Poop Volcano

I haven't written in a while, I know.  I actually have a job, though, even if it is working for the government, so cut me some slack.  Anyway, one of my co-workers, a civilian charged to help the Marines overcome their writing disabilities, heard me telling some sea-stories a while back and has been after me to write down one of them in particular.  So here you go, Wounded Knee.

The United States military is the most advanced, best-trained, and best-funded force in the history of Planet Earth.  It is also the most expensive.  People are constantly going on about military spending.

These things are pretty pricey, after all.

  If you are a member of this force, however, you would get the impression that we are constantly on the edge of going bankrupt, or that we aren't getting any funding at all.  The Marine Corps in particular is always behaving as if it is on a shoe-string budget.  

Considered a luxury...

For instance, in Twenty-nine Palms, CA at the main camp for training units, Camp Wilson, everyone lives in metal huts with uneven dirt floors, no A/C, and worst of all, no partitions between toilets in the bathroom.  How much could a few sheets of plywood have possibly cost?  I get it that the Marine Corps wanted to make us tougher by making us deal with "expeditionary conditions," but I fail to see the training value of having to watch some hairy dude take a shit.  Then again, I'm a private pooper, so maybe I am more sensitive to that sort of thing.

This should be illegal.

Not a lot of good pooping spots here.

Here's a story:  Several years ago, when I was doing some training at the base in 29 Palms, we did what we called a "leader's recon," where the officers and Staff NCOs would go out to the live-fire ranges a few days before a big exercise to get the lay of the land.  It would just be a small group in a couple of Humvee's, out in the vast training area in the Mojave Desert, which is only slightly more inhabited than the freaking moon.  Anyway, there's this particular terrain feature there called the "Gator," which is a little finger of a hill that sticks out into the valley that has some old tank hulks and piles of tires that serve as targets for air strikes.  We took our MRE lunch break at this particular location, and I became aware of a certain intestinal requirement that could not be postponed.  The Gator is covered in big craters from the bombings, which just so happen to provide perfect hiding places for a private pooper such as me, so I counted myself lucky to have such a place available in this treeless wasteland.  I announced my intention to everyone and grabbed my e-tool, my pack of baby wipes, and my modified shitter-stool (fashioned from a 40-lb shaped charge stand-off stand), and I climbed the hill, finding the deepest bomb crater I could, and I prepared to fire one off.

Now, let me set the scene more completely for you, Dear Reader...  I was in 10-foot deep bomb crater in the impact zone of a live-fire range in one of the most deserted training areas of the largest and least-populated base in the Marine Corps, which also happens to be in the doggone MOJAVE DESERT.  Think of the creepest parts of The Hills Have Eyes.  I felt very much alone.  So imagine how mad I was when the young lance corporal who was driving my Humvee crested the top of my private bomb crater, pulled down his trousers, and assumed a squatting position about five feet away and directly in front of me.  I was furious.  I was in mid-shit, but even so I started grabbing all the rocks I could reach and throwing them as hard as I could at that moronic devildog.  What kind of jackass does something like that?  This happened more than ten years ago now, but it still pisses me off.

No dog poop sign in Israel.  I just find this hilarious.

But I digress...
I didn't start this off intending to write about shitting in the desert.  I was going to tell you about shitting on a Navy ship.  Or, more accurately, about one particular unexpected hazard of shitting on a U.S. Navy vessel at sea.  It relates back to my earlier statement of how the military is always pinching pennies on the little things.

A toilet on a U.S. Navy warship looks pretty much like a toilet at your local high school or stadium or any other large public facility.  Nothing special-looking about it at all, except for one key difference--it flushes with sea water, not fresh water.  There's a good reason for this.  While the ship is floating on an unlimited supply of salt water, fresh water must be made by filtering and distilling the seawater before it can be used for drinking, cooking, and personal hygiene.  It doesn't make a lot of sense to then crap into this limited supply.  So, things like flushing toilets and fighting fires are done with salt water.

The Navy really knows how to make you feel special.

Flushing toilets with seawater does have some consequences, however.  One is a weird and unpleasant smell, that I have never really found anywhere else.  The other is a buildup of a hard calcium deposit, caused by the reaction of the salt water and human urine.  This calcium deposit can, over time, restrict the flow of water through the lines and cause the toilets to back up.  This is remedied by treating the lines with an acid solution and then flushing them out with more water, which the Navy calls "hydro-blasting."  What that means is a few unfortunate sailors are hooking saltwater fire hoses up to the shit-pipes and flushing them out with massive volumes of seawater.  This activity is something that used to take place when the ship was in for refitting, but in order to save money and reduce turn-around time, they began doing it at sea in the 1990's.  This doesn't sound all that bad until you really start to think it through.

This never stops being funny.

When a ship like an aircraft carrier is at sea, there are a lot of people on board--somewhere in the neighborhood of 6000.  Those people all poop.  Even children's books are clear on this.  Just read Everyone Poops, by Taro Gomi.  So you can't just close down all the heads (sailor-talk for bathroom) at one time for hydro-blasting.  You have to do it in stages.  That means that when you are blasting the poop-pipes with fire hoses, some of the heads are still in use.   That means there is fresh shit in the shit-pipe.  A lot of it.

See also, Nobody Poops But You 

Another factor is this: when a job involves poop, nobody wants to do it.  This job involves washing fresh sailor-shit and piss-crust out of a pipe with a fire hose, so it's pretty damn bad.  Nobody wants to do this.  So the people who finally wind up with the job are the ones who either couldn't figure out a way to get out of it or are too inexperienced to realize just how disgusting it is going to be.  People like these often make mistakes with details like which valve is supposed to be in what position.  If you leave the wrong valve open, when you blast the pipe with water from the fire hose, there is a good chance that the high-pressure shit water could go back up the pipe to the toilet.  When this happens, you get what I call a "poop volcano."

Imagine, if you will, the absolute horror of actually being inside one of these heads during a poop volcano eruption.  All six toilets spraying brown chunky water with fire-hose force onto the ceiling above.  God forbid you were actually utilizing one of them at the time.  Talk about getting PTSD...  There are many terrible things I would prefer to having the toilet I am sitting on suddenly explode with the shit of a hundred people.

Thankfully, I was never actually astride an erupting poop volcano.  I have, however, opened the door to the head to find the entire space absolutely coated in liquid shit.  This is not a sight or a smell you will soon forget, let me tell you.  Especially when you are clad only in a towel and a pair of government-issue flip-flops (AKA shower shoes).

Shower Shoes.
Insufficient protection in the case of a poop volcano.

So there you have it.  The Poop Volcano.  This story really has no point, no moral, and no plot, but here it is anyway.  And there are plenty more where those came from.  These are far from my only poop-related tales from my Marine Corps experiences.  I have dozens more.  Hundreds, even.  You have been warned.