As a classical musician and a teacher, I've had a number of students who were active military and were going to Iraq. I am pro-war and very supportive of the military, but I've always wondered... what does the military do to protect the hearing of the troops? I know that as a musician, I have different priorities than a soldier, but I do think of the possibilities that my students could come back deaf (and obviously, but hopefully not, worse) or with hearing damage. I know that the military has things like silencers, etc. available to them, but you never (at least on TV) see soldiers making use of them. Ear plugs would obviously be impractical in combat, yet one of my students told me that most of the time, soldiers use hand-signals for commanding squads in combat. I was also reading Soldier of Fortune recently where they had a preview of the (Jackhammer?) Machine Shotgun. As far as I know, shotguns are deafening and there are no shotgun silencers. I began to think, while this gun was strategically effective, we'd still have a bunch of people coming back functionally deaf after the war. Again, I don't want to be like one of those do-gooders who complained about the body-armor and then we had troops with 200 lbs of armor on and they couldn't move in it (and subsequently discarded some of it) and do more harm than good, but thinking post-war, how do we prevent hearing loss DURING war?