Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

9. THE MAGGOT PARADOX Flies on the Battlefield, for Better and Worse

IN A MEMORABLE CARTOON from my formative years, a well-dressed man with a goatee is seated at a restaurant table across from a fly. It’s a giant fly, a fly large enough to fill a dining room chair much the way a person would. The man addresses a waiter. I’m paraphrasing here. “I’ll have the gazpacho, and some shit for my fly.” It was a commentary on flies, or perhaps an observation on the odd human habit of elevating nutrient intake to social ritual. Or maybe just this: No matter how fond you are of a fly, dining out together is going to be awkward.

And the cartoonist only drew the half of it. Because flies have no teeth, they must first liquefy what they plan to eat. (Or order the gazpacho.) This they do by applying their digestive enzymes outside their body. The process was captured on film and included in the 1940s British Army hygiene filmstrip The Housefly. “Their vomit is puddled about your food to make a kind of porridge,” says an incongruously posh-sounding narrator, “which the fly then sucks up.” Technical Guide No. 30 (Filth Flies) of the US Armed Forces Pest Management Board would also have you know that “flies further contaminate food by defecating on it while they feed.”

No flies of any size are eating at Mi Rancho Mexican restaurant in downtown Silver Spring this evening, but some fly biologists are here, and that can be equally disquieting. We’re talking now about those out-of-body digestive enzymes. A researcher I had spoken to the previous week referred to the salivary glands, not the stomach, as the source. For clarification, I have turned to one of my dinner companions, George Peck, resident filth fly expert at the Entomology Branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), just down the road.

“I think it’s both,” Peck is saying. “They vomit up enzymes from the crop along with the saliva and let it—”

“Are you all done here?”

Peck looks up to acknowledge our waitress. “I am, thanks… and let it fall onto the food.”

With George Peck, the topic of flies and their unusual physiology doesn’t elicit disgust. Awe, mostly. I have heard him marvel at the sensitivity of the fly’s body hairs, how they enable it to detect the bow wave of an approaching hand and lift off in the split second before contact is made. He talks about the halteres, tiny gyroscopes that enable the fly to hover or change direction “faster than the fastest flight computer on any jet.”

Less awesome: Researchers in Japan established that the strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7—deadly outbreaks of which periodically make headlines in the United States—thrives in housefly mouthparts and frass.[39] Bacteria on or in filth flies have been shown to transmit typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and a whole wet bar of lesser diarrheal infections. (Both houseflies and blowflies fall under the grouping “filth flies.”) British researchers documented a close association between filth fly populations and cases of food poisoning from the campylobacter bacterium, both of which peak during the warmest months. (The English used to speak of “summer diarrhea”—loose stools and cramping having joined warm nights and fireflies as hallmarks of the season.) In a 1991 study, an Israeli military field unit that undertook an intensive filth fly control program saw 85 percent fewer cases of food poisoning than a similar one that did not.

The Armed Forces Pest Management Board’s filth fly technical guide includes a figure for the number of times in twenty-four hours that a single fly vomits and defecates on its food after a controlled feeding of milk. The figure, a range from 16 to 31, was arrived at not by staying up all night watching but by counting “fecal spots” and “vomit spots” (the latter distinguishable from the former by their lighter color). The reader is invited to speculate about the number of “spots” on food in a military chow line in the era before sealed dining facilities. Fly infestation in the mess halls of the Vietnam War, the guide relates, was so intense that “it was difficult to eat without ingesting one or two…”

Infestations still happen, mostly in the rough and not entirely ready first few days or weeks of a war. Early on, weapons and ammo take priority over latrines and refrigeration units in terms of what supplies get shipped. During the first Gulf war, Marines arrived in the region via the port of Jubail, where the Saudis housed them in a warehouse. “We had ten thousand Marines and two squat toilets,” recalls Joe Conlon, a retired Navy entomologist. The toilets soon clogged and sewage ran in the streets. Meanwhile, with no refrigerated storage, pallets of produce began piling up on the dock in the 100-degree heat. Thousands of flies converged. Conlon estimates 60 percent of the Marines got sick.

Historically, battlefields were even worse. Combat is a filth fly cornucopia—a bounty of rotting organic matter to eat, to lay eggs in, to nourish the offspring. On Pacific islands during World War II, says the Armed Forces Pest Management Board guide, “flies developed in corpses on battlefields and excrement in latrines to levels beyond modern comprehension.” A similar scenario developed in the aftermath of battle in El Alamein, Egypt, prompting officers of the British Eighth Army to mandate fly death quotas—each soldier responsible for killing at least fifty flies a day. During the Vietnam War, corpses became so heavily infested with maggots that pesticides had to be used inside body bags.[40] In Conlon’s camp on the Kuwait border, accumulating garbage exacerbated the problem. The Marines weren’t allowed to burn it—the normal disposal strategy—because the fires would give away the camp’s position. (The garbage eventually became part of military strategy. It was hauled away under cover of darkness and burned at a distant site, to trick the Iraqis.)

Nowhere was the filth fly situation more dire—or perhaps just more memorably documented—than in the American Civil War. “Few recruits bothered to use the slit trench latrines…,” wrote Stewart Marshall Brooks, in Civil War Medicine. “Garbage was everywhere… [alongside] the emanations of slaughtered cattle and kitchen offal.” Entomologists Gary Miller and Peter Adler, in a paper on insects and the Civil War, quote a letter by an Indiana infantryman describing the scene: “The deluge of rain which had fallen… soaked the ground until the whole face of the earth was a reeking sea of carrion…. Countless thousands of green flies… were constantly depositing their eggs… which the broiling sun soon hatched into millions of maggots, which wiggled until the leaves and grass on the ground moved and wiggled too.”

You can imagine what might happen to the open wounds of a soldier lying on a battlefield for any length of time. Most likely you would be wrong.

THE SOLDIERS, two of them, are not named, nor is the battlefield on which they were hit. We know that it happened in France during World War I, sometime in 1917. We know that it wasn’t winter, because the men arrived at an army hospital having lain “in the brush” for seven days. And because it was fly season.

That’s US Expeditionary Forces surgeon William Baer relating the story of how he came upon the unseemly idea of intentionally infesting wounds with maggots to help them heal. Filth fly larvae—blowfly maggots, most notably—prefer their meat dead or decaying. When the meat is part of an open wound, the act of eating performs upon the meal a kind of natural debridement. Debridement—the removal of dead or dying tissue—fights infection and facilitates healing. Because dead tissue has no blood supply and thus no immune defenses, it’s easily colonized by bacteria. This encourages infection of the healthy tissue and inflammation, which slows healing.

Baer was impressed that the soldiers had no fever or signs of gangrene. The mortality rate from the type of injuries the men had—compound fractures and large, open wounds—was about 75 percent with “the best of medical and surgical care that the Army and Navy could provide.” In 1928, a decade after the war had ended, Baer summoned his courage and experimented on civilians. His inaugural patients were children, four of them, all with recurrent bone infections from blood-borne tuberculosis, a condition that antiseptics and surgery sometimes failed to quell. Raymond Lenhard, the author of a biographical monograph on Baer, recalled hearing the great surgeon tell the story. Lenhard had been a student of Baer’s at Children’s Hospital School in Baltimore and, reluctantly, a dining companion. (“Often during lunch he would make us lose our appetites.”) Using the offspring of blowflies trapped near the hospital, Baer “loaded up” a wound and proceeded to watch the results. After six weeks, the wound had healed. As did the wounds of the other three children.

What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology. “The Chief was overweight, breathed audibly, and snorted in the fashion of a tic,” wrote Lenhard. Baer would sometimes go from operating room to lecture hall without changing, delivering his talks in baggy, bloodstained surgical trousers. He bred Chow Chows at his home, bringing yet more snorting and audible breathing to the Baer household.

Beneath the earthy exterior, Baer was an exacting and dedicated practitioner. He considered his “maggot treatment” far less abhorrent than the alternative: amputation. To Baer, the removal of a limb was “the ultimate in destruction,” wrote Lenhard, showing a flair for video game marketing eighty years premature.

So impressed was Baer by the work of his larval “friends” that he designed and built a thermostat-controlled wood and glass fly incubator at the hospital. Only thrice in an ensuing eighty-nine cases did the maggots fail and the patient succumb to infection. Fearing that the larvae may have introduced the offending bacteria, Baer devised a protocol for raising sterile specimens. Remnants of his technique live on today at Monarch Labs, in Irvine, California. Their Medical Maggots are also sterile, as required by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which in 2007 approved live blowfly larvae as a medical device.

While the majority of modern “maggot therapists” treat the hard-to-heal foot ulcers of diabetics, WRAIR’s George Peck has been seeking to take medicinal maggots back to their roots in the military. In 2010, he was funded for a study looking into the efficacy of blowfly larvae in treating chronically infected IED wounds. More recently, Peck received a grant to genetically modify blowfly maggots such that they produce antibiotics. Though maggots already prevent infection, these “supermaggots” could be tailored for specific bacterial infections.

Peck offered to hatch a “clutch” of maggots for me, taking care to time things such that when I arrive at his and his wife’s home for dinner, the larvae will be the size of Medical Maggots at the time they’re released in a wound (about two millimeters long). I don’t have any wounds. Just questions.

GEORGE PECK and his future wife, Vanessa, worked together in the basement insectary at WRAIR. An insectary is a facility for rearing insects—insects used, in this case, for testing vaccines and repellents against whatever has been lately plaguing troops. Vanessa cared for a colony of sand flies,[41] while George was down the hall with his filth flies. It’s a setting that might dampen the ardor of another pair, but Peck remains besotted. You hear it behind his words when he talks about her. Peck is a man easily taken by emotion. At Mi Rancho a few nights earlier, as we were getting ready to leave, the topic turned briefly away from flies. As I rose from my chair I heard Peck say, to no one specific, “I just love bees.” The word love breathy with feeling.

Peck abandoned a career in solar physics, because he felt it was taking him too far away from the natural world. He and Vanessa share their home with more of that world than most. They keep as pets a tarantula (Henrietta) and a small community of Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Like William Baer, Peck is a man some might find eccentric, but those who know him even slightly can see that it all comes down to a generous and open heart.

Vanessa clears the dinner plates while I finish my wine. The children are doing homework in the living room. George sets a glass dessert dish in front of me. Chocolate pudding, my brain offers optimistically, but it’s not that. It’s raw liver.

“These are about one day old.” Peck points out a cluster of maggots, maybe twenty or thirty, feeding side by side, packed in close. They’re easy to miss, because all that can be seen of them is their tail ends. Insects take in oxygen through openings in the exoskeleton called spiracles. In the larvae, these are, specifically, anal spiracles. On top of its other charms, the maggot breathes through its ass. It is a handy evolutionary adaptation if, as Peck puts it, “you spend your whole day with your head buried in slimy dead flesh.” Compared to lungs and a diaphragm, it’s an inefficient system, which is one reason the Insecta class never evolved to be as large as Mammalia. Having several minutes ago viewed a fly under George Peck’s home microscope, I assure you that’s a good thing.

William Baer likened clusters of feeding maggots to litters of puppies. “So voracious are they in their struggle for food that they will stand upright on their heads with their tails in the air, as puppies do… around a basin of food where the basin is too small for the number of puppies.” Baer had dogs on the brain. To me, they look like a set of tiny accordion buttons being played by some ghost polka virtuoso. The important thing, especially for someone being treated with them, is that they don’t look like maggots. So if a patient peeked beneath the trademarked Monarch Labs LeFlap dual-layered maggot cage dressing, he would not be slammed with a squirming Halloween horror visual.

Peck transfers three outliers to the tip of my index finger. They rear up and wave their heads like happy Sesame Street puppets. Peck says they’re searching for food. Now two are lifting the third up above them. They remind me of jubilant teammates after a sporting victory.

Peck isn’t reading joy in the scene. “They do cannibalize,” he says gently.

Upon closer inspection, they are, yes, attacking—eating!—their clutch mate. They were away from the liver for maybe two minutes! The maggot lives to eat. That is what it does, all it does, for the four or so days before beginning the energy-intensive, deeply sci-fi project of rearranging itself into a fly.

Peck puts a maggot under the microscope he has set up on the kitchen table, so I can get a closer look at the mouthparts: the showpiece of maggot anatomy. They are rasping, curved scythe-like things. They’re the only piece of the maggot formed from chitin, hard and brown in contrast with the creature’s moist, pale, flexible self. Fortunately for maggot debridement therapy patients, the tissue deep inside a wound—dead or alive—has no sensory nerves; those are up in top layers of skin. Provided the Medical Maggots recommended “dosage”—5 to 8 maggots per square centimeter of wound surface—hasn’t been exceeded, there should be enough dead tissue to go around, and no ravenous maggot will shift its gaze to live skin.

“Those little mandibles,” Peck says as I look through the eyepiece, “can do what no surgeon or scalpel can do. No robotic laser can bend its light into a hidden crevice from an IED blast like that can. That is the master surgeon.” If you want to destroy every last bacterium and shred of dead tissue, a maggot is your man. He’s a small man, though, so it takes a while. A course of maggot debridement therapy—up to six rounds of fresh larvae—may take weeks. Whereas surgical debridement can be done in a matter of hours. And if a patient’s immune system is healthy, as a young soldier’s tends to be, it’s not necessary to get every last cell of bacteria and necrotic flesh.

But Peck never suggested that maggots be used for the initial debridement of a blast wound. For military personnel, maggots would come into play further down the road, should a recalcitrant infection set in—some antibiotic-resistant strain, perhaps something exotic and stubborn that lurked in the dirt that was blasted so deeply and voluminously into the wound. These complications set in often enough that Peck received military funding for a rodent study to measure the effectiveness of maggot debridement therapy for soil-infected IED wounds. The experimental protocol presented challenges. It required Peck’s team to surgically mimic, in a rat, the typical injuries caused by a bomb blast. To meet the requirements of the animal review board—and Peck’s own personal ethics—no part of the process could be painful to the rat. The nerves supplying feeling to that portion of the body had to be identified and severed.

Peck’s funding was not renewed, for reasons that are fairly easy to guess at. Modern hospital culture is technology-driven and forward-looking. To those unfamiliar with the studies and success rates, maggot therapy sounds primitive, anachronistic. Peck recalls presenting some promising preliminary findings to a roomful of colleagues and listening while a disapproving colonel talked about the thirty years of advancements he’d seen in his time at WRAIR. The man shook his head. “And we’re using maggots.”

A 2012 survey of US Army physicians suggests that the colonel’s opinions are not those of the majority. While only 10 percent of those surveyed had prescribed maggot debridement therapy, 85 percent felt that having access to practitioners would be a good resource. Their reservations were mostly just practical: They didn’t know where to obtain the maggots or how to use them or what the billing code might be.[42] In a smaller survey, practitioners voiced concerns that the medical facility they worked for wouldn’t allow maggots, and that patients would be likely to balk.

They are wrong about the patients. The surgeon who runs the Southern Arizona Limb Salvage Alliance,[43] David Armstrong, has applied maggots to more than a thousand patients. “I can count on one hand the number of people who have refused,” he told me. The Medical Maggots FDA approval summary cited a “complaint and adverse event” rate of 1 percent, many of these occasioned by “late or lost” (or perhaps hurled into a Dumpster by the driver) FedEx shipments. The yuck factor of these wounds—and their resistance to more conventional treatment—well overrides the yuck factor of hosting live blowfly larvae. Also, Medical Maggots are less off-putting than you might imagine. Straight out of the vial, they’re the size of cupcake sprinkles. When they’re not eating each other alive, they’re kind of adorable. They move like inchworms, like something you might see humping along the pages of a children’s book.

“People take an interest in the cute little guys,” Armstrong said, quickly amending his statement with “…and gals.” You mean, I asked him, the way one might follow the progress of seedlings one has planted, or guppies one is raising? “Exactly,” he said. “And then, in turn, the progress of the healing going on. It’s hard to describe it, but the larvae draw people into the wound emotionally.” Medical Maggots patients, some anyway, are sufficiently positive and cavalier about their infestations that they go around wearing Monarch Labs t-shirts that proclaim, “Maggots on Board!”

Hospital staff are less charmed. “A lot of doctors and nurses find it repulsive,” Armstrong told me. Colonel Pete Weina, former director of the Complex Wound and Limb Salvage Center at WRAIR and now their chief of research programs, agrees. Around 2009, Weina had a William Baer moment. “I had a patient who’d passed out in an alley and flies had come by and laid eggs in his wound. The nurses were all, ‘Oh my God, this is terrible, get the maggots out of there!’” Recalling what he’d read about the blowfly larvae’s talent for debridement, Weina improvised a cage dressing to keep them from straying and left them in. The wounds healed nicely, but Weina backed away from the practice. “The entire hospital was pretty much grossed out by what I was doing.”

While not discounting what he calls “the gross factor,” George Peck sees cost as the main hurdle. How is it, you might ask, that maggots are more expensive than surgeons? It’s not the creatures themselves; a vial of Monarch Labs maggots is priced at $150. It’s the time demands on medical staff—staff who have to be trained to monitor the maggots and change the dressings. Peck shows me a second bowl of liver and maggots, hatched two days earlier. “See how foamy and goamy it is in there?” With, say, a hundred maggots, he explains, the breathable mesh of the cage dressing quickly becomes nonbreathable. The larvae suffocate. The nurses are repulsed.

Changing a maggot dressing is trickier—and creepier, and goamier—than changing other kinds of wound dressings, because you are also changing the insects. Each dose must be completely wiped out—literally, with a piece of gauze—before the next is introduced. Overlooked maggots that continue growing will soon be gripped by an urge to pupate. After a few days of gorging, fly larvae abandon the juicy chaos of their childhood home and set out to find a dry, quiet place in which to build a cocoonlike “puparium” and become a fly.

There is an understated line in the Medical Maggots package insert: “Escaping maggots have been known to upset the hospital staff…” One, they’re maggots. Two, they’re about to be flies. Flies in the medical center. Flies in the operating room. Landing on open wounds. Vomiting and defecating. Moving on to other wounds, spreading the antibiotic-resistant pathogens they’ve picked up on their feet. Physician Ron Sherman, Monarch Labs’ founder, started out raising maggots in a closet at the VA hospital in Long Beach—a closet that “became quite spacious once everyone found out what I was doing.” The moment a fly would get loose, the administration jumped on him. Sherman has since moved his “living medicine” operation to a warehouse near the Irvine airport, where he raises maggots, leeches, and fecal bacteria (for transplants). I can imagine the company’s Schedule C taxable expense form simultaneously attracting and deflecting a visit from the IRS.

FILTH FLIES are lured by the odor of decay: a whole body or sometimes just a part. A moist, rank, infected body opening—be it a wound or a natural cavity—is a VACANCY sign to a gravid female. When maggot infestation shows up in a medical journal, it’s generally accompanied by the technical term for it, “myiasis,” and a revolting photographic close-up of the infected, infested part: gums, a nostril, genitals.

Here again, some words from the Armed Forces Pest Management Board: “Vaginal myiasis is a concern of increased importance because of the larger numbers of women serving in deployed units…. Egg laying may be stimulated by discharges from diseased genitals.” In a hot climate, there might be a temptation to sleep outside uncovered, the board points out. And the kind of soldier who sleeps outside with no underpants would also, I suppose, be the kind of soldier with a genital disease. The kind headed for “dishonorable discharge” of one kind or another.

And finally, there is “accidental myiasis,” typically of the intestines. The tale unfolds like this: The patient espies maggots in or near his daily evacuation and assumes he has shat them out. He further assumes—as does his doctor—that he accidentally ate some food infested with fly eggs. One hyperventilating MD, writing in a 1947 issue of British Medical Journal, claimed that the “resistant chitinous coating of the egg” survives the acids and enzymes of the stomach, enabling the larvae inside to travel unharmed to the less hostile environment of the intestines, where they would hatch and set up camp.

To the rescue, in the form of a letter to the editor, comes F. I. van Emden, of the Imperial Institute of Entomology. Does it not make more sense that the larvae were hatched not inside the patient but inside—as Van Emden put it, giving toilets and bedpans the ring of religious sacrament—“a vessel used for receiving… the excrements”? Furthermore, Van Emden points out, insect eggs are not made of chitin. The “shell” is a fine, thin, permeable membrane. To prove his point, Emden set up an experimental tabletop stomach, a mixture of warmed gastric juices and chewed bread, into which he placed eggs and larvae of the species in question. The larvae, including those inside eggs, were killed.

To any in need of further reassurance, I give you Michael Kenney, of Governmental Medical Services for the city of Katanga in the Belgian Congo, circa 1945. Presumably the GMS was an agency providing health care for indigents. “Sixty human volunteers…,” Kenney wrote, in Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, “were fed living maggots” of the common housefly, encased in large gelatin capsules. It’s unclear whether the larvae—twenty per subject!—were encapsulated individually or inhabited one large community capsule, but either way it took two glasses of water to get them down. A third of the time, the capsules were vomited up shortly after they were swallowed, their passengers still for the most part alive. In the remaining two-thirds of the subjects, diarrhea with dead maggots ensued. An “occasional” maggot survived the odyssey, but that doesn’t mean the volunteer was infested. A brief transit through the alimentary canal is different from settling in and passing your childhood there. All the volunteers’ symptoms cleared up within forty-eight hours and no further maggots appeared. This suggested that, first, fly larvae “do not produce a true intestinal myiasis in man.” And second, there’s no such thing as free health care.

It’s almost 8:00 p.m. at the Peck residence. George has brought out a tray of pinned insect specimens. I’m distracted at the moment by a live one.

“George?”

“Mm?”

“You have a large, somewhat frightening insect on your shoulder.”

Peck doesn’t bother to confirm this. Without removing his gaze from the tray, he says, “It’s probably a brown marmorated stink bug.” This time of year they’re apparently everywhere. He explains that the name derives from the smell released when the bug is crushed. This one isn’t crushed but carefully escorted out the screen door into the deepening Maryland dusk. Peck sits back down at the kitchen table. “They’re beautiful under a microscope.”

SETTING ASIDE George Peck—an act I’ve put off for as long as possible—most of the military’s filth fly researchers are down in Florida. The Navy Entomology Center of Excellence (NECE) is located in Jacksonville, about an hour’s drive from colleagues at the US Department of Agriculture Mosquito and Fly Research Unit. NECE serves as the military’s pest control arm. It is a job that will go on forever. Because new generations come and go in a matter of weeks, flies quickly evolve resistance to whatever new pesticide they’re hit with. There will always be some with a mutation that helps them survive, and those survivors and their rapidly proliferating spawn will repopulate the area, laughing at the humans with their misters and foggers and truck-mounted sprayers.

The flies of the Gulf wars are recalled as maddeningly persistent, a function of food’s relative scarcity in the desert. During Operation Desert Shield, Navy entomologist Joe Conlon camped with a light infantry battalion in the Saudi Arabian desert near the Kuwait border. The flies served as an unpleasant but effective alarm clock. “You’d be asleep with your mouth open. Soon as dawn came the flies would be out, looking for food and moisture. They’d fly right in your mouth. You’d wake up to the sound of Marines coughing and cursing.” USDA fly researcher Jerry Hogsette told me about a team of entomologists in Operation Desert Storm who drove off into the empty desert until they could no longer see the base, stopped, and opened a can of sardines. Within seconds, there were flies.

The fly’s tenacious commitment to humans and their filth explains the military’s enduring commitment to extermination: Soldiers constantly waving off flies are soldiers poorly focused on their job. When the job involves shooting and not getting shot, that’s a hazardous distraction. With livestock, too, the distraction can be lethal. Hogsette says a cow can become so focused on shooing flies that it forgets about eating and starves. The agricultural community uses the term “fly worry.”

The Gulf wars saw a related condition: insecticide sprayer worry. Shortly after the United States arrived in Kuwait, military intelligence determined that Saddam Hussein had purchased forty insecticide sprayers. With all the talk of “weapons of mass destruction,” paranoia was running high. Joe Conlon was brought in to assess the likelihood—and the danger—of the devices’ being used to disperse chemical or biological weapons. He deemed it unlikely. “You can’t control where the cloud goes. You’re just as likely to poison your own troops.” Conlon’s professional opinion was that Saddam Hussein wanted to kill some flies.

High-volume fly traps are a popular tool on military bases, because they’re low-maintenance. Here the artistry is in the lure. NECE has tested different wavelengths of ultraviolet light, varied background colors, and all manner of chemical attractants. There was a fleeting moment, during World War II, when fly attractants played a more strategic battlefield role. Nazis had poured into a Spanish enclave of Morocco with the aim of cutting off the Allied supply line to troops fighting Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The Pentagon called upon Stanley Lovell, director of research and development for the Office of Strategic Services or OSS (precursor to today’s CIA), to devise a way to quietly, as Lovell put it in his memoir, “take out Spanish Morocco.”

“I evolved a simulated goat dung,” Lovell wrote, improbably. Spanish Morocco being a land with “more goats than people,” the decoy dung would, he reasoned, fail to arouse suspicion. The plan was to spike the turds with both a powerful fly attractant and a cocktail of pestilent microorganisms and then drop them from planes during the night. Filth flies would take over from there: landing on the dung, picking up pathogens, and delivering their deadly payload to the Nazis’ meals.

The OSS files in the National Archives and Records Administration include dozens of entries for gadgets and weapons dreamed up by staff,[44] but I found nothing under “goats,” “dung,” or Lovell’s name for the project, Operation Capricious. Lovell wrote that he and his colleagues were “well along” with it when word arrived that the Germans had withdrawn from Spanish Morocco. Perhaps. I suspected that the killing shit never made it further than the drawing board. Or, more likely, the cocktail napkin.

And then I came upon an OSS file labeled “Who, Me?” And it was clear I had underestimated Stanley Lovell.