Memory of an Army Deployment: The Lack of Modern Inventions

Stevie Turner responded on her blog that she thought the washing machine was the most important invention of our lifetime. I’m rather prone to agree with her simply because I’ve been a position where I didn’t have one.

Picture it. It Late 1990. We’ve deployed to Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Storm/Desert Shield. We took everything we could think of. But there was no room for a washing machine. Had we had half the common sense we thought we did, we’d have gone and bought one of the old roller wringers some of our parents and grandparents used and strapped it down in one of the Humvee’s we shipped down there. We did have electricity from the generators but how we’d have gotten water for it to service a single platoon, not to mention a company, is another issue.

Being Army, we looked to overcome, improvise, and adapt. But we were all too cheap to buy a washboard at the local store and used a large plastic tub and tent pole to wash with.

We’d pour the water in the tub, toss in detergent and whip it around. Empty, rinse, hang up and dry. The good news was the air was so dry and it was usually so warm, that you could hang up something dripping wet and it would be bone dry inside of ten or fifteen minutes.

And yes. We were so cheap we didn’t even buy clothesline or pens!

Nor had we purchased detergent.

For the longest time we used shampoo. Then once we were in Iraq, one of our number went into an abandoned Iraqi bunker and found a large box of detergent. I’m happy to say that out clothes were actually coming out clean,

But leave it the engineers to come up with an awesome and logical solution.

They got a large plastic barrel. They tossed some large rocks into it, threw their clothes in, added water and detergent and simply rocked the thing back and forth for about five or ten minutes. Empty the dirty water, add clean to rinse, and rock back and forth for several minutes. Finally, you hang up your clothes to dry.

Of course, the twin gods of Pride and Cheapness prevented us from asking where they purchased the barrel from or out making an offer on the one they had.

It might not have been a full-fledged washing machine, but it was sure easier that doing it the way we did things.