Grandpa’s War – Part 14 – Laundry and other Details

I don’t know what we were thinking.

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 smarts we claimed, we’d have bought one of the old roller wringers. Some of our parents and grandparents used them. We’d have strapped it down in one of the Humvee’s we shipped down there. We did have electricity from the generators. So all we’d have had to worry about was water for it. Using 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. So we used a large plastic tub and tent pole to wash with.

We’d pour the water in the tub, toss in detergent and stir it around with the stick. You’d then wring it out. Empty, rinse, wring out, and hang up and dry. Laundry was almost always a two person job. Wringing out anything more than a pair of socks involved two people.

Drying the clothes was the easy part. The air was so dry and warm, you could hang something up wet and it would be dry in 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. In Iraq, we found a large box of detergent in an abandoned bunker. I’m happy to say that our 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 in, added their clothes, water and detergent. Then they 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.

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

Bedding was another matter.

We used sleeping bags of course. Sleeping bags are difficult to wash in the field. Even without dust and dirt, they get smelly. This is normal not matter how clean one is. Humans sweat, and we shed skin and hair. All of that tends to get a little smelly.

The field expedient way of dealing with this was to take it out early in the morning, open it up, and let the sun and breeze take care of it. After an hour or two of that, sleeping in it was almost as good as sleeping under fresh sheets.