TGIF

People are disgusting.

          I live in a containerized housing unit (we call them CHUs).  It’s anoth

er word for a trailer.  It’s perfectly comfortable.  I've got A/C.  I have to share it with a roommate, but I get about 60 square feet of

 space for my bed and wall locker.  Only because I find it interesting, (I’m not complaining) federal penitentiaries offer a lavish 96 square feet for their “guests”. 

          What the prisoners don’t get to enjoy is a 150 meter stroll to reach the toielt in the middle of the night.  I get to do just that in flip-flops over gravel.  Until last Friday, I was under the impression that all my fellow CHU-dwellers did this.  Turns out: not everyone. 

          Grown men, when faced with a long walk to the restroom, will instead urinate in a plastic bottle.  They throw the bottles away in the morning (presumably on a daily basis, but maybe they pile up).  Sometimes the bottles make it into the dumpster, sometimes they get thrown into a drainage ditch.  Nice!  I assume it’s only men doing this; women would have to be pretty talented.  And I’d like to say that this was something that only silly American soldiers were up to.  I don’t want to assume that they are immune from demonstrating this behavior, however we have random room inspections and such activities would be frowned upon, not to mention embarrassing.  

          So if it’s not soldiers filling the bottles, who could it be?  Well, I live amidst a large block of CHUs housing many of the clever, efficient, and well-compensated individuals known as military contractors.  Without them, this war would be much less comfortable.  And who would do all the laundry?  I could spend a lot of time discussing my deep-seated acrimony for these people and the companies they represent, but when I leave this government position that I’m currently filling, I’d hate to wind up in some job for which there was documented proof of my own self-loathing. 

          And this story isn’t about contractors anyway, it’s about piss, and my morning spent collecting it in a garbage bag. 

          For every piece of trash on any military installation, there is a Sergeant Major somewhere who is unhappy about it.  Here on my FOB, a group of them got together recently and decided to each take responsibility of one of the living areas in order to police up all the refuse therein.  Our battalion’s living area was further divided between the companies and this Friday, my company had a mass gathering of all its members and then combed its section with every last soldier wearing blue surgical gloves and carrying a trash bag. 

          The Marines boast about the fact that each of them is an infantryman first.  This is special I guess because no matter what skill they have been specifically trained in, they are all capable of running around and killing people if the need arises.  I’ve always been a little envious of my Neanderthal brothers-in-arms because of this principal.  I like the fact that the Corps has a unifying set of skills that ties them together as Jarheads.  It’s sweet.  In the same spirit, the Army should declare that each soldier is a janitor first.  I wouldn’t put it on a recruiting poster but it’s the truth.  I’ve learned more about the custodial arts as a soldier than I ever would have on the outside. 

          I’m a captain.  It’s not a real big deal but the list of people who can boss me around is relatively small.  However, if this past Friday was any indication, I am still just as much a janitor as any other soldier in this fine outfit.  And with gloves on and trash bag at the ready, I shuffled passed the rows of CHUs at 0600 this morning as my contractor friends lay sleeping sweetly, no doubt dreaming of all their wonderful money and legal immunity.  I found a syringe, the first of the day!  At the bottom of a 10 meter drainage ditch, I squatted in ankle deep sludge and gently placed bottle after bottle of human waste into my bag.  I studied each one and noticed varying degrees of hydration. I actually felt bad for one guy, he might need to see someone about a possible kidney problem.  One bottle had a cigarette in it; I don’t even want to imagine what the story was there. 

          I have a college degree and I fill a middle-management position in the Army similar to what you might find any other educated 27-year old doing in corporate America (probably fewer requirements for Arabic proficiency and trigger-pulling in the corporate gig).  I don’t pretend to know much about the real world anymore, but I would like to see what might happen if a fortune-500 company asked all its employees to come in a little early each Friday and just wander around the campus collecting the garbage.  I’m positive that there would be varying degrees of irritation - depending on the garbage.  What if hospitals started making the doctors and nurses clean up biohazard on some beach in between shifts?  I guarantee you’d at least have a lot of unhappy doctors... and patients. 

          It’s hard for me to decide what part of my story I should be upset about.  I’m not too good to pick up garbage. It’s not the contractors’ fault that the bathrooms are so far away and they can’t hold it.  Maybe I'm just frustrated because we're pulling the piss-bottles out of one ditch, in order to truck them a mile away to another ditch labeled “land-fill”.  Perhaps this is all just another indication that we've been here far too long.  I won’t try to draw a single, over-arching conclusion.  I can say this for certain: only in the Army and in this war would I ever get the chance to be a part of such an absurd and humbling endeavor.  We'll be out there again this Friday.   

          We few.  We happy few.  We band of Janitors.