When do fashion designers make the difference between comfort and misery for active soldiers? Why does the military need a radically different kind of crash test dummy? What role could maggots play in healing open wounds? 

These questions and more are answered by best-selling science journalist, Mary Roach, author of "Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War." 

In this audio tour of duty we go beyond war's battlefields, bombs and bands of brothers to hear why scientists, doctors, researchers and designers do vital work tackling the armed force's most persistent adversaries: heat, disease, exhaustion and noise.

The heroes Mary Roach writes about do their work quietly behind-the-scenes, improving the odds that troops who go to war come back alive.

Mary has been called "America's funniest science writer" by the Washington Post. In the words of a British reviewer, she "has specialized in tackling the uncomfortable, and at the heart of every book is her desire to explore the places from which we recoil."

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