The Gundecker

When a young person goes to the recruiter to discuss which rate they’re going to be, if they scored between “barely sentient” and “didn’t spell their name right,” there’s a good chance they’re going to see Hull Technician as a career option.

It looks attractive, too! A lot of junior Sailors get into the HT rating because they see “welder”. Absolutely, HTs are the shipboard welding rate in the Navy. Hardly any other sea-going rate does welding, but you know what else they do?

They spend a lot of time fondling poo.

That’s right, in addition to welding, they’re also the Navy’s plumbers. It seems like that surprises a lot of people once they get to boot camp and someone tells them what they’re going to be doing when they get to a ship, and a huge chunk of it is ensuring that a turd goes from a butthole to a holding tank effectively.

I’ve known a good handful of HTs that joined because they had practiced welding in the past, but couldn’t get a certification. Welding is a pretty lucrative skillset, so it makes sense people join thinking they’re going to be a uniformed welder in the Navy, and then discover they’re also in charge of damn near all the piping on the ship.

And that’s a lot of piping. Firemain, chill water, potable water, AFFF, JP5, lube oil, seawater, and of course, sewage.

It does have it’s benefits, though.

You will no longer have a shit phobia.

Simple fact, HTs are not afraid of poop. They’re not afraid of it touching them, them touching it, of smelling it, of having to fucking swim in it.

They can’t be.

Most ships now operate with a thing called the Vacuum Collection and Holding Transfer (VCHT) system. Guess what it transfers?

If you said turds, you’re right! HTs are responsible for the VCHT system, which is essentially like flushing a toilet with a fucking jet engine attached to it. I have, to date, failed to see a single failure of the VCHT system based purely off of someone taking a massive shit.

If it fails, and it does, it’s because something else caused a clog. That can be anything from absurd amounts of toilet paper, feminine products, or any one of a thousand things that shouldn’t have been flushed.

Like tools. We had someone try to flush a series of hex keys down the toilet once. It busted the whole goddamn system, because even if something manages to get through the pipes, it goes through a masticator that chops up all the material (read: dookie) that gets to the holding tank. The masticator, used to chewing up fat shits like bubble gum, was not prepared for solid metal hex keys, so it said “No, fuck you,” and took a few days off.

Guess what has to happen next?

There’s an outfit, effectively a hazmat suit, that Sailors affectionately refer to as a “poopie suit.” Fucking guess why.

Some poor HTs have to throw those suits on, then open the holding tank to go inside and repair whatever damage your careless ass dropped into the system to break it.

And that, dear reader, is why I felt compelled to write an entire article about these fine men and women. These people simply have no pause when it comes to dealing with human shit.

When they had to enter the holding tank to fix the damage the dumb prick that dropped the hex keys did, you’d think it was just a normal goddamn day.

They’re wading, waist-deep, in chopped-up toilet paper, turds, and sometimes paperwork admin doesn’t want to fucking deal with (probably).

They didn’t care. They went about their dark, stinky work, then walked out like the tank that holds our shit was a 7/11 and they’d already gotten their Takis.

On a destroyer, that puts them in the ladderwell (stairwell) that leads up past two berthings. They tracked human excrement through that ladderwell like it was just mud, and they had a housekeeper coming in right after them.

They just didn’t give a fuck, and to be honest, I get it. Regardless if they’re not afraid of poop, they still probably didn’t want all the hassle that comes with some dipshit dropping their fucking tools into their equipment and fucking it up, so they made us deal with the god-awful smell.

Imagine the worst shit you’ve ever taken. Now imagine that 110 other people are all taking shits of the same severity, and nobody is flushing. That’s about what it smelled like in that entire area.

It was a fucking shitty (pun intended) thing to do, but it’s all because…

HT’s are vindictive bastards.

Once, our culinary specialists (CSs) served a meal of chicken. This isn’t remarkable, the Navy has a long, sordid love affair with serving dry, boot-leather-tough chicken to it’s Sailors. On this particular occasion, we were underway, and the chicken was fucking tainted.

So inevitably, everybody got a wicked case of earth-shattering bubble-guts. It happened immediately.

Let me tell you a little about me: My stomach is weak as fuck. I’ll never be able to hold a job as a toll booth operator, unless they get real cool real quick about letting us keep 5-gallon shit buckets in the booth.

After eating that chicken, it set in motion things that could not be undone before I had even thrown out my tray. This might be the only time that my incredibly caucasian intestinal tract has been a benefit and not a colossal goddamn hindrance, because I had a massive headstart on the inevitable bedlam about to unfold before me.

After I finished doing an absolute paint job on the toilet, I walked out into berthing as people started running frantically to get to the head, lest they blow hot dookie into their coveralls. One dude jumped down the ladderwell into the berthing, a solid 10 foot leap, while unbuckling his belt mid-air to save precious seconds on the way.

Then I heard it.

“Forward VCHT is secured for maintenance until further notice.”

At the best of times, hearing this on the ship’s loudspeaker (1MC) is a starting pistol for everybody to get to berthing as fast as they possibly can to be the last person to shit into clean water. The implication, of course, is that people will shit into previously shat-upon toilets, and they absolutely will. I’m not prepared to denounce these people, because you gotta do what you gotta do.

Still, ew.

The only way to deal with it is by making a doo-doo nest out of toilet paper. It sounds like you’re imagining: A whole fuckload of toilet paper, coiled into a birdsnest, upon which a person fires a stream of white-hot diarrhea into, because you’re sure as fuck not shitting like that if it’s not an emergency. And then, the next person does the same, as does the person after that. Soon, the toilets look like a paper mache volcano, except the lava is diarrhea shit, with a comparable temperature.

To this day, I refuse to believe any of this was a coincidence. Sure, the maintenance had probably been planned for the week, and the fact that the entire crew had been served bad chicken wasn’t part of that plan (or fucking was it?), but it was too much of a coincidence that less than a week after they had to wade through warm human shit to fix a system someone else’s carelessness fucked up, suddenly the system was going to be down for maintenance while just about the entire crew was trying to release demons from their bowels.

All of this went on for about two hours. During that time, people were waiting in line to be repeat customers to either vomit or shit in the toilets, now full of all varieties of human excrement. The heads smelled absolutely apocalyptic. It was a smell you’d only observe elsewhere in the only porta-potty serving a 4,000-attendee Pain Olympics catered by Taco Bell.

One dude shit in the deep sink, because his guts were set alight and were otherwise going to explode in his abdomen. For non-Navy types, a deep sink is a large metal sink in a closet used for filling buckets, decidedly not for pooping. Also, people had to watch him shit, because you can’t shit in that sink and also close the door to the closet.

After they finally un-secured VCHT and everything got flushed for the most part (even the jet-engine flush couldn’t handle all that toilet paper right away), the smell lingered for hours. You could absolutely smell it strongly in your rack, which I’m sure was incredibly distracting for all the people trying to watch Gilmore Girls on full volume before bedtime. (Just me?)

The best part was a couple days later, when we still had multiple people sick with food poisoning, the XO came over the 1MC and said “Shipmates, it isn’t difficult to wash your hands. We have too many people getting sick right now, wash your hands.”

The implication there being that this wasn’t because the CSs served undercooked tainted chicken. It was far more likely, in the XO’s reckoning, that all of us enlisted degenerates were sitting around licking each other’s fingers after dark, leading to a completely avoidable stomach virus to run rampant through the ship.

Which is ridiculous, because this was weeks after the last game of Lickfinger we played in berthing.

At the end of the day, the HTs got their revenge. It may not have been deliberate (yes it fucking was), but we all paid for some idiot’s transgression of dropping a stupid goddamn tool in the VCHT system.

If I’m one of the HTs, I’m claiming full credit for shutting off the toilets during a 5-alarm caca emergency, regardless of actual intent, to make sure everyone understands:

He who controls the shitters, controls civilization.