I was reflecting on my time in service, one of the last asks I answered, and the reports from earlier this year regarding Amazon employees and their access to restrooms during working hours. Workers reported that the only accessible bathrooms were a long walk both ways, and when your productivity is being monitored by the second, even a five minute bathroom break can jeopardize your job. Thus, it was reported, some workers peed in water bottles to avoid leaving their station. Others simply didn’t drink for their twelve hour shifts.
There are a few things I’d like to talk about regarding the military and our Pee Time.
I’ve read through a few articles on this now, and there’s a fact that I think needs addressing when we talk about workers peeing in bottles on the job: the workers that do this are almost exclusively cis male. They have to be; it is hard if not impossible for a cis woman to pee in a water bottle.
When you consider this, an additional fact becomes apparent: women who work in Amazon warehouses have no choice but to take the time penalty and walk to a bathroom. This, combined with the general consensus that women take longer to complete their business, is probably affecting how Amazon hires, fires, and treats its female workers.
I reach this conclusion based on how female soldiers are treated for the same reasons. When I was enlisted, it was a well-known fact that sometimes, soldiers peed in bottles. They just do. Sometimes they do it even if they don’t have to. Like, literally, in their barracks rooms. When deployed, it seems easier than the long hot walk to the bathroom.
So you can imagine soldiers aren’t so shy about doing this on the job either, especially in my branch: in an ADA unit we were locked in small confined boxes for twelve hour shifts and discouraged from leaving. During deployment we sometimes worked 48 hour shifts, with our meals brought to us and with no sleep. This was all for the purpose of training, of course; there was never an actual threat or a reason we couldn’t leave our stations, we just Couldn’t.
So units with female soldiers must consign themselves to the fact that their soldiers will demand bathroom breaks, and they will demand actual toilets to take them in. Furthermore, because male soldiers can’t pee in a bottle in front of a female, they too must take bathroom breaks. This develops into a similar culture you see in schools, where asking to go to the restroom is thought of as an excuse to get out of work, especially if you’ve gone too recently. It’s worse for lower-enlisted, who already have very little autonomy. Sexual assault is so bad that we mandate new recruits to go to the bathroom in “battle buddy” pairs, like kindergartners. An especially ornery NCO might make you run there, “’cause if you gotta go that bad you had better run!” and time you, which can be a very different experience for men and women.
Males can easily go in their full battle gear: unbutton, do the business, rebutton, head out. Cis women can’t do this, meaning you have to add time for taking all of your gear off/putting it on. I watched this in real time in the army when waiting in line for portable toilets: female goes in one, and while you hear her fighting and thumping around with her battle gear, four or five males pass through the other by the time she comes out again. Male soldiers will just leave the line until she emerges. Our gear and uniforms are built for cis men to pee with, and we know this, but as is our culture we often blame the female soldier for that.
It’s easy to neglect these sorts of problems when considering how equitous the army is, but it’s even easier to get lost in the sauce about small-time solutions instead of looking at the big picture. For example, the FUDD, or Female Urinary Diversion Device, researched by the U.S. Army in 2009 but gained traction in 2014 when female soldiers were starting to get accepted to combat units. It’s a device that female soldiers must buy, carry, and maintain in order to adapt to the harsh conditions of the field, including the necessity to urinate with men nearby.
This is ludicrous. Why is the army profiting off of the inhumane conditions that it’s forcing its own soldiers to endure? These are grown men and women, many of whom came from poor working-class families, who are sometimes mandated to wear (and thus purchase) adult diapers and then remain in them, soiled, for hours at a time for the purpose of “training.” It has complete control over the suffering, but it merely sells us products that soften the suffering. Or they have us shit and piss in the bush around our worksite, biohazards be damned.
The fact is that these conditions are not rare. The Amazon warehouse is just one small example of how workers’ rights are being restricted under threat of violence. It is not exaggeration to call them human rights violations. If you can’t eat, drink, or go to the bathroom 50-80 hours a week at the risk of losing your job, and thus your livelihood, you’re not a worker: you’re a wage-slave.
Many other workers have started coming forward about being forced to relieve themselves in undignified ways to spare their jobs. I’m asking everyone to take a moment to reconsider the unwritten rules in your job, and in what other ways your rights are being infringed upon.
Getting Wasted on Torpedo Fuel During World War II,
During World War I the United States Navy first instituted a rule decreeing that no alcoholic beverages were permitted on ship. This didn’t mean that drinking stopped entirely on US Naval vessels, crafty sailors still found ways to smuggle alcohol on board or produce their own. During World War II many sailors resorted to drinking the fuel from the Mark 14 torpedo. The Mark 14 was the standard torpedo used by the US Navy in early World War II which could be dropped from the air, used by surface ships, and used by submarines. To power the torpedo the Mark 14′s engine burned 180 proof (90%) ethyl alcohol. For those who don’t know, ethyl alcohol is the potable type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages. Sailors would mix the torpedo fuel with juice, preferably pineapple juice but also whatever they could get their hands on. The drink was commonly known as “torpedo juice”.
In response to an outbreak of sailors boozing on torpedo fuel, the US Navy began denaturing the fuel, which means they would add a 5-10% mixture of methyl alcohol to the fuel. Whereas ethyl alcohol is potable, methyl alcohol is poisonous, causing blindness or death when consumed. Denaturing was a process created during the Prohibition Era to prevent people from drinking non-beverage sources of alcohol such as fuel, cleaners, and sterilizing agents. The idea is that if you mixed it with poison people would be smart enough not to drink it. In reality, people drank it anyway causing thousands of deaths.
To this day denaturing is still done and taken for granted without a thought despite many thousands of people being poisoned to death, not just desperate boozers looking for a cheap drink but accidental poisonings of children. Regardless, the Federal Government and most other governments have yet to change their policies on denaturing. I guess it’s worth it to keep people from getting drunk on rubbing alcohol. However, the US Navy did modify it’s policy regarding fuel alcohol. Like denaturing in the civilian world, denaturing of torpedo fuel only led to hundreds of deaths of sailors by methanol poisoning. Sailors would try various methods of filtering out the methyl alcohol, some as harebrained as running it through a loaf of bread. Most methods failed resulting in illness and death. Thus, the US Navy ceased denaturing of torpedo fuel but substituted methanol with croton oil, which is a potent laxative. The Navy figured that if they weren’t going to poison sailors who broke the rules by drinking torpedo fuel, they could at least give them a really bad case of the runs. Unlike methyl alcohol however, croton oil can be successfully removed from alcohol, in particular through distillation. All over the Navy sailors constructed crude stills to distill the alcohol from the croton oil.
So then the Navy found itself back to square one, with it’s hands full of unruly sailors drunk on torpedo fuel. The problem was mostly resolved however with the invention of the Mark 18 torpedo. The Mark 14 torpedo had several problems; it often failed to detonate or detonated too early, it would run too deep, it would run in circles, and of course sailors were getting smashed on it’s fuel. Thus in late 1943 the US Navy adopted the Mark 18 torpedo, which was much more reliable, more economical, and utilized an electric engine. Thus no need for alcohol fuel. At that point, much of the supply of underground booze in the US Navy dried up.
If you want to “relive” World War II history and make torpedo juice for yourself, it’s relatively simple. Just mix one part 190 proof grain alcohol such as Everclear (found at any liquor store) with three parts pineapple juice. Please don’t use methyl alcohol or denatured alcohol. Don’t eat Tide pods either you dumb shits.
I have never seen an advertising campaign more evil, more insidious than the one for the army currently airing in the UK
“This is belonging”
We’re introduced to a group of earnest young men. they’re white, they’re black. they drink tea. they play practical jokes. they quote popular TV shows. they talk about sports. they face their fears. it’s loving and domestic and all too easy to overlook the guns and camo and helicopters blaring overhead.
make no mistake, these adverts are aimed at the young and disenfranchised. poor people, people of colour, people who have been bullied and abused by society and made to feel like they don’t belong anywhere. Join the army, they’re told, and you can have the love and acceptance you crave but have always been denied. Elsewhere, you might get called racial slurs. you might get called a pansy or a fairy, but not here. You belong with us.
For example: Islamophobia is rampant in the UK. here we have an advert of a Muslim soldier praying while his squadron, armed to the teeth, sits in silence. the message is clear – while the rest of society may despise you, here, you will be respected. this is belonging.
here’s one called ‘expressing my emotions’, featuring a white man in his 40s – practically the posterchild for the UK’s current mental health crisis.
you don’t have to worry about bottling up your feelings in the army. after all, this is belonging.
here’s another one called ‘can I be gay in the army?’. we’re told: “I was really worried about whether I’d be accepted, but within days, I was more than confident in being who I was.” Clearly homophobia is a thing of the past in the army. don’t worry. this is belonging.
and it works. while the response to these adverts from an unfortunately vocal number of people is basically “fuck you, we’re racist and proud of it!” there are young people being taken in by this. I have met gay children, trans children who are determined to join the army because, after being rejected by their parents and peers, they’re now being told “here you will be accepted. here you will be loved.”
fuck that. don’t be groomed; don’t let the vulnerable and desperate people in your life be groomed. we need to fight the root causes of these problems in our society and stamp them out so that wielding a gun and cowering in some blown-out building in a country you helped destroy is no longer seen as some sort of salvation. fight racism. fight homophobia and transphobia. fight the stigmatisation of mental illness. fight the system that prioritises the rich and leaves the rest of us to rot.
don’t be taken in by something that offers easy answers, chews you up and spits you out, destroyed, guilty, with PTSD and nowhere to go. where do you belong when you can’t fight any more? where do you belong when you can no longer be used?
i just want to add that not only is the UK the only country in Europe that recruits 16 year olds (known as ‘recruitment of child soldiers’ when other countries do it), they also target their recruitment to secondary schools in economically deprived areas with high long-term unemployment. in areas where there is a sense among kids that they should move somewhere else as soon as possible, the army tries to be the first people kids encounter to offer that.
Yeah, they play these ads in cinemas as well, it’s why i stopped going in at the scheduled time and waited till AFTER the ads before entering
Today is Armistice Day, and so we as a nation wrap ourselves in an uncomfortable tension; pride, joy, loss and sorrow mingling with awareness and anger.
On this Armistice Day, let’s remember all the people who fought in our armed forces because they didn’t think they had other options. Let’s remember the times when our politicians have used our forces as a blunt instrument for personal political gain. Let’s remember unjust wars. Unneeded wars. Wars that gobble up our young, our poor, our needy – and drain the money that could have been spent on our most vulnerable.
War has a cost. Don’t let our political situation draw us into mindless complacency and blind nationalism.
Our military-industrial complex is not to be praised or lionised. Remember our veterans, used up and thrown away by a country with no more use for them. Remember the children recruited to feed our seemingly endless wars, in far-away places we can comfortably ignore. It’s true that 16 year olds can’t serve on the front line, but they can’t just quit if they turn 18 and don’t want to be deployed to combat. 16 year olds can’t drive, can’t vote, can’t drink – but they can sign their life away?
We need to reform our military, the way we use it, and the way we treat our serving soldiers. Not cover our bloodstained hands in poppies and hide their costs under empty promises of remembrance.
My favourite things about this was that Don’t Join the Army was a legit advert here except it was Don’t Join the Army / Don’t learn your strengths / Don’t be a hero ect ect and people genuinely went around replacing them with things like this but my absolute favourite one ever is that one of the billboards in town literally just read “don’t join the army” and some one spray painted under it “don’t fucking die”
“Besides advocating for friends’ interests, some of the Mar-a-Lago Crowd’s interventions served their own purposes. Starting in February 2017, Perlmutter convened a series of conference calls with executives at Johnson & Johnson, leading to the development of a public awareness campaign about veteran suicide. They planned to promote the campaign by ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange around the time of Veterans Day. The event also turned into a promotional opportunity for Perlmutter’s company. Executives from Marvel and its parent company, Disney, joined Johnson & Johnson as sponsors of the Veterans Day event at the stock exchange. Shulkin rang the closing bell standing near a preening and flexing Captain America, with Spider-Man waving from the trading pit, and Marvel swag distributed to some of the attendees. “Generally the VA secretary or defense secretary don’t shill for companies,” the leader of a veterans advocacy group said.”
Four of the five Canadian Forces personnel who said they were members of the group the Proud Boys and disrupted a Mi’kmaq ceremony in Halifax on July 1 have been allowed to return to their regular duties.
“The investigation has now been completed, and no criminal charges will be laid,” Rear-Admiral John Newton said in a release Thursday. The men were members of the army and navy.
On July 1, dozens of people were gathered around the statue of Edward Cornwallis in downtown Halifax to mourn the atrocities committed against Indigenous people when a group of five men clad in black polo shirts approached.
The off-duty members were carrying a Canadian Red Ensign flag and announced they were members of “The Proud Boys, Maritime chapter.”
So as a division officer to nearly 60 sailors over 3 years. I asked every single one. “What made you join the Navy?” Here is the breakdown. 80% – To pay for college 10% – To get out of a bad family situation 5% – Family Tradition 5% – Because of 9/11.
Natives ain’t a monolith, kemosabe. There are conservative, patriotic, USA-lovin NDNs who fly the stars and stripes at powwows and make sure there are veterans honor songs and dances there and who vote Republican and shit like that.
But there are Natives, some who are my own kin, who hate this country and yea, they enroll in the military, because they’ve been kept by colonial capitalism in some of the shittiest conditions in the world, and want an out, and the benefits provided by VA and the GI Bill are one of the most accessible ways “out”. When I lived in Montana, half of the NDNs I knew were either in the military off-duty, or had served in the past, including cousins of mine, and they hated it with every fibre of their being, but contrary to popular belief, universities and tribal councils aren’t pulling strings to shower Native Americans with free money to go to school or learn a trade, so sometimes a trip around the world in Uncle Sam’s murder machine is the only way they can find to make sure they don’t get stuck in permanent poverty (I don’t have enough time to elaborate on this but I’m sure you know that this doesn’t always work and the cycle of poverty continues, plus with an added dose of extra PTSD and frustration dealing with the VA bureaucracy)
Plus there’s a multigenerational situation going on here of people who had uncles and fathers and mothers and aunts and grandparents who served in Vietnam, WWII, etc, and you’re usually guaranteed to get a few veteran honours if you do a stint in the military, so there’s that pressure too, a lack of knowledge about different options, opportunistic military recruiters knowing that reservations and towns with high native populations are a good quota filler, basically a toxic brew of circumstances that, if you could distill it into a picture, would make an excellent cover image for The Wretched of the Earth.
Also in Canada (not sure about in the maritimes where the military is more prolific than where I live in Western Canada, but bear with me here) every single Native I know is about 100x more vocally contemptuous of Canada, and they don’t generally serve in the Canadian military. My armchair sociologist anthropologist observation notes that, unlike in the U.S, many First Nations have band funding so students can go to school or learn a trade with financial support, almost every single large Canadian university has an Aboriginal Services branch that’s meant to help students adjust to university life, and there is not an active culture of military recruitment present on reserves or at Native friendship centres or powwows or cultural gatherings. Hmmm!
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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