Places to Poo

Encouragement, YES! Helping Bullis do his business.

            “Vance, you OK?”  Lebel asked.

            “Yeah, it’s that time,” I replied with a pale face.

            “Time for what?”

            “Time to piss out of my ass.”

            “You just ate ten minutes ago.”

            “Yep, then I’m late.

            I scurried out of the chow hall in Taji, Iraq in the Spring of 2010 hoping to make it to the latrine on the other side of the compound.  No such luck. 

            “Shit, shit, shit oh no, this isn’t happening,” I whimpered to myself.

            Oh but it is, Mat, IT IS.  There’s no way I can make it to the other side of the compound for an actual toilet, but I scanned the area for a shack with “Hodgy Shitters” where I could do the whole “squat to poo in a hole in the ground” thing.  I spotted a shack and awkwardly ran in as I clinched my ass cheeks while still whimpering.

 “No, no, no you don’t.”

I dropped my pants around my ankles while I was still a few feet away from the hole, spun my body around to get into position, grabbed a wall and down I went in a sweaty heap thinking I was about to expel Lucifer himself right out of my bunghole.

            “Ohhhhh yeah,” I moaned in both relief and pain.

            That’ll teach me to eat local food that’s prepared with unfiltered river water.  My average sized body had dysentery for a few weeks and dropped 20 pounds thanks to completely liquidating all consumed food in about ten minutes.  From the moment food went down my throat, it waged a violent war with my digestive track letting out screams from within to let me know that I had better find a place for the casualties real quick.  There were no solid pieces either.  It was all acidy liquid that burned all the chafed skin from where I would wipe at least nine times in 24 hours.  To this day, I only purchase premium Charmin’s.  Dehydration is a motherfucker.

            Going number two is taken for granted every day back in the States.  Did you know it’s actually better for your digestive track to squat over a hole in the ground and the way you’re used to sitting on the toilet actually creates hemorrhoids?  Squatters apparently know a thing or two about poo.  Squatting is the hard part, but by no means the nasty part.

            Luckily on that fateful day in Taji, I had already been dealing with the issue since I was in Diyala Province near the Iranian boarder two weeks earlier.  That means I knew I had to carry an emergency supply of toilet paper at all times.  If I hadn’t had the TP with me in the shack, I would have had to go “third world” on the wiping.  That would entail hoping there was still water in the hose lying next to the hole to rinse while wiping with my hand.  That’s why Iraqi’s don’t shake with their left hand and to offer yours is extremely insulting.

           

Questionable Evolution

I’ve stayed in some really nice places while deployed, but then again I’ve also stayed in places where even rats are like, “Oh, hell no.”  In 2009 at Combat Outpost (C.O.P.) Cobra, we had to improvise when it came to our bowel needs.  There were nice porcelain holes in the ground, but its not easy to squat and aim with all of our gear on.  We first grabbed a metallic folding chair and cut out an ass-sized hole in the seat and then placed the chair over the porcelain hole.  Great success!  However, the local plumbing couldn’t handle TP.  After wiping, we had to put the used TP in a trash bag sitting next to the makeshift toilet.  Yes, that meant if some mouth-breathing degenerate decided to miss the trash we all got a whiff and a few lucky ones got an accidental touch of someone else’s feces.

            Eventually engineers made it out to C.O.P. Cobra and installed toilets.  All good, right?  Negative.  We shared those latrines with the Iraqi Army.  They couldn’t get a handle on “sitting.”  Instead of sitting on the toilet to do their business, they would stand on top of the toilet seat and squat.  As you can imagine, they missed.  The toilet seat would look like somebody dropped mud on it and then leaped all over to the sounds of “Kris Kross will make you jump, jump.”

Burn It

             “If I was going to be a shit burner, I made damn sure I was the best shit burner we’d ever had,” Coach Lyons ranted.

            Coach Lyons was referring to his service back in Vietnam.  At the time, I was riding the bench as usual attempting to play college football at Christopher Newport University.  I never complained about being on the bench because I knew college was the wrong time to start playing.  I was in it purely to try something new and man, I was the worst player on that team.  However, a lot of other bench-ridden players were crying about the splinter collection on their asses from riding the pine.

            Good ole Coach Lyons decided to do a motivational speech teaching them how to be team players.  He explained that everyone has a place and if people don’t take their jobs seriously, the whole team falls apart.  Coach Lyons explained that back in Vietnam, as an FNG, he was told to burn shit.  Instead of complaining about the nasty job, he did it the best he could until he was promoted.  A lot of guys on the team might have forgotten that speech, but it served me well as a leader.  Thank you, sir.

            I was lucky enough to never have been actually told to burn shit, but I didn’t think that was right.  During my second tour I always included myself in the shit burning rotation.  It can be pretty demoralizing to burn somebody’s excrement that doesn’t share the same duties, no pun intended, so I think it would behoove every leader to join in the fun.

So how do you burn shit?  Very easy and the smell is unforgettable!  Grab a 15 gallon metal bucket for everyone to shit in.  All full?  Drag that fucker out in the open away from anything flammable or edible.  It’s recommended to dump just a cup of diesel fuel in the shit bucket, but I’m a pyro so I encouraged the fellas to do a “healthy pour.”  Light a MRE match and drop it in.  Man make fire!  Man make stinky fire.  Start stirring.  Depending on the load, everything should be evaporated after 30-45 minutes of stirring.  Add more diesel as necessary.  Now you’re a big boy.  Go brag about this war story at the bar and let me know how many digits you land.

Most Creative Drop

            While deployed, our schedule could go from insane to complete boredom on the daily.  Along with an extremely new environment, new diet, adjusting to vaccines and of course sleep depravation, our bowel cycle was all kinds of FUBAR.  When Mother Nature called, you had no choice but to answer.  Often times we weren’t in a natural place to make it happen, so we had to improvise. 

            If we were on a dismounted patrol that came to a halt, guys would just walk a few feet off the path or road to drop a deuce.  If we were clearing a house, guys would leave a present for whoever dwelled there to come home to and it wasn’t in a toilet.  The most difficult time to poo was when we were in a moving Stryker.  Some guys would just open the back hatch, squat with their bare asses hanging out of the back of the Stryker and drop a turd.  From the side it definitely looked like the Stryker itself was shitting all over the street, much like a horse without care.

            Zach Brown, not the country star, takes the cake with the most creative attempt.  Notice the word “attempt.”  I met Zach after my first tour and he’s become one of my best friends.  There’s never a dull moment in his life.  Zach went thru a world of shit before the army, yet I've only known him to be an outstanding person and soldier.  He’s tall, white, had peppered hair before his 23^rd birthday, loves all things Baltimore and can party like no other.  One thing about Zach is that he’s not afraid of anything.  This mentality allowed him to do whatever he wanted in front of other people with no shame.

            So no shit there he was (I have to stop with these puns).  Zach was inside a Stryker on the move.  He was riding in a mortar variant.  The mortar variant had an actual mortar tube on the inside and the roof of the Stryker would open like a French door to allow the mortar tube to fire on the move.  Zach’s vehicle could essentially drop a bomb (I did that pun on purpose) down the tube and it would then fly out of the Stryker en route to killing the enemy.  Zach however would use this tube for a different kind of mission.

Zach really had to go number 2, but his platoon couldn’t safely stop.  He grabbed a plastic bag, threw it in the mortar tube as if it were a makeshift trashcan and tried to hop on.  The problem was the angle of the tube and the bumpy road his platoon was traveling on.  Zach literally had to jump multiple times while grabbing at whatever he could to balance himself to attempt this feat.  He not only got some in the bag successfully, but he got it everywhere else as well.  Probably not a good experience for the rest of the mortar platoon inside that Stryker, but I love laughing while thinking of that story.

Proper Poo Disposal

            “Sergeant Stache!  Are we supposed to piss in these too?” I hollered from a nearby culvert.

            “Uh, no I don’t think so,” SGT Stache yelled back.

            “Damn it.”

            While working with boarder patrol agents on the Mexican boarder in October and November of 2005 we had to be very careful to hide our existence.  A measure I believed to be most unnecessary.  Each Stryker was given one plastic 5-gallon bucket to bring to their position on the boarder.  These crafty little midge-Johns came with plastic bags and a seat.  The trick was that we were only allowed to poo in these plastic bags.  I don’t know about you, but if I go poo it’s usually followed by pissing.  So essentially we had to poo while slinging our wangs over the side of the bucket.  This would be the most awkward poo I would make.  How would women do this successfully?  Every day our First Sergeant and his driver would stop by and pick up the bags-o-poo.  He and his driver then went to a disposal area, opened each bag and then dumped the remnants.  That had to be quite the smell.  That’s what I call paying your dues.  God bless you two.

Patrol stopped? Don't mind if I do.