See the previous posts RE: Fresh Laundry and Beds. The Army really made me appreciate some of the more obvious things in life. Especially when I went to Kosovo.
I didn’t really go off post too much when I was in Kosovo, not because I was busy or afraid of being shot at. All because I was afraid I’d have to pee in a hole.
In case you didn’t know, Kosovo is in eastern Europe, one of those former Yugoslavia states where all hell broke loose in the late nineties. In this case the “hell” that broke loose was hundreds of years of racial tension, much like nearby Bosnia. By the time I got there in 2005 most of the shooting was done, except for the random skirmish every now and then, and a Polish warrant officer who committed suicide when his wife left him (we had weapons and ammo at all times, since it was still technically a combat zone).
All of this going on and I was afraid of peeing in a hole. Pretty unbelievable, huh?
Yeah…have you ever had to pee in a hole? Trust me, it can be pretty jarring.
We females aren’t exactly built for that maneuver.
The whole thing started when our unit’s mail clerk went on a humanitarian trip to a nearby orphanage. I was the executive officer (read: the head guy’s errand bitch) and I was asking her how it was, because that's the kind of thing officers are supposed to do. Also, because she seemed a little shaken up when she got back. She told me and another girl, our clerk who was so soft spoken that it was sometimes easy to miss her very funny observations, that it was fun until she had to go pee. “It was just a hole,” she said, cheeks pinkening.
“You mean like a pit latrine?” We had those in basic training. It was a wooden bench with holes in it. I’ll let your imagination fill in the rest.
“No, just a hole. In the floor.”
This blew my freaking mind.
So then, for the rest of my tour I was petrified by the fact that I’d go somewhere and have to try to pee in a hole, aiming just right so that I didn’t splash my boots. Or worse, what if my side arm fell down the hole? Not that I dropped my weapon a lot, or ever, but still?
This was really probably just all of my other anxieties focusing in on one cultural difference that my mind wouldn’t accept, but it still gave me a profound appreciation for indoor plumbing.
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