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the call and dialed the Natick ballistic protection guys. What in fact were they working on? Silk underwear, said the ballistics guys. No, really , they said. Unlike other naturally breathable textiles—cotton, say—silk doesn’t fragment and riddle a wound with bits of fiber that can seed infection. It’s surprisingly strong. Spider silk, specifically, has a better strength-to-density ratio than steel. (Natick at one time had a “spider room” in the basement of Building 4 and a team of scientists working to parse the unique protein structure of spider webbing in order to synthesize it.)
    Despite its strength, silk doesn’t inspire confidence. Kevlar does that. People don’t realize that a khaki-weight Kevlar (or its newer cousins Spectra and Dyneema) doesn’t stop bits of metal packed into improvised explosives. For that you’d need fifteen to forty plies—far too heavy for underwear. What Blast Boxers stop is dirt and sand launched by buried bombs. That is important, because dirt carries fungi and bacteria that can cause deep-lying, hard-to-conquer infections in a wound. Blast Boxers are excellent. But they are most assuredly not, as the advertising material implied, bombproof. “Honestly,” Accetta says, “if the insurgents can make a bomb big enough to blow up a seventy-ton M1 tank, they can certainly make a bomb that’s going to blow up your underwear.”
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    * Natick Labs and precursor the Quartermaster Subsistence Research Laboratory have extended shelf lives to near immortality. They currently make a sandwich that keeps for three years. Meat, in particular, has come a long way since the Revolutionary and Civil wars, when beef came fresh off cattle driven alongside the troops. During World War II, the aptly named subsistence lab developed partly hydrogenated, no-melt “war lard” and heavily salted and cured, extra-dry “war hams” that kept for six months without refrigeration and earned the not exactly over-the-moon descriptors “palatable and satisfactory.” I quote there the July–August 1943 Breeder’s Gazette , sister publication of the Poultry Tribune , a newspaper either about or for barnyard fowl.
    † Misspelled as “Uoellette” on the Natick Building Inventory, and “Oullette” on the sign outside the building. Somebody burned for that one.
    ‡ I went on the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System to find you a figure for the number of burns caused each year by pantyhose. Alas, NEISS doesn’t break clothing injuries down by specific garment. I skimmed “thermal burns, daywear” until I ran out of patience, somewhere around the thirty-seven-year-old man who tried to iron his pants while wearing them.
    § Including the skin of children whose parents, like mine, collected the mercury from broken thermometers and put it in a plastic margarine tub for them to play with. The sixties sure were different.
    ¶ Is it possible for an organization to have enough hook-and-loop fastener concerns to merit a whole agenda? When that organization is the US Army, it is. The US Army has enough hook-and-loop fastener concerns to merit an entire Hook and Loop Task Group (a sub-subcommittee of the Combat Clothing Utility Subcommittee).
    # Defense Department facial hair policy is so complex that the Army saw fit to create visual aids for identifying Unauthorized Male Mustaches and Unauthorized Male Sideburns. Grids are overlaid on drawings of faces with labeled letter points, A, B, C, D. No such aid or information is provided for unauthorized female or transgender facial hair, and I encourage all such enlistees to begin growing their Fu Manchus and muttonchops now.
    ** The Cold Weather Trigger Finger Mitten Insert, a component of the Extreme Cold Weather Mitten Set. As opposed to the Intermediate Cold Wet Glove or the almost fashionable-sounding Summer Flyer’s Glove.
    †† Referred to casually as the “combat diaper” or “blast diaper.” But not “codpiece.” Possibly