Grunt by Mary Roach

extract the last batch, the soldier’s last shot at biological fatherhood, in the operating room. “But again,” said Dean. “If they haven’t consented, I can’t do it. I don’t know if this guy wanted to be a father, now or ever. I need to know that, or have a [prior] directive from a legal guardian or next of kin. The wives and girlfriends get upset, but it’s not their body.”
    So education is what’s being done. Information about sperm banks is sent to service members before they deploy, so that at the very least they’re aware it’s an option.
    Not good enough, says Stacy Fidler, a veterans’ reproductive rights advocate I spoke to at Walter Reed. With support from a national infertility nonprofit called Resolve, Fidler is pushing for on-base sperm banks. She lives with her son Mark, a Marine who has been recuperating in an apartment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center since the propulsion charges on three grenades on his belt were set off by a nearby IED. Mark lost all of both legs and both buttocks. Although, quoting Stacy, “the big boy’s fine,” there was some damage to the testes, and the family doesn’t know whether Mark will be fertile once he heals.
    M ARK WAS on his bed when I arrived. It was midafternoon, and the curtains were closed. The Big Bang Theory was playing through a projector set up on his bedside table. I sat down in the one chair available, in the path of the projector’s beam. The actors sniped at each other on the side of my head until Mark reached for a remote and shut them down. Pressure sores made it too painful for him to sit upright. Without the cushioning of buttock muscle, the bony points of the pelvis can wear through the skin. Mark’s bed had become his couch, his office, and his dining table. Within arm’s reach were three remotes, an iPad, a plate of donuts, and that simplest of prostheses, the rattan back scratcher.
    “Listen,” said Mark. “I know how a grunt’s mind works. They’re not thinking about having kids. They don’t have wives, most of them.” He was shirtless under a gray fleece throw, his body a round form that stopped too soon. He pointed out that the sperm bank nearest to the Marine Corps training base at Twentynine Palms was probably in Los Angeles, three hours away. “You can give them all the information you want; they’re not going to do it.”
    His mom joined the conversation. Stacy Fidler wore jeans and a red shirt with a Marine Corps insignia and was perched on the edge of Mark’s prone cart, a joystick-operated, wheeled table that he’s been using to get around. “It should be available right there on base,” she said. “And if you don’t want to, you don’t have to.”
    “No,” countered Mark. “You have to make them do it. Honestly, in Afghanistan we talked nearly every day about getting blown up. But the most we ever talked about, injury-wise, was losing maybe above the knees, both legs. You never think about the genitals. Don’t give them a single chance to go, ‘Aaaaa, forget it.’”
    If the military were to pay for predeployment sperm-banking for every male recruit, wouldn’t they also need to pay for extracting and freezing eggs—a costlier and more involved undertaking? Stacy shakes her head no. “If a girl gets her ovaries blown up, she’s not going to be here.” Meaning that an explosion that blows up a woman’s ovaries is likely to be lethal. “That’s a whole different ball game,” she said, intending no word play.
    Mark has radar for whatever frame of mind a person has brought along into his room: unease, medical detachment, in my case curiosity. With little warning, he rolled onto his belly, pulled the blanket off and slid down the back of his Jockeys. Pointing to where his buttocks used to be, he said, “This right here is my lap.” Was , he means. His surgeons took skin from the front of his thighs, thighs they were removing anyway, and covered the crater made by the grenades. A