Dec 09
4
I Told a Friend I Would Share This
On Thanksgiving Eve I got onto a drunken streak of telling jarhead stories and I told her I’d dig this out and pass it on. It was originally written during Bush the Lesser’s reign, when I was highly irate that the right wing had arrogantly commandeered the notion of “patriotism” and appropriated it for themselves. I have never entirely outgrown my stubborn streak of childish teen rebellion, so the writing is just a touch blasphemous, and the story is gleefully and unabashedly profane and scatological.
I know I’ve got some tender-hearted little delicate flowers who read my blog. If you fall into that category, this may be a post to skip.
Just sayin’.
Four Minutes of Freedom
There’s a web site where wingnuts go to stroke each others’ fantasies of turning the United States into a theocracy and using the force of arms to make the entire world an American colony. One of their luminaries, a young man named “Dave”, got into a pissing match with his community college teacher and posted about it on the boards there. The site’s posters, the very picture of godly compassion and Christ-like love, descended on her like jackals and made her personal and professional life hell. It turned into such a mess that the board has now deleted those threads, but many of them involved scathing attacks on the teacher’s liberal views and her peace activism. There were many assertions that Freedom® isn’t free and that she was squandering the Freedom® that had been purchased for her by Real Patriots®.
I posted the following piece on one of the forums where I hang out. It is dedicated to Dave.
Being in the military sucks.
One of my strategies for coping with that suck was to remember that I was doing it for a reason: the people back home that I cared about. As I’ve said before, most of peacetime military life consists of tedious bullshit such as scrubbing your toilet for half an hour only to have your platoon sergeant tell you that you missed some piss crystals under the rim and you need to keep working on it.
Usually, when cleaning, remembering my mother and grandma would help me calm down and keep scrubbing. When I needed a little extra juice to squeeze out the last chin-up for a perfect score or to keep my legs pistoning just enough for my run time to be under 18 minutes, I thought about Carrie, the first girl that I ever really loved. At the end of long hikes, her face would float in my mind long enough for me to get through whatever it was that I had to do.
I knew that they weren’t in danger. I knew that scrubbing my pisser was not protecting grandma’s freedom, and I knew that the rape-hungry Iraqi hordes were not at the door of Carrie’s house in Yuba City. While I hoped that I would never have to use violence to defend my ideals, I knew that day might come. The more work I did in peacetime, the better prepared I would be in war. So I remembered the people back home, reminded myself that I was doing it for them, and kept doing my job.
—
A six-hour hike on a Guantanamo Bay afternoon is not a fun thing. Full cammies and combat boots are less comfortable to hike in than the bermuda shorts and hawaiian shirt that any sensible person would wear. A full ALICE pack weighs a shitload and rides directly on your kidneys. You sling your weapon, but your pack and gear make it ride funny; it will slip off and clatter to the ground if you don’t keep actively fucking with it. You have to lean way left and hitch your gear up, while marching, to dig your canteen out for a drink of stale water that is, literally, hotter than piss. The weight of your helmet cinches a vise around your temples that becomes infinitesimally tighter with every step, and you are taking a lot of steps. You sweat a lot. The sweat gets on your glasses and eventually reaches a point where your sweat-soaked cammie blouse does nothing but smear the sweat around, coating the world you see with a murky layer of mud. The same fine dust that sticks to the sweat on your glasses also sticks to the lining of your throat and nose.
On really long hikes, you reach a point where you don’t care about any of that. You don’t see, think, or feel. Your entire being becomes nothing more than the simplest biological mechanism required to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
The hike in this story was not one of the really long ones. We were only about 4 hours into it, which sucks but is not mind destroying. I was going okay, keeping up, trucking along, when I felt something bad. My guts began to slide around on themselves. I felt the liquid, serpentine slither of everything below my belly somehow getting slippery. Whatever I had eaten was going to come out, and it was going to come out ugly.
I can’t describe the next half hour, and I’m not going to try. I will say that I managed to keep it together, though by the time they called a halt I was on the edge of just breaking down and letting it all go and just dealing with the misery and shame. Nobody’s face was in my mind but my own.
When the command came to halt, I popped the straps on my pack and it whumped to the ground before anyone else had come to a complete stop. I’d kept my eyes on the prize, and the gates of heaven were about to swing open as a choir of angels sang me to my seat: there was a single puke-green portapotty less than 20 yards away.
I raced to it, elbowed some poor fucker out of the way, and jumped inside. I threw my weapon in the corner and shucked everything down. I was seated and braced before the door slammed shut.
Nothing happened.
I sat there in the sick green light filtered through the plastic walls, with wads of single-sheet MRE toilet paper cluttered around my boots and my head thick with the superheated chemical-shit stench, and nothing happened.
Then it did.
My guts twisted and cramped and my bowels exploded in a backblast of shitrain that hammered the portapotty’s tank and made a sound so loud and so horrible that I heard the guy outside say, “Jesus fucking Christ” with a mixture of religious awe and absolute revulsion. The first blast was followed by more, each time accompanied by cramps that wrenched my entire body and made me twist on the seat, each time that same sick spatter of clotty, frothy, liquid hell.
Relief was a physical thing for me, sanctified and holy.
It didn’t take long to get everything out, and when I was done, I knew that everything was, indeed, out. I had weathered the storm and triumphed. Only then did I realize that there was no toilet paper in the potty. I did what anyone would do: I pulled my Ka-bar, cut my own underwear from around my ankles, and used my skivvies to wipe the horror off my ass. I threw the filthy rag into the tank and stepped out into the bright sunlight.
I still had time to sneak in a smoke before we got the order to saddle up. I would guess that I was in the portajohn for about four minutes.
—-
Some of the things that I did, I’m very proud of. They were worthwhile and necessary, and I am honored and fortunate to have been able to do them. Those things I did for my friends and family, and for Carrie in Yuba City.
The four minutes that I spent in that plastic shitpit, however, were the four minutes that I spent specifically defending Dave’s freedom. Those skivvies are for you, Dave. Remember them with pride.
