The Unquiet Life of Franz Gayl

[Kuros]

A tech-savvy Marine who made too much noise, helped save the lives of countless troops in Iraq, and paid with his career.

Based on their research, he built, in his living room, a weapon for immobilizing people without injuring them (and tested it, on himself). When he was awarded a patent, what had been known in military labs as the Gayl Blaster became the “high intensity directed light and sound crowd dispersion device.” Popular Science chronicled his work, as did Wired writer Sharon Weinberger in her book Imaginary Weapons. When he left the Corps in 2002, after twenty-two years of active duty, the Marine commandant wrote him a note: “You have been a super-star for the Marine Corps for your entire career; if I had a chance to vote you would be our first one-star space general!” That year, he was hired as a science adviser to the Marine Corps at the Pentagon.

But Gayl had an equally pronounced talent for making waves. In 2004, he wrote a report exposing the dysfunction of the Marines’ science and technology division. Unsatisfied with the attention it got among the brass, he published an article in the Marine Corps Gazette suggesting that the service risked irrelevance if it didn’t change. The report was right, the general whom Gayl worked for told me, as was Gayl, usually, but he was also incapable of subtlety and indifferent to hierarchy.

“He’s very smart and gifted and very passionate about what he does. He would do anything for the Marines,” the general said, but he was not particularly well liked in the high command. “I think people resented his intellect.”

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