In Pursuit of Silence Read Online Free PDF Page B

of all his work in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of his special-operations activities involved long walks, since news about the liftoff and progress of helicopters, and even of their reconfigured Toyotas, would often be relayed via cell phone from village to village, far in advance of their movements. Engine noise eliminated the possibility of surprise. And for the same reason that they avoided vehicular transport, he and his unit almost always moved at night. Even with their night-vision goggles, hearing was the primary sense they employed as they closed in on a target. “In an assault on a compound, everyone would be listening as hard as they could—and straining to be as quiet as possible. Without silence, the teeter-totter of success will tilt in the bad guy’s favor.”
    Soldiers are taught the acronym SLLS, which stands forstop, look, listen, smell. But since operations are normally done at night, Everman continued, “the vision part is impaired. And I think the smell part really comes from Vietnam days, you know—the smell of rice cooking. It wasn’t too applicable to my experience. But you’re definitely listening. And you’re definitely being quiet.”
    Even when you’re being as quiet as you can, Everman said, you still make sounds. He and his team would try to fasten down any loose gear with rubber bands to prevent rattling. But even if they succeeded, their own motion would often be loud enough to mask important warnings. And on top of these “regular sounds,” he went on, “you’re moving at night, over rough terrain. Everyone’s going to fall down. It’s not like in the movies. I’ve taken a lot of diggers.” After someone falls, they all freeze, listen, make sure there aren’t any new sounds indicating they’ve been heard.
    The other element Everman’s unit had to contend with was also an acoustical threat: barking dogs. “That’s why nomadic, pastoralist cultures keep dogs,” he noted. “They’re a good early-warning system. But dogs bark so much,” Everman added. “It’s like sirens here in New York. Especially in a village, when one dog barks all the other dogs start barking …”
    There was one aspect of Everman’s experience that I figured would ignore silence: the actual assault on a compound; the deafening volleys of bullets released when they took out “the bad guys.” But here a mysterious combination of psychology and physiology kicked in to counter my expectations.
    Everman reduces the essence of combat to two principles: stress management and problem solving. At their core is yet another dimension of silence. “When a gunfight kicks off, it’s fucking
loud
,” he told me. “But every time, the real
cracks
areover in the first few seconds. Then it’s just”—Everman lifted his hands up by the sides of his head and then suctioned them violently into his ears—“
whooosh
. It’s like that scene at the opening of
Saving Private Ryan
. The first thing that goes is your hearing—partly because you’re blasting your eardrum or whatever, but there’s something else happening as well. The way it goes silent allows me to focus on solving the problem. You’re not going to be able to solve any problems if you’re not managing stress, and aural exclusion is a key part of stress management. It puts you in a Zen state. I’ve never been more in the moment than I have in combat situations.”
    The mind, it seems, can create silence where actual silence is least present. For Everman, the switch to silence, entering what he described as a Zen state, meant the changeover from listening to seeing. “Once the gunfire starts, I’m always cued into muzzle flashes rather than sound,” he said.
    At the end of our conversation, I asked Everman what his most powerful “sound memory” was of his time as a soldier. At first, he spoke of how, in Afghanistan, if you took away the AK-47s and the cell phones, the noise of the place was “completely biblical. What you heard were