timed me. When I made a mistake, I had to start over. At one point he threatened to post the footage on YouTube. My armpit gauze has been tweezered into a glass specimen jar like an exotic lace-winged insect. Mauté, having sniffed it, pronounced it “a wonderfully fresh BO smell.”¶ Every now and then in life, a compliment is tucked so seamlessly into a insult that it’s impossible to know how to react. Around Monell, body odor seems to confer no shame. Seems to possibly even confer respect. When Mauté referred to a colleague as “the donor in terms of his ability to produce body odor,” it seemed a kind of honorific, so much so that only much later did it occur to me to omit the man’s name.

  The odor descriptor Monellians use for human flop sweat, the emotion-moderated secretions of the underarm apocrine glands, is “onion-garlic-hoagie.” Presumably there are odor descriptors for the smell of other animals’ stress, but you’d have to ask those animals, or the animals who hunt or harass them. If you wanted to know what distressed groupers smell like, for example, you could ask a shark. Or you could ask the US Navy.

  ___________

  * Including—attention, aging M*A*S*H fans—a Major Frank Burns. I nursed a fleeting hope that a Major Houlihan would appear on a CC list alongside him, but it was not to be.

  † For years, the most-requested scent at eclectic fragrance firm Demeter was newborn baby’s head. So they isolated and synthesized it. (Weird? Not for Demeter. Their line also includes Laundromat, Mildew, Paint, Play-Doh, Dirt, an
d Pruning Shears.) Baby’s Head did not test well. Outside the context of a baby, it turns out, newborn scalp odor isn’t well liked. The firm added baby powder and citrus notes and changed the name to New Baby. Baby’s Head perhaps making some people uncomfortable, what with Pruning Shears right next door.

  ‡ In highly dilute form, skatole adds a flowery note to perfumes and artificial raspberry and vanilla flavors. This I learned from HMDB, the Human Metabolome Database, which I consult the way normal people consult IMDb.

  § This is not the reason International Flavors and Fragrances developed a proprietary vomit scent. They did so at the request of a company that planned to market it as a diet aid, a stick-up odor dispenser that would discourage you from eating by making your refrigerator stink like vomit. The item was never produced, because in tests, a certain percentage of people, particularly if they were hungry, had a positive response to the smell. They wanted to have it as a snack.

  ¶ As opposed to a “stale-uriney BO smell,” the smell my stepdaughter Phoebe, as a little girl growing up in a big city, called hobo pee. Monell Chemical Senses Center BO expert Chris Mauté surmises that “hobo pee” is the smell of sweat and sebum that has been extensively broken down by bacteria: “the kimchee of body odor.”

  Old Chum

  How to make and test shark repellent

  IF YOU WERE IN the market for a chemical that is harmless to humans but toxic to lesser classes of creature, you might reach out to someone in agriculture. A good pesticide, if there can be such a thing, combines both qualities. The insecticide rotenone was the topic of a 1942 memo from the US Department of Agriculture to the US Eleventh Naval District. In addition to killing bugs, rotenone, the letter stated, is a powerful fish poison. When added to water at concentrations only feebly toxic to humans, the chemical “stupefied goldfish.”

  This was encouraging information, except that the Navy had inquired about something for sharks. World War II marked the first time in US military history that battles were being fought on and over tropical seas, and stories had begun to circulate of sailors and fliers being attacked and devoured after abandoning ship or ditching their plane. (During the previous world war, crews wound up in the North Atlantic, where cold devoured them first.) One particular narrative made its way to a man named Henry Field (as in the Field Museum of Natural History), who at the time held the title Anthropologist to the President, as well as a post with—well, hello again!—the OSS.

  In June 1941, the story went, an Ecuadorian Navy plane went down in the Pacific after running out of fuel. The “desperation and terrification” of the flight officer is detailed in the official report of the incident, which Henry Field either heard about or read. It was a moonlit night. The man wore a life jacket, and as he swam he pushed along the body of a drowned colonel. Sharks began to cross the water in front of him. “At a given moment I felt that they were trying to take away the corpse, pulling it by the feet, on account of which I clutched desperately the body of my companion and together with him we slid until the tension disappeared.” Here I confess I became more interested in the translator of the report than its terrificated protagonist: “Once refloated, with despair I touched his legs and became aware that a part of them was lacking.” The flight officer abandoned the demi-corpse and continued alone to shore, “with various sharks following.”

  “Night after night,” Henry Field recalls in his memoir, “I thought of these men . . . with sharks cutting through the water around them.” As Anthropologist to the President, he had Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ear, even, it seemed, in matters of ichthyology. “I wrote the president a memorandum suggesting that we try to develop a shark repellent.”

  With presidential blessings, Field met with fellow museum curator Harold J. Coolidge, also on the payroll of the OSS. Coolidge was a primatologist—a silverback gorilla he collected (shot) in the Congo resides to this day in Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology—but he agreed to oversee the shark project. You can well imagine that a gorilla expert on salary with a spy organization might suffer a mild sense of purposelessness. Here at last was something up his alley, if not precisely on his doorstep. Coolidge hired another curator pal, W. Douglas Burden, as the project’s principal investigator. Burden was an expert on Komodo dragons, had written an entire book about Komodo dragons, but he, too, knew little about sharks.

  For actual shark expertise, the OSS turned to a college dropout named Stewart Springer, whose résumé included stints as a commercial fisherman and as a chemical technician at the Indianapolis Activated Sludge Plant. In 1942, there were no experts in shark biology and behavior. Truly, no one knew much about the creatures. The combination of hands-on shark experience and sludge chemistry was, in fact, ideal background for the task. “Dr.” Springer, as some of the OSS correspondence refers to him, was as good as it got.

  The US Navy agreed to contribute funding, even though, as one of their rank pointed out, there was at that time no formal record of anyone who had taken the oath of the Navy having been harmed by sharks. Their concern was morale. Fear of sharks, however irrational, was thinning the ranks of willing fliers. Stewart Springer voiced the cockamamie irony of it: “It was okay to give one’s life for one’s country, but to get eaten for it was another matter.” If nothing else, a repellent would serve as what Douglas Burden called a “pink pill,” a psychological fix for shark-shy aviators. On July 3, 1942, funding was approved for OSS Office of Scientific Research and Development Project 374, Contract OEMcmr-184: a three-month investigation “looking to the development of means of protection against sharks, barracuda and jellyfish* for men adrift in lifebelts.” (In three hundred some pages of archived correspondence for Project 374, I saw but two passing references to barracudas. As far as I can tell, no one ever got around to jellyfish.)

  The lab work was done mainly at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which housed a collection of captive sharks called dogfish—in size and temperament, somewhere between a great white and a goldfish. Rotenone was among the first substances the team tested. “Definitively negative,” Burden reported to Coolidge. “Lethal doses do not deter the feeding process.” The shark would die, but not before you did. Until such time as goldfish presented a threat to national security, rotenone would be limited to the arsenal of the USDA.

  Seventy-nine substances were tested and rejected. Irritants failed. “Repulsive odors” failed. As did clove oil, vanillin, pine oil, creosote, nicotine. They tried compounds related to mothballs, asparagus, horse piss. The sharks ignored all of it. The first “hot lead” sprang from an item of sharker lore. Springer had heard that a shark carcass abandoned on a bait line will ruin the spot for shark fishing. He and his team got to work. They rented an “isolated” house in Florida for $10 a month, and never, I’m guessing, was a cleaning deposit more roundly withheld. Chunks of shark muscle tissue were left out at room temperature for four or five days. An extract was then prepared by grinding the decomposed flesh, stirring in alcohol, and filtering the resultant shark muck.

  Forty-three experiments later, Springer enthused in a note to Burden, it was possible “to say POSITIVELY that the meat contains some substance strongly repellent to sharks.” Repellence value 88.4 percent! Ninety to 100 percent effective! The bimonthly progress report of Contract OEMcmr-184 describes Springer as “sufficiently convinced of the effectiveness of the concentrate that he would be willing to test it in a life belt with a bucket of blood.”

  An expedition to test the decayed meat concentrate on wild sharks had been slated as the next step, but Springer and Burden urged the OSS to begin production immediately. “If we really have something now and . . . the field test delays use of a good thing by six months,” Springer wrote to Coolidge, “and if during those six months . . . some poor devils might have been protected it would be bad.” Springer happened to know a contractor who could get right to work producing the concentrate. Shark Industries was a Florida purveyor of shark skins and shark oil—and also, speaking of things
that smell fishy, Springer’s sometime employer. The company, Springer felt certain, would be able to produce enough shark extract to outfit 2,000 to 5,000 life jackets per month. If Springer had his way, the whole undertaking would soon be moot, as there would be no sharks left to repel.

  The OSS didn’t bite. Rather than move forward with the concentrate, they wanted to try to isolate the active ingredient—a compound that could be ordered or cheaply synthesized, thereby saving them the cost and bother of large-scale shark carcass reduction. Chemists were hired, three of them, and they soon came up with a promising candidate: ammonium acetate. It, along with two compounds that had earlier shown promise (copper sulfate and maleic acid), plus thirty pounds of the Macbethian-sounding “extract of decomposing shark meat,” were flown down to Ecuador, to the very same waters where our story began, to be tested on “voracious surface-feeding sharks.” Lodgings were secured, boats and guides hired. Three weeks later, Burden dispatched a glum cable: “The waters off the coast of Ecuador have been virtually empty.”

  From deep in the pockets of the OSS came Harold Coolidge’s reply: Try Peru. “Don’t be discouraged,” he wrote. “Shark hunting is not unlike tiger hunting. You remember how plentiful tigers are in various parts of French Indo-China until you reach the point when you want to shoot one and have only two or three weeks at your disposal.” You got the sense, leafing through these letters, that a career in natural history was little more than a way for well-connected gentlemen to finance far-flung safaris and fishing expeditions in the name of science. The title of Douglas Burden’s memoir nicely summed the job: Hunting in Many Lands.

  The expedition eventually located some sharks, off the coast of Guayaquil, Ecuador. More discouraging words followed. Nothing worked. They tried combining the ammonium acetate and the copper sulfate, and that compound (copper acetate) seemed effective. Unfortunately, two or three pounds of it, in the form of a slowly dissolving cake (think urinal, not birthday), would be needed for one day’s protection. This would not do. The Navy wanted something small enough and light enough—six ounces at most—to seal in a packet and attach to a life belt. The life belt, a precursor to the flotation vest, was a deflated rubber tube worn around the waist at all times and inflated in an emergency. Like any part of a serviceman’s uniform, the belts developed holes from wear and tear. The last thing a seaman needed on top of a leaky life belt was a three-pound anchor of questionably effective shark repellent.