Grunt (23 page)

Meanwhile, back in time, the OSS had a bigger problem. The tubes were defective, and there wasn’t time to redesign them. Someone had gone ahead and added Who, Me? to the OSS catalog. Urgent cable requests were pouring in. Ten thousand tubes on order. “Memorandum on ‘Who, Me?’: Prevention of Contamination of the Operator” details the agency’s scramble for a fix. Slip-on paper hand shields? Too flimsy. Cloth-backed paper shields proved sturdier, but conferred protection only “when one squirts from a horizontal position.”

In the end, the OSS opted for rubber shields, despite a domestic rubber shortage dire enough to have prompted tire rationing and soon-to-be collectible posters (America Needs Your SCRAP RUBBER). Along with gas masks, life rafts, and jeep tires, the nation’s wartime rubber needs would come to include rubber Who, Me? sleeves with anti-dribble operator-protection lip.

Late in 1944, 95 rubber-accessorized Who, Me? tubes were rushed to Maryland Research Laboratories. They passed the Rough Handling Test. The Accelerated Aging Test. The Tropical Weathering Test and the Arctic Storage Test. The Combined Rough Handling and Tropical Weathering Test. Only once was a tester’s hand contaminated, owing to “a strong wind blowing across the direction of fire.” At last! The report of this final round of testing, dated November 9, 1944, pronounced Who, Me? ready for production and shipment to the field. Federal Laboratories was persuaded to take the order: 9,000 units, at 62 ½ cents each—enough revenue to cover the purchase and installation of the very finest fume hoods money could buy.

And there the story should have ended. But did not. Ernest Crocker, sensing the trough of lucrative government contracts being pulled from under his snout, dropped a stink bomb of his own. “The odor of Who, Me? is not considered objectionable by Orientals.” Humiliating the Japanese in occupied China, you will recall, had been Stanley Lovell’s original goal. Crocker offered to develop a new malodorant. Production was delayed yet again. More tests ordered. Your taxpayer dollars shaking their little green heads in disbelief.

“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.

O
N 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.”

I
F 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,” Maut
é
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. Maut
é
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. Maut
é
, 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 Maut
é
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, and 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

I
F 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.”