Festival taking place in the citys inner harbor. Then on saturday, september 24, book tv is live from the National Book festival at the Washington Convention center in the nations capital. Coverage includes talk from Pulitzer Prize winners and gordon read and joby warwick as well as your phone calls for authors bob word word, congressman john lewis and others. For more information about the book fairs and festivals book tv will be covering and to watch previous ethical coverage, click the book tv tab at booktv. Org. [inaudible conversation] okay, lots more if i can have your attention please. Can everybody hear me in the back back there . If youre in the back and if anybody is standing we also have the monitors on tonight. Theres a monitor in the cafc and also a monitor by one of the registers next to you so if anybody wants to get a slightly better view you can go to the cafc or that monitor out there. Im dana kelly. Pleasure to have youall here. Always a pleasure to have mary roach back. Shes been here for any number of her titles and is always a pleasure to have her back. Tonight is grunt. Tonight is about what the military has to go through. Were not going to bars tonight. Were going to the front lines. And there are some things that i certainly didnt know that you will find out tonight about what the military has to go through. In various ways. I will just mention one which i dont know if mary will talk about tonight but one of the things we learned is how diarrhea could be a threat to national security. Agreed. A quick blurb from the boston globe. Mary roachs latest bit of brilliance is meticulously researched and disturbingly funny as her previous books. Grunt examines the Science Behind war as well as the researchers leading the charge in stateoftheart development. Its an engaging blend of anecdotes, research and reflection. Mary roach as many of you know is also the author of packing for mars, the curious science of life in the void. The curious coupling of science and sex, science tackled the afterlife and skip, the curious lives of human cadavers and her writing has appeared in every magazine you could possibly imagine area shes going to be in con precision tonight with Jeff Greenwald if you are a fan of travel writing, jeff is the author of five bestselling books including shopping for buddhas, scratching service, how star trek concord planet earth and his latest is snake lake and jeff is also on our factory. Yeah, jeff works in our factory. He is also on the faculty of our travel writers conference so if there are any budding writers in the audience tonight, you can find out more about our conferences, theres a mystery one in july and one in august and jeff will be on the faculty of that and you can find out all the information about those before you leave tonight orin our newsletter so without further do, would you please welcome mary roach and Jeff Greenwald. [applause] high. Guest high. Host do you want your voice to be miked up . Guest im a few octaves lower and more sultry going to, well, its not really laryngitis anymore because you can hear me. Yesterday wouldve been worse. Im hoping it holds up. Weve got tea here and we should be good. Host lets go right into it, thanks to everybody for coming, thank you dana for the great introduction. Im going to start with this question, mary. War spreads from very unusual seeds so lets get first to grunt. Guest it wasnt a seed, it was a chili pepper. I was reporting a piece on the worlds hottest chili pepper, i was in india and someone told me when i was reporting on this pepper and this contest where people eat this unbelievably hot chili pepper. They said the Indian Military weapon eyes this chili pepper and i said i really need to report on that so i went over to this science lab that the indian Army Maintains and talk to them about the chili pepper which they never deployed because it is prone to mildew. So it kind of bombed. The exploding chili pepper grenades never was deployed but while i was there there were other interesting things they were working on. Theywere working on a leech repellent while i was there which i thought was right up my alley. I dont know, a leech repellent. That was kind of where the idea came from. I thought military science sounds far more esoteric and maybe more approachable than you might think so thats what got the ball rolling. Host eight roach of all thing is something id like to ask about. All of your points, they are wonderful, scientifically and lightning and they are really funny and kind of breezy, a lot of them. Did you feel any sort of worry about bringing this kind of lightness or brazenness or humor to the world of soldiers which are kind of angry in the United States right now, soldiers are heroes, they sacrificed a lot. How did you feel about bringing your humor to that subject mark before a lot of trepidation about that. A lot of concern. I want to do, i have to, ive got to be me. Its got to be a mary roach book. It had to be funny, it had have some level tea. On the other hand, this is war and people are injured in many ways and i didnt want to be disrespectful. Or make light of things in an inappropriate way so i tended to make fun of myself as the clueless outsider that i truly was. For example, at one point i have a chapter on basically how to design a vehicle, how to design automotive safety for people who drive on bombs. How do you create a vehicle that will keep the passengers safe if a bomb goes up so they were showing me around this large Armored Vehicle and talking about how it had to be stripped down because you couldnt keep adding more armor because that would make it so heavy it would be too heavy for the engine, for the brakes so it was very strippeddown inside and i said oh, its great that you still have cupholders and the guy said no, those are rifle holders. [laughter] and that kind of would happen over and over because i really am not, i havent spent any time in the military. I dont have any family. My father is 65 when i was born, he actually enlisted in world war i. He was born and lived here and started basic training and he got a hernia and that was that for the illustriousroach military career. Host is this feeling, i think it is . In terms of being the person whose blunders into these situations without knowing much about them, youve covered so many subjects now but we also know it was a two grunt was tracking to mars. Was it harder to get access to military or to the Space Program . Before you would think the military but in fact it wasnt as difficult. The military were very straightforward. It was either is this budget classified . If so, no. Right up front no but it wasnt classified. People were very helpful and willing to kind of help me. The difficulty was was not that people were saying no, it was that nobody felt they had the authority to say yes so you had 15 people, i cant say yes but you have to ask these people and these people were pingpong back and forth andit took a year and a half to get , to try and submit, i year and a half. It was just trying to find a way on there. In that casepartly because i wanted to be on for only a few days, not months. I do like to immerse myself in reporting but it has its limits. Host the good news is you can get on, the bad news he is you will be there for 12 months. The beauty in all your books is in the details and there are details that are unforgettable. One of them for me was in your chapter about military uniforms you mentioned United States government has a button specifications guide. The guide is 22 pages long and i was amazed to read the army requires that its clothing designers have a Fashion Design degree, isnt that an oxymoron . Guest you would think so, i was surprised as well. The moment that i was talking to in the design lab, mia grabs basically designed accessories of being a soldier, the clothing, the things you carry, the things you sleep in, the tents, the sleeping bags. They have a design lab for the uniforms and this woman had a fashion degree and her background was in swimwear design and i thought that makes no kind of sense to me and she said actually, if you think about it, it does. Because the bathing suit is for a specialized activity, aquatic activity. Its in a specialized environment, its water. So it has to give, it has to direct water in a certain way so in fact she felt her background in swimsuit design was in fact a fairly appropriate one. The other woman had worked for highend wedding gowns. She said here again, was a wedding gown . Its a layering of specialty fabrics. [laughter] host one thing we learn from your book is some things you think would be a danger to soldiers like sharks, say if they go overboard are actually no problem at all. Its something you dont think about like diarrhea which is a gigantic problem. Why is diarrhea such a great problem for soldiers . Guest let me tell you. My first book, historically, diarrhea was, theres doctor William Adler had a great quote, hes a famous father of modern heroism, thats what they call him. Hes the one that says dysentery has been more fatal to soldiers than powder or shot. The facts bear that out. The Mexican American war as an example of this. Seven soldiers died from dysentery and disease, mostly dysentery. More than soldiers killed in combat. You would have these camps and youve got the mess tent where you are preparing food and all this refrigeration and youve got an open latrine and flies, unbelievable number of flies attracted if anybodys were around so the flies are landing in the latrine material and buzzing over to the bees which are setting their because the flies are on a mechanical vector which means they land on the crap and then have feces on their feet and inoculate the food which sits there for two hours and the whole camp gets dysentery or yellow fever, whatever. So it was a tremendous problem. Now its not because theres good hygiene on basis. The basis work conditioning for the whole dining so it could be sealed. You didnt have to open a window so theres no flies anymore, thats not a problem but it is a problem if you are saying special operations, one of those guys going out on small unit. Say, a small village in somalia and youre doing counterinsurgency work. Those people are eating what the locals eat and water is often not safe and diarrhea among those folks is quite high. As you could imagine, if you were going to i dont know, take down osama bin laden, whatever your assignment was and had extreme gastrointestinal emergency, thats difficult to national security. I went all the way to africa for the diarrhea chapter. Thats just the kind of gal i am. So i ate a lot of special operations food going out to areas places in somalia and north africa and i went with the Diarrhea Researcher who was testing a very quick one dose regimen where you would eat this in a matter of hours or a few days so thats something they were testing. Host top secret. Guest no, actually it will be coming soon to a drug store near you. Host one thing that was interesting is that you take for grantedthat mexico is kind of like the poster child for travel. Its tourist about how much mexico on that honor had an interesting story. Guest if you go on to the road which is with allamerican journals, most of them anyway and you put in diarrhea, you will get 35 Journal Articles so that justin guadalajara and its synonymous with diarrhea. Because herbert you must, the godfather of Diarrhea Research has done more for counteracting diarrhea than any man on the planet. Hes since retired but he thought where our people getting sick . He said the lab and wallow guadalajara at the university using students as his study subjects and published papers at guadalajara. Host dear think the reason why hes never won a nobel prize is because theyre embarrassed to call him up question mark. Guest hes probably on an egg noble. Host you dressed up at one point for this role as a newbie journalist in some of these situations. You are with a group called strategic operations where you had to, your role in the true theatrical read creation of a war scene, what was that like . What was the role you played . Guest strategic operations is a big movie studio in Southern California that is now used for training combat medics and needy corpsmen who did medicine for the marine corps and because of the films that were made there used to be action films, war films so they are really good at violence, gore, loud noises and explosions so its perfect for setting up these simulations and they have actors coming and its hyperrealistic is the word to use. Theyve trademarked the world hyperrealistic so these medics and corpsmen are in training, theyre coming in and they are immersed in this scenario and its very intense. Youve got pyrotechnics that they sound and they have dust hits and it looks like rifle fire is actually happening. They are our actors, some of them are entities who have eight latex sleeve on their stop. Theres really impressive door and stage blood that is pumped at an accurate rate by Remote Control for the bleeding and the lady corpsmen is putting the tourniquet on properly, the bleeding will slow. If its not put on properly it continues to bleed and the actor gets very quiet and meanwhile the instructors are screaming and its a very intense scenario so in order to get close enough so i could see what was going on, i requested a room and i dont know what to do with you and i suggested that i just play a journalist. I was typecast. So thats what i did. Host how did these doctors do in that situation . Did they keep their calm . Was there a reason to be feel confident about their abilities in the field . Guest it was a two day course, the first round of experiments, of the simulations versus the lab so its a tremendous difference. The first one was, thered be a guy who wanted to pick up a stretcher and you have to coordinate picking up a stretcher. If theres a guy on the other end that doesnt know what patient is on, this one guy did that twice, once did it the wrong way so he was backing up and meanwhile the instructor is yelling, using a lot of words i cant use on cspan2. Host was this fun or were you terrified to be in the spirit . Guest your adrenaline gets going and just from the loud noises and startled from the gunfire, even though its not real and thats whats important because the fight or flight response, it boosts the adrenaline. Thats great if you need to fight or run away but if you need to cut emergency or apply a tourniquet, or apply pressure because someones lung has collapsed, thats not helpful for you. You need to do this in the worst physical scenario when you are flooded with adrenaline and thats you shaking, your hands are shaking so thats kind of, it wasnt so much i was afraid for my life but you definitely, its not a relaxing afternoon. Host you became sort of a method actor. One thing i love about your books is you get to meet scientists you would otherwise never hear of, people who are sort of on the front lines of some really obscure form of research. What are the qualities that attract you as a scientist when you do these books western mark. Guest i dont know who they are going to be until i meet them. Its a testament to scientists in general that they tend to be really interesting people. I had no idea what george peck would be like. Georgia tech worked for walter reed, the department of military entomology. He was fifth in line at the pentagon and not what i expected. A very sensitive, philosophical soul who was, loves nature in all its forms including the magnet. Maggots are used, i should explain. Maggots perform this amazing function, they eat the dead tissue which encourages the Growth Growth of the new tissue area its typically done surgically. But in world war ii these soldiers would come in with these horrible wounds and take the maggots out and the wound is doing great, it wasnt infected so george peck was using maggots at walter reed for iud injuries and. Host iud injuries . Guest yeah, put this on me. He goes, marry, when youre talking about soldiers, put iud. Im sorry. [laughter] host thats all right, we have time. Guest anyway, it wasnt iud, when an iud goes off because its very explosive, it blasts all this debris and sand and dirt deeply into the wound so theres a lot of problems with infection so george peck was looking at bringing maggots into the armory of the surgeon and trying to get people okay with that but he said, he had me over for dinner and he said i have a clutch of maggots especially for you and when you arrive they will be the same age as the maggots we introduced into the wound. So i got there and we had dinner and i was finishing my wine and george peck went away and he came back with what looked to me like a cut glass bowl with chocolate pudding area but its actually raw liver. A clutch of maggots in there, happily feeding which is what maggots do. They love to eatand george was saying , he took a look and said put a couple of them on the fingertip and he had me look at them outside the context of the raw liver. Maggots, its all context. When you take them out of the running body or the liver, they are cute. Theyre kind of like the size of a cupcake sprinkle, they are very cute. And he was like, those Little Creatures, those mandibles can do what no surgeons scalpel can do. We had this real tremendous respect and passion for these Little Creatures so i love someone like george peck. I didnt know thats what i was getting when i showed up there. Host have you heard from george peck since the books come out . Guest just to thank me for the book. I didnt get any feedback. Host he and his maggots are some of the most memorable characters in the book and however many maggots. Among the strangest programs you report on in grunt is the armys attempt to create a truly noxiousstink bomb but it wasnt really a bomb , was it . What actually is it . Guest you mean the world war ii or the more recent one . Its a malodorous, a nonlethal weapon, that is a horrible smell used to clear a room, if i had one here in my bag. Its actually not. I did have a malodorous called stench soup which was the most effective. Cross culturally in any context, this was the stink that everyone and feared and i had a sample and actually my idea, why am i not here tonight, i had an idea that perhaps the place i should open is with the Republican National convention. [applause] wear with this metaphorically right now open.