99% Invisible - 222- Combat Hearing Loss

Episode Date: July 27, 2016

The US military buys a lot of foam ear plugs. Visit any base and you’ll find them under the bleachers at the firing range, in the bottoms of washing machines. They are cheap and effective at making noise less … noisy. … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The United States Marine Corps buys a lot of earplugs. Visit any military base and you'll find them. Under the bleachers at the firing range, in the bottoms of washing machines, they are cheap and effective at making noise, less noisy. Most earplugs reduce noise by about 30 decibels. That is Mary Roach, author of a bunch of great books,

her latest one is called Grunt. It's about the science of humans at war. 30 decibels can be significant. Every three decibel increase in a loud noise cuts in half. The amount of time you can be exposed without risking hearing damage. To put that another way, an unprotected human ear can spend eight hours a day exposed to

85 decibels without incurring hearing loss. That's the level of freeway noise. 85 decibels is also the level of a crowded restaurant. But if you go up to 115 decibels, things like a chainsaw, or a really loud concert. Your safe exposure time is only half a minute before your hearing can be affected. So without ear plugs, you should only be exposed to the sound of a chainsaw for about 30 seconds. But with ear plugs, you've got closer to 8 hours. In a military situation, a reduction of 30 decibels is especially helpful with a steady, grinding background in, like, say, a Bradley tank clattering over asphalt, or the thrum of a black-hawk helicopter.

But there's a problem with earplugs as the solution on a battlefield. I will tell you that I've never seen a Marine wear earplugs in a combat operation. That's Erin O'Wan-Soo. It's been eight years as an infantry Marine and served a tour of duty in Fallujah Iraq. And this is Eric Fallon. In over 24 years of military experience, I've never seen soldiers put a passive ear plug in and go on a dismounted patrol.

Soldiers aren't using their ear plugs because when they do, they can't hear what's happening around them. And with unprotected ears, a lot of service members are coming home from battle with tenitis, which is ringing in your ears or hearing loss. It's not uncommon. Anyone, especially in the infantry, will pretty much tell you that they have hearing loss.

When Aaron and his buddies get together in social situations, everyone speaks a little louder. You know, when we get together, everybody knows who has the worst amount of hearing loss. Typically, if it's a good set of friends, we know which year they tend to have hearing loss in. I can tell you two or three friends right off top of my head. I know, OK, yeah, he got hit by an IED on his right side.

I need to speak to his left ear. But while Aaron's fellow Marines are naturally understanding about his hearing loss, his wife and kids find it challenging. They actually end up getting frustrated with me, and it's, I don't know, you just try to play it off sometimes, pretend like you heard what they had to say, and try to pick it up later on in the conversation, or figure it out later, or ask them as though you forgot.

You didn't actually forget, you just never heard them. When you really think about the advent of black gunpowder, which is really when the military became an extremely noisy environment, think about how long we've lived with that. Really without a solution, the solution is to put something in your ears that blocks the sound. And oh, by the way, it doesn't just block the sound

that we want to prevent, It blocks all the sound. Since World War II, the VA has been reporting on what kinds of injuries they treat. And tonight's Inherien loss have always been the number one and number two most prevalent injuries to service members. Eric Fallon has been studying how to protect the hearing of service members for a long time. He's an audiologist. An audiologist is a medical professional that is concerned with the auditory system. Eric used to be the chief audiologist at Walter Reed Medical Center. Some audiologists work with patients to give

them hearing tests and diagnose what kind of hearing disorder they have, but Eric's main focus is trying to find solutions. The right protective solutions that not only protect their hearing, but enhance their performance in some way. Eric now works for the company 3M, designing hearing protection for military use, and he's fond of saying that the military has a noise problem, but... We have a significant quiet problem. What he means is that service members in combat need ear protection that works for them in both environments, because the transition from quiet to noisy can happen very, very quickly.

In a war zone, you have to consider everything. Even just walking down the road has a strategy to it. The quote unquote, killing radius of a fragmentation grenade is 15 feet. If troops walked along in a clump like tourists, a single grenade could kill a bunch of them at once. So they try to keep at least 15 feet between each other on patrols. But the more spread out they are, the harder it is to hear one another. Troops in combat might walk in the quiet for hours.

The only noise being just a little bit of chatting, the sound of gravel crunching under their boots. And then suddenly, this is a video that Eric Fallon likes to show of troops on patrol in Iraq. These troops were just walking along. Hey, buddy! And then all of a sudden,

things got kinetic very quickly. Hey, buddy! Are you okay? And then all of a sudden, things got kinetic very quickly. In the video when the troop comes under fire, all the soldiers fall to the ground and begin shooting. It's loud, and they probably aren't wearing hearing protection. But Eric says the potential damage to their ears isn't the only problem. Their lives are in danger, and their hearing is one of the main things helping them figure out what to do.

Just because they're being shot at doesn't mean that they understand what's happening to them. They may not know, am I being shot at by 50 people or three people? What's happening to the left of me? What's happening to the right of me? One of the major tools to figure out what's happening in this situation is radio. With a radio, you can connect to someone who has more of a bird's-eye view of the place. This might be another soldier somewhere on a roof, or someone monitoring from a drone camera. Communication will help the person on the ground answer all the questions running through

their head in that moment. What do I do? Do I push through the assault? Do I hold in place? Do I wait for the quick reaction force to come and help us? Do I call in air support? But it's loud. They can probably barely hear what the other people around them are saying, let alone what's on the radio. And if I can't hear the signal, I may be missing the information that I need to make the right decision. And so if you see in that video, there's a young soldier laying on the ground communicating

over the radio and just before the video stops, you'll hear him say, I can't hear you. A point that I try to make whenever I use that video is that's probably one of the more important communications that not only that person but his team members will ever have in their lives because they're under direct enemy fire. Being able to hear the radio and each other is crucial to their survival. Eric believes that he has a solution to this problem. He thinks that service members on dismounted combat patrols like the one in that video

should be wearing a device called T-CAPS. So tactical communication and protective systems or T-CAPS are products that are designed to not only deliver hearing protection, but to allow you a better ability to hear what's happening around you so you can maintain some situational awareness. T-Caps come in a couple of styles. One style fits inside your ear, kind of like a pair of ear buds,

and the other style fits over your ear, and they look like the earmuffs you might wear while operating power tools. Both styles are equipped with environmental microphones that pick up the sounds around you and feed them into your ears at levels that your eardrums can tolerate. In some cases these products integrate into a radio system so that you can have more seamless to a radio communications. With the radio feature you could be talking with a drone operator or communicating with the command center, and you can actually hear what they're saying to you because the device is blocking out other noise. And yes, 3M, the company Eric works for Cells, T-Caps,

but he's also an audiologist who's dedicated his career to protecting the hearing of people in the military. Eric sent us a few of the over-the-ear style T-Caps headsets to try out. Each pair have a power button that allows you to toggle between a few settings. 99PI producers Katie Mingle and Sam Greenspanan tested out the tea caps in front of our office where there's been a bunch of loud construction happening all week, and Katie recorded what the world sounds like through her tea caps. So in this clip, Katie and Sam are standing on the sidewalk wearing tea caps, looking like a couple of weirdos basically.

People are walking past, a construction worker is sweeping, and despite the fact that they're wearing big, padded earmuffs, they can hear it all really well. Because the environmental microphones are picking up the noise around them and feeding it into their ears. That's Sam talking to Katie using the radio feature on the T-Caps. Now someone has started to saw through the concrete nearby, but the T-caps are attenuating the sound, so that Sam and Katie can still hear it, but it's a much lower volume. But if they take the T-caps off... I won't make it listen that very long, but basically, the T-caps allowed Katie and Sam

to communicate through some very loud construction noises while also protecting their ears. And when it was quiet, they were able to hear the environment around them, soft sounds, like sweeping and people talking. T-caps are also being marketed for use in industrial and construction settings, just like the one Katie and Sam were standing in the middle of.

In the military, they've been used since the early 2000s, mostly by special operations groups like Navy SEALs. But they're not standard issue, even for troops in combat who would be exposed to the kind of noise that can damage your hearing. The conventional forces do what I think that conventional forces have done for many, many years. They just accept that communicating is going to be a challenge. Communication challenges and hearing loss

were so much a part of the culture of combat that Eric says when he was a soldier he actually wanted hearing loss so that people would know he had experienced. So if you didn't have a degree of hearing loss it was obvious that you were one of the new guys and that you had not really been around much noise and you really had not fired that many artillery rounds down range. While soldiers are actively serving, they do have to undergo fairly comprehensive hearing tests and periodic check-ups. These tests are administered by an audiologist, but the results of those tests get passed on to the unit commander and he or she decides what to do with them.

And a soldier who is found to have degraded hearing often won't be taken out of their position. We're just so accustomed to finding workarounds with hearing loss. You will sometimes find soldiers that have a significant degree of hearing loss. But their unit leadership may be so dependent on that person that they also want that person to remain where they are. I look forward to the day when we put as much emphasis on maintaining good hearing as we do good vision. Eric has found that in order to get the military interested in protecting people's hearing,

he's had to sell it differently. But that didn't really work. It's not a unit commander's job to be concerned with the VA's spends on hearing loss. When Eric talked to unit commanders, he had to make the argument tactical. He had to explain that when people can hear they can be more effective on the battlefield. This points to a larger disconnect between the Department of Defense, which is tasked

with defending the nation and the VA, which provides health care to veterans. If the DOD is given a choice between spending their money on bombs or hearing protection, it's not hard to see why they might choose to kick the can to the VA. But to defend the Department of Defense, they have made an effort in the last couple of decades to do better. There's more testing than there used to be, and in 2009 they established the Hearing Center of Excellence, which researches hearing loss and advocates for more protection.

This invisible injury of hearing loss is very significant. The big part of our job is to advocate and build awareness. That's Colonel Mark Packer. He's the director of the Hearing Center of Excellence. And he says, yeah, T-Caps are great, but they're not perfect. All hearing protection has some fallibility.

If you're out on a hot mission in the desert and you have those earmuffs down over your ears, they are hot. Soldiers might remove them and then be unprotected when they need it. Other arguments against T-Caps, they are this extra thing to carry and they have to be charged and if they break they're expensive to replace. Not everybody

needs a $1,500 tactical radio device. There are some solutions in between T-caps and the cheapest foam ear plugs. There's what's called level dependent ear plugs that are made to protect against high impulse noises like weapons fire, while allowing other environmental noises to pass through. But Eric and others we spoke to said that these ear plugs still make it difficult to hear the environment around you, and for that reason a lot of people will opt not to wear them. Whether T-caps are the solution for all combat troops or not, it's worth saying that Colonel Packer and Eric Fallon, they're basically on the same side about this, and they're both

working sometimes together to find a solution to one of the oldest, most prevalent, and most invisible problems in the military. 99% Invisible was reported this week by Mary Roach and produced by Katie Mingle, with Delaney Hall, Shreefusef, Emmett Fitzgerald, Kurt Colesstead, Sam Greenspan, Avery Trouffleman, and me Roman Mars. This episode was based off a chapter of Mary Roach's excellent, best-selling book, Grunt, the Curious Science of Humans at War. I cannot recommend her books enough.

They are the best time you can have learning weird things about science. We are a project of 91.7K ALW, St. Francisco, Radio Row, Inbeatable, Downtown, Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, follow all the people who make this show on Twitter and Instagram, but the best way to explore the 99% invisible activity that shapes the design of our world is to click around the hundreds and hundreds of stories on 99pi.org. RADIO TAPI-O-R-X.