Curious - am I wrong in assuming that people in the armed forces use hearing and eye protection now, and years ago? I imagine if you go back far enough, nobody wore any kind of protection. I assume that by the time WW II came along, and especially afterward, people were issued what they needed..... but that's just a guess.
I do get a hearing test now on a yearly basis, and got tired of saying "What???" so often, so now I've got hearing aids, and have just ordered ear plugs this morning. The closest I've ever been to "combat" is movies and books - but all I've read about hearing loss is stories of soldiers who wrote that they couldn't hear anything after a bomb went off, or something like that, and gradually their hearing came back. Apparently the real hearing loss doesn't happen until many years later.....
I'm probably not the only one in these forums who didn't REALLY understand any of this, until a few people here started talking about it. I used to think that ear muffs and plugs were all the same, all did the same thing, and you just needed to remember to use one or the other. Until then, I thought my old red ear muffs (you can see them in the movie, The Island, filmed at Tamiami Range in Miami, around 1980) were still perfectly suitable. Had I not been reading a lot of things here, I'd probably still be using those old muffs, assuming they were still quite fine.