Shit Burning; My Way – 349 words

Shit burning

Each artillery and mortar round comes with bags of propellant. A very important job of the gun crew is to remove the bags to achieve the proper amount for the fire mission. To get it wrong could mean dropping that round on top of our own guys. The left over propellant was burned.

You may have heard how we disposed of our fecal matter in Vietnam. In the field you dug a hole and shit in it, then you covered it up. Simple but not practical on a fire base. there we built fine outhouses, complete with seats. They had doors in the back to access the area below the seats where we placed one half of a 55 gal drum to catch the droppings. Every morning they were cleaned out by the “shit detail”.

The shit detail got to pull out the (hopefully) half full barrel and replace it with yesterday’s barrel. You pulled it a safe distance away and poured about five gallons of JP4 (Jet fuel or kerosene) stirred it all up threw some toilet paper in to get it going when you lit it. The resulting foul smelling, thick black smoke would last for hours after which you would stir it again and repeat the process until it was just charcoal (not suitable for the grill).

You probably know where I’m going with this.

One day I got the shit detail and decided to make the process more efficient. I went through the usual process adding several bags of propellant in the mix and more on top. I used the toilet paper as a fuse so I could get a safe distance away and lit er up.

It was beautiful! The barrel looked like the nozzle of a giant rocket buried up-side down. The beautiful yellow/white flame must have gone 20 feet in the air. Problem was, not all of the shit was consumed but the barrel was completely emptied. I’ll let you guess where it all went. Luckily, it was during the monsoon season so after raining shit, the afternoon downpour mitigated the effects.