This morning I was thinking about what I’ve been told about firing a gun in an actual self-defense situation - that it’s going to be much louder in your bedroom than it is with hearing protection on in a shooting range, either indoor or outdoor, and you should be ready for it, etc.
Surely soldiers in, say, Iraq can’t have hearing protection all the time, otherwise they’d miss stuff that would get them into the firefight in the first place, right? Or do those helmets help with that? If not, are the loud noises of gunfire a problem? Does it happen infrequently enough that their hearing recovers? I assume various bomb attacks would be dangerous for your hearing as well, but is that a concern compared to the whole “spinal injury and amputation” thing?
So, does the military do something to protect soldiers’ hearing in this kind of “it could happen at any time” urban battlefield? Is hearing loss common to people in that kind of environment?
It is a massive problem, and a leading cause of military-related disability. And while soldiers are issued hearing protection in the field and are indeed required to wear it, most don’t because they feel it affects their situational awareness (as in - you can’t hear the enemy).
Never mind that you can’t hear them either after your eardrums get blown out in an IED blast.
I must note, too, that this is hardly confined to combat troops. I never saw a day of combat as a sailor and wore my hearing protection religiously around shooting - I still had a notable hearing shift after just five years of active duty. It was caused by trying to hear aircraft over a radio circuit hundreds of miles away through heavy static while wearing a headset - the only way to compensate was to crank the volume up and listen for the faint voices.
I can pretty much second everything Mr. Moto has said. I am a medic in the army and one of my jobs is to make sure soldiers in my company get annual hearing exams.
Pretty much every soldier has significant hearing loss after 5+ years, combat or no combat.
Mine was under the threshold for disability, so they just sent me away with an honorable discharge and a likelihood that I’ll need hearing aids when I get older. I just hope there isn’t an issue when I ask the VA for them.
Isn’t electronic hearing protection used these days? I mean the ones with built-in microphone/speaker/amplifier, that automatically cut off the sound transfer when the microphone picks up a noise spike (such as from a gunshot)? I found myself hearing very acutely with one of those sets.
Without turning this into a major debate, my general opinion is that the American public and the American media don’t really care much about soldiers and their problems. And the small portion of care that exists is wrapped up in either support for the war (if you’re a political conservative) or opposition to it (if you’re like many liberals.)
I saw this in a thread about awful barracks conditions - people here immediately started harping on the war. Never mind that I saw awful conditions in barracks when I was active duty in the 1990s. Never mind that I found a cite from 1993 saying that the Army expected to complete their barracks modernization in 25 years. No matter - it just became another war debate.
Americans say they love the military, but they love them from a distance or with clean uniforms. Nothing that has happened in the last forty years or so has changed that very much.
Not making light of this subject, I play Senior (55+) Softball with a retired Marine who lost 90%of his hearing in Vietnam. Concussion-related due to a hand grenade. He had been in and out of Balboa Naval Hospital for more than 40 years. The staff tried everything, but to no avail. Well, last year he gets a call to come in again. Whatever they did worked and he walked out one hour later with his hearing restored. Imagine being all but deaf for 40 years and in an instant your hearing is restored.
Fast forward to the following Saturday. He’s on the mound pitching and the usual wise-cracking/bantering is going on (seems like we’re all reverting back to childhood as we age). Well, halfway through the second inning he walks off the mound, throws the hearing device back in his bag, returns to the mounds and proclaims, “Life was so much simpler when I didn’t have to listen to you assholes.”
I’m not sure if those are exactly what I mean. I was referring to muffs that capture and amplify external sounds and transfer them inside the hearing protection muffs, and cutting noise spikes that pass a threshold. From the description on your linked page, they seemed to have a slightly different purpose, but I might have interpreted it incorrectly.
Anyway, if something of that kind is used, then why is there still so much hearing damage? You aren’t rendered nearly deaf with them on, so that complaint doesn’t fly.
The thing is it’s not just gunshots that harm hearing but the constant drone of the equipement. Tanks, personel carriers, helicopters and such are much more prevailant everyday than gunfire. A lot of gunfire damage can be avoided just by wearing passive ear muffs. I beleive that the ones you point to are made mostly for firing ranges. In truth I don’t beleive that there is a single pair of hearing protection devices that adquetly protect the user in all situations, but such is life everywhere.
Ah. Then what is the reason for people in tanks/APCs/etc not to use hearing protection at all times? Even passive systems would work there, with integrated comms.
The complaint mentioned upthread was about reduced situational awareness, which I assume is more of a problem for dismounted infantry than tank crews. In that setting, I don’t see why hearing protection similar to the ones I linked to wouldn’t do. In fact, they are what we used while I was doing my military service. What constant drones are they exposed to? When riding in an APC the active component can either be turned off, or dialed down to a lower volume.
I’ve heard a lot about it, but mainly because my grandfather had major hearing issues after a tank fired a round next to his head in WWII. He received disability from the Army for the rest of his life.
He said he never heard the blast, it just sounded like someone flipped a switch in his head to the “off” position. I’m not sure how many days went by until he could hear again.
I can’t speak for whether these things actually reduce situational awareness - I do know that this is a strong perception among troops and a reason they leave the hearing protection off.
First off the ‘passive systems’ are earplugs. They’re issued in Basic. They’re cheep but they work. If you get anything better than that it must depend on your MOS and the age of your equipment. When I was in the artillery, we got earplugs.
Earplugs work well but they really hinder communication so you take them out a lot. Do this 10-15 times a day in a dirty, gritty, sandy place and your ears can get irritated. Sometimes you don’t have free hand so they get left out. Sometimes you’d lose one. That little string that connects the earplugs in the link above is new this year. It would be nice if hearing protection was integrated into the helmet. But they’ve been talking about that for 20 years and it’s never happened.
To be fair, a lot of this is Murphy’s Law applied to any large bureaucracy, especially one that relies on the lowest bidder.
An American solider from 1778, 1864, 1944, 1994 and today would all find things to complain about, just as all soldiers do.
That doesn’t mean they’re not right, but there was never a mythical ideal where American soldiers-- or really, any nation’s soldiers-- had 100% of what they asked for, gold-plated, all of the time, with the support of the entire populace.
That would be great for motorcycles too, I’ve searched to no avail. Any time I ride more than 30 min or so without protection I get stir-crazy from the wind noise.
Having worked in a County Veterans Service Office, I know that there were lots & lots of veterans with hearing loss. In fact, I sometimes thought that nearly all of them would qualify for service-related tinnitus.
This was especially true of WWII, Korea, & Vietnam vets, but frankly, new ones from Grenada, Iraq I, Iraq II, were not much better. I guess it’s jut pretty hard to be around big guns or big airplanes when they go off and not get some hearing damage.
