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because codpieces likely had nothing to do with genital protection—or fashion, for that matter, or cod. C. S. Reed, writing in the Occasional Medical History Series of the Internal Medicine Journal , speculates that codpieces were worn to cover syphilitic buboes (swollen, inflamed lymph nodes) and the “bulky woolen wads” used to absorb the “foul and large volumes of mixed pus and blood . . . discharged from the genital organs.” It’s all speculative, because the fabric codpieces, the pus, and the woolens have all disintegrated in the intervening centuries. We do have Henry VIII’s suit of armor, which features a codpiece like the nose of a Cessna, but historians now say there’s no evidence the king had syphilis. The only thing I can say for sure is that Bubo (in Kuwait City) is an even less appealing name for an eating establishment than Bursa (San Francisco).

Boom Box
    Automotive safety for people who drive on bombs

     
    A S SOMETIMES HAPPENS IN rural America, someone has shot up a road sign. The sign—a right-turn arrow on a yellow background—stands on a paved lane along the edge of Chesapeake Bay. Given the gape of the hole and the fact that the road traverses Aberdeen Proving Ground, there’s a good chance it wasn’t made by a bullet. A proving ground is a spread of high-security acreage set aside for testing weapons and the vehicles meant to withstand them. In the words of the next sign up the road: Extreme Noise Area.
    I’m headed for Aberdeen’s Building 336, where combat vehicles come to be up-armored—as the military likes to up-say it—against the latest threats. Mark Roman, my host this morning, oversees the Stryker “family” of armored combat vehicles. He’ll be using them for an impromptu tutorial in personnel vulnerability: the art and science of keeping people safe in a vehicle that other people are trying to blow up.
    My extremely uneducated guess is that some sort of shaped charge hit that sign. A shaped charge is an explosive double whammy used for breaching the hulls of vehicles and harming the people inside them. The first blast propels the murderous package to its target. On arrival, the impact detonates a wad of explosives packed inside. The blast slams a metal disc positioned in front of the explosives. Combined with the weapon’s contour, the energy of the blast shapes the metal into an extremely fast, close-range projectile that can punch through the hull of an armored vehicle with little trouble. RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) are the ones most people have heard of, though there are ever bigger, deadlier iterations. Defense Industries of Iran is said to have one that can push through 14 inches of steel. Shooting a traffic sign with a shaped charge is like using a leather punch on a Kleenex.
    By and large, an army shows up to a war with the gear it has on hand from the last one. The Marines arrived in Iraq with Humvees. “Some of the older ones had canvas doors ,” says Mark, who was one of those Marines. His hair has since gone silver, but he’s retained the ready, let’s-do-this physicality that the Marine Corps seems to impart. When I asked a question about a new blast-deflecting chassis, he grabbed some wheeled mechanics’ boards and we rolled beneath a Stryker and finished the conversation on our backs.
    Early on in Iraq, the Army tried plating vehicles with MEXAS armor panels, which work well against heavy machine-gun fire. “We were like, crap, ” Mark recalls. “This does not stop an RPG.” You might as well have armored your vehicle with right-turn signs. Another thought was to add tiles of reactive armor, a sort of exploding Pop-Tart affair. When an RPG hits it, the filling explodes. This outward-directed blast serves to negate the blast of the RPG—and any passing pedestrian. Given that much of the fighting during the first Iraq conflict took place in urban areas—and was ostensibly an effort to “win hearts and minds” among the