Monday morning is the weekly staff meeting for our office. We kick the meeting off each week with a presentation by one of the staff on a random safety topic. This week one of our guys gave a little talk on poison ivy. You know, a wild plant that grows in all too many places, and contact with it will cause skin irritation. Some people are more sensitive than others.
Here’s a picture of one phase of poison ivy for you city folk.
After the guy finished his presentation, they asked for comments. I had one comment: “The active ingredient of poison ivy is soluble in alcohol.” When I stated this observation, it caused questions to arise as to how I came by that piece of knowledge.
Naturally, there is a story.
Flash back to a period of my misspent youth when I was a young tank commander in Fort Hood, Texas, summer of 1969. I loved my job. Fort Hood was a fun (if somewhat hot) place to be a tanker, and we were in the field for a couple of weeks as the operating element supporting a government study of the endurance of tank crews. I and my crew were down on the tank line one afternoon doing tanker things, in our case, changing out a couple of bad track blocks. My tank was at the end of the line, parked right next to the M-113 armored personnel carrier that belonged to our attached medics. I was pretty good friends with the head medic, my crew having helped him with a problem or two.
He pops his head out of the commander’s hatch of his track and says, “Hey, Cajun, you know where there’s some poison ivy?”
This is not the usual sort of request one expects on the tank line, so my curiosity level starts climbing. “Yeah, there’s a thicket just off the side of the tank trail about a mile that way,” I said. “It’s kind of a long walk.”
“Can we ride? You got a tank an’ all”
“Sure. Let me tell the lieutenant we’re gonna run up the road to seat those track blocks.”
This is actually a legitimate excuse. After installing new track blocks, you need to run around a bit to seat the end connectors and then re-tighten them to make sure they’re secure, otherwise you stand a pretty good shot at shedding some essential hardware next time you go somewhere. A lot of a tanker’s life is spent looking at the several hundred bits of the tracks, making sure they’re in place and tight.
A few minutes later I, the medic, and my driver were trundling up the tank trail at the point of a dust plume that reached back behind us a thousand yards. 750 happy horsies of US-made diesel rumbled happily pushing us along. In a few minutes we pulled off the tank trail next to a thicket of mixed vegetation.
The medic got out, donned a pair of rubber gloves and started collecting poison ivy leaves, stuffing them in a half-liter plastic jar. After he filled the jar, he screwed the lid on and climbed back up into my loader’s hatch. Donning his CVC (Combat Vehicle Communications) helmet, he said over the intercom, “Okay, I got what I need. We can go.”
And we did. We rolled back into the assembly area and my driver and gunner and loader went about checking the new track blocks. Me, I followed the medic back to the medic tent, our field first aid station. He got a bottle of rubbing alcohol out and poured it into the bottle of poison ivy leaves, then he mulled the mixture around with a medically-approved stick.
“What exactly is that?” I asked.
“This,” he said, “is the best stuff in the world. The active oil from poison ivy dissolves in alcohol,” he said as he poured the greenish liquid from the bottle into a little aerosol spritzer.
“I can see some obvious functionalities,” I said. “So where’s this going?”
“Captain (name redacted) chewed us up one side and down the other this morning for not cleaning out the officers’ latrine. I tried to tell him that we were the medics and we weren’t tasked with cleaning latrines, but he got louder and louder and threatened a bunch of stuff. Tomorrow, that latrine will be immaculate.”
The latrine herein referenced was a wooden outhouse built over a pit. Inside were two holes fitted with regular toilet seats, but the person’s output into those holes flopped into a pit dug under the outhouse. In the summer, these things had a smell all their own, and the necessary ventilation to let the smells out and to allow a little air to circulate also allowed dust to flow in. We enlisted men suffered through the same setup, except ours had six holes and our more refined and sensitive officer corps only had two. Both were equally smelly and equally cleaned (by somebody other than the medic platoon) every morning, but if the wind was blowing that dust plume from the nearby tank trails, it didn’t take long for the seats to get dusty. I just wiped the dust off before sitting down. Apparently Captain Xxx didn’t see this as a function he should himself have to perform.
That afternoon, the officers’ latrine was cleaned by the medic platoon. I am told it was spotless. They even dumped oil of wintergreen into the pit so that while the smell of summer-baked feces still rose from the depths, it now had a minty freshness. And the seats were especially shiny.
Now one more fact needs to be made clear. We of the tank platoon and our retinue of support people, the medics, the mechanics, the cooks, etc., all enlisted men, we had to stay in the field during this exercise. Captain Xxx and the couple of other officers got to travel back into the station and to their clean, comfy quarters every night. Several of them used that latrine in the next hours after it was cleaned, and I am told that calamine lotion was in much demand among them.
Yeah, yeah, I know… Horrible. Regulations were violated. Some innocents were subjected to terrible rashes on tender parts of their anatomies. Etc., etc. Our own poor lieutenant was a victim. And I felt bad. But to this day, I haven’t told a soul.
Best stuff in the world, indeed.
