#Tales from the Gun Shed

18 Sqn Wessex on ex in the north German Plain, 6 weeks of the old Eternal Triangle exercises. Rocks running all matter of crap duties with the old tricks – fill the Elsans up with neat racasan so the first aircrew who deposits never goes near an Elsan ever again because the splashback seared his jewels – kept stuff down to manageable proportions. We have a new Chief Magician in charge of the techies who thought he was the dogs…… Told us one morning that from now on his men would burn the wet pit every day. Suits us said the Hooligan whilst telling me and Mac to keep our eyes on them. So early in the morn, after getting the birds off for the days tasking, Chief and his gang of flightless birds trogged down to the pit. It was roughly 5 feet by 8ft by about 6 foot deep, in the wood. Two jerry cans of paraffin went dutifully onto the pit and the burning taper thrown in….result nowt…not even a sizzle to the great disappointment of the chief. We shall have to try some more quoth the great technician and another 10 gallons of paraffin went in with still nowt so he decides he will use some petrol, but not a lot so it remained manageable. Unbeknownst to him Mac and I had been watching and had each appropriated 2 jerry cans of aircraft fuel. None of your mamby pamby Avtur, this the Avtag the old Wessex flew on – white spirit based.
So we slung the 20 gallons in when the guins were searching for a chit to get petrol. Down they came with 5 gallons of petrol, dropped it in and tossed in the lighted taper. Slight difference…. Apocalypse now, from out of the pit rose a huge fireball rapidly ascending into the sky, complete with a mushroom cloud…blowing trees with three feet trunks aside like saplings in the wind…and leaving all the high paid technoprats with fricasseed eyebrows and black faces…to which the Hooligan remarked dryly “obviously far too technical for the rocks to do it best you guys keep on trying.”

Up Country Malaya – Kotta Tinggi, Jungle Warfare School out at Lombong Waterfall. My friend Yorky, with the google eye, has the bright idea of increasing the number of beer chits we get by volunteering us for the poo pit duty. 2 shillings and 11p a day for “objectionable duties” is not to be sneezed at, quoth he. So, every morning before we went off on training, we had the signal honour of emptying the squadrons poo buckets, known as elsans, into a large pit, slinging some lime on it and depositing the correct amount of that blue poison Racasan into the new useable elsan. It could have been the heat or the lack of a copious amount of Tiger ( every time 15 organised the airdrop the palette with the beer on creamed in) but after a while Yorky started to take, what I thought was, an unhealthy interest, in the contents of said elsans. So I was not surprised when he appears at my side in the queue for breakfast (another advantage of the poo pit team, you went to the front)

“quick Geordie come and look at this, I found the worlds biggest turd(WBT)”.

Faced with a mess tine full of powdered egg, swimming in some form of liquid grease, I joined him and, sure enough, he had indeed snagged a monster. My little inner voice of caution started to murmur when he started to measure it and then using his gobbling rods(knife fork and spoon – KFS, in the parlance of the blanket stackers) carefully lifted it out for close examination. The only flat surface we had was the bonnet of OC 15 Sqns rover, all very spruce with a lovely white canvas cover for the spare wheel on the bonnet. Yorky then tastefully arranged the WBT into an arrangement like an upside-down ice cream cone on the white tyre cover. At that moment, Mick, our sergeant, grabbed me to go and draw the A43 ground to air radio set for the days training so I left Google Eye gloating over his prize. Perhaps my inner voice was turned down too far, anyway after a hard days training, standing in the cookhouse tent queue that night minding my business, the Sqn WO comes up and looks at me and Yorky and says “you two CO’s Tent NOW!” One didn’t argue with Big John and so we paraded at the CO’s tent. Piggy the CO came to the point quickly “what sort of insult did you intend when you left that turd on OC 15’s vehicle”. I was starting to hear the inner voice hitting the loud pedal and listening to the gibbering loon going on about how long we had been on the crap house gang and imagining the end of a promising military career. The loon dribbles on further about how we had taken time to make sure there was no one suffering from any foreign disease and inspected the output every day. Piggy was having a good day so we got a lecture about taking mundane duties too seriously and we could get out back to our meal

Result – the inner voice shouted and I got as far as the tent flap before the CO asked Yorky which pit it came from – quick as a flash, the crafty one says “Officers toilets Sir” to which Piggy had a wee smile “out ,the pair of you”. I actually got my hand on the tent flap before the loon asks “Any idea what caused it sir?”

“For your information it was babies heads ( Ration packs steak and kidney pudding)
and Bacardi and coke” thus confirming it was his – so somewhere in the ulu north of Lombong waterfall lies the last resting place of the Worlds Biggest Turd where the dawn comes up like thunder – outer China – “crost the bay (with apologies to Kipling)