Desert Storm(part 10)

Building the camp

When we got to our first camp in the desert, there was no easing into anything. The place was bare. Wide-open sand, wind, and a whole lot of “figure it out.” Everything had to be built: foxholes, bunkers in case a Scud came screaming in, shower spots, and the crappers — which deserve their own special mention later.

Right off the bat, our stick wigglers pulled one of the boldest moves I saw the entire deployment. They reappropriated — politely speaking — about 15 to 18 oversized Air Force pallets. These weren’t little light-duty things; these were the heavy monsters. They used them to build a bunker so stout, so overbuilt, that they parked a HUMVV on top of it like it was no big deal. Solid as a bank vault. And lucky for me, that bunker sat right across the little path from my tent.

So when the word came down to get into our bunkers for a possible Scud attack, I didn’t take off sprinting across camp to the bunker I was supposed to go to with my platoon. Nope — I ducked straight into the Fort Knox bunker. We sat in full MOPP gear for hours, breathing through that mask funk, sweating, waiting for an all-clear. And of course, a few days later, the Air Force came sniffing around, asking about their missing pallets. We all played dumb like it was a competitive sport.
“Pallets? What pallets?"

Now, I’ve mentioned the showers before — cold, open, miserable, barely-functional setups — but the crappers? Oh, the crappers were their own chapter of suffering.

The crappers were these big wooden boxes, about eight feet tall, twelve feet wide, and four feet deep. Three holes across the top. No stalls. No dividers. Just you and two other guys sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, dropping deuces together like some kind of awful team-building exercise. Behind the box was a door to pull out the cut-off barrels full of the daily deposits.

Every morning, whoever drew crapper detail had to crawl back there, swap out the barrels, pour some diesel in the full ones, and light them on fire. Burned crap and diesel. That smell settled into your clothes and followed you like a curse. And if you were the unlucky one stirring the burning mixture with a stick? You earned a special place in whatever afterlife rewards that kind of misery.

Things got easier once we acquired a UniMog — basically a Mercedes truck with a backhoe/loader attached. One of our senior NCOs usually ran it, but he had better things to do. When I told him I knew how to operate a backhoe, he tossed me the keys like it was my birthday.

One of my jobs was to dig a burn pit near the perimeter berm. Easy enough. I dug a pit right beside the berm and piled dirt on it to raise it. And yeah, I giggled to myself doing it. Even said — out loud — that some boob was gonna drive into it because you couldn’t see it at night.

That little prediction came back for me later.

We started hauling the barrels to the pit, dumping fuel from the POL truck, and burning everything at once. A huge improvement. Except one day the POL crew made a bad call: after a fire had burned down, they decided to add more fuel. They were smart enough to stay back, but when that fuel hit the hot ash — WHOOMPH — a thirty-foot flame shot straight up. Missed the truck, thank God, but it sure as hell scared the crap(pun intended) out of all of us involved.

And then… my karma arrived.

I was on guard duty at o-dark-thirty one morning. Quiet. Still. We saw what looked like a flashlight on the outside of the perimeter berm, so I drove the CUCV over to check it out. 

I eased toward the berm, and bam — the front tire dropped right into the edge of the burn pit. Not the whole truck. Not a dramatic fall. Just one tire… but that was enough. No traction. No backing out. Just me, sitting in a stuck truck in the dark, realizing precisely what I had done — and that sunrise was going to be brutal.

When the sun came up, most of the camp was standing back at a distance, staring at the sight. Just watching from afar like an audience at a bad comedy show. And of course, by that point, everyone knew I’d been running my mouth about how some idiot was destined to drive into that pit.

Turns out that idiot was me.

It took about 30 seconds to pull the CUCV out, but the damage to my reputation? Yeah… that stuck around a whole lot longer.