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The Silverstream Model 261 Self-Contained Long Range Armored Combat Trailering Unit
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The Silverstream Model 261 Self-Contained Long Range Armored Combat Trailering Unit
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Added: July 17, 2007
Briefing
The model 261 Silverstream self contained long range armored combat trailering unit serves as an extremely effective logistical base for freelance small-squad long term hostile environment deployments. There is however, a slight problem with the toilet...
Name: Zacharias Tomlinson
Alliance: Texas General Irregulars - 202nd Heavy Combat 5th Wheel Division
Combat history:
2039 Southwestern General Insurgency
2041 Brownsville Credit Riots
2042 Rio Grande Surprise
2044 Corpus Christie Dockside Uprising
The Scene
This starts in a straight documentary style. Zach sits and addresses the camera, telling his story to the camera in an improvised studio in a motel room somewhere in the desert southwest. He is 40ish, calm, and weathered. As the story develops, we transition to a video montage of the events as they transpired with Zach's narration continuing.
Zach
The early morning hours are not good for crap taking. Between the 16 hour run down to Christie, the cranky tow unit, and the South Texas Insurgency, it'd been a tough 24 hours. Neither of us were sleeping very well. It was about 3 ayem and we had finally settled in for a couple of hours of shuteye before the action started, and I got hit with a "too tired to sleep" interval. I tossed and turned for an hour or so, grinding back and forth over all the unpleasantness of the last few days, and then was hit with an overwhelming urge to take a crap. Now, as anyone knows, the early morning hours are a piss-poor time to be engaging in any kind of activity involving the movement of the bowels, I've learned this lesson again and again, but whatever controls that stuff deep in my lower lizard lobe hasn't got the message yet.
Maybe now it will.
Regardless of the overpowering feeling of doom, there was no arguing with such a fundamental call to action, so I rolled out of bed and clunked through the living unit trying not to twist my ankle or hit my head too hard.
The model 261 self contained long range armored combat trailering unit is all business. It's built to send a maximum volume of firepower downrange at the highest possible rate of fire, while providing accommodations for the crew during long term deployment. It is outstanding in fulfilling its combat mission, and I have been an extremely satisfied customer over the last five years. However, the primary function of the vehicle is combat, and the crew accommodations are extremely minimal. Basically, it is set up so that the crew can spend a month or two off the supply chain without actually dying. With all the crazyness going on, this was a very attractive feature when I was looking for a rig, so I went with it. However, there is nothing "comfortable" about the quarters, as every possible microinch of the interior is packed with rockets, chain gun ammo, 155's and small arms. There are bunks, a microwave, a small fridge, and about 1 cubic foot of non-combat storage and thats it.
Its kinda like a submarine...except less comfortable and more cramped.
This entire setup it is particularly ill-suited to any type of night time maneuvering...particularly when you are half asleep...particularly when you are feeling kind of cranky anyway, and most particularly when your entire body is wracked by the intensely urgent need to take a bowel movement.
So I flopped and clunked and hit my head while navigating through my evil submarine thing, until I finally made it to the teensy weensy little toilet made for strange alien people with impossibly teensy little butt cheeks.
After hitting my head a few more times and getting properly situated, I moved forward with the business at hand.
It was not pretty.
Combat is extremely bad for the digestion...one of those little known facts rarely covered in history books and movies. Actually, a considerable amount of a soldier's time is spent worrying about the next crap...when it will happen, how it will go...whether it will be as bad as the previous one...
There was considerable struggling...there were some extremely candid comments that passed my lips...and there was the feeling of a concrete hammer head wrapped in barbed wire passing through my most delicate tissues...
It was like losing a serious fist fight.
In prison.
After 25 minutes, the nightmare ended and I had enough to show for my efforts to retreat and declare victory. I slumped forward for a moment, feeling the exhaustion and defeat flow over me, and then reached back to trigger the waste ejector.
The sound it made was not the right sound. It was not the sound of the bowl being evacuated out into the holding tank. It was the sound of something going wrong...it was the sound of something extremely bad happening.
Once again, I must say that the 261 is an extremely capable and reliable unit at performing its primary function - destroying the enemy. Its secondary function, keeping the crew alive between combat intervals is adequate, with a few notable weaknesses, and one massive design error for which the engineers should be strung up and shot.
There is a little teeny valve in the waste ejector that uses some of the suction to remove the condensation from the refrigerator so it doesn't get all moldy back behind the heat exchanger. It is kind of a good idea...I've had mold in my heat exchanger, and it is a real pain in the ass. However, the engineer who had this bright idea didn't follow through on making sure that the valve was really all that well built, so it is NOT really that well built. It is not well built at all, actually, and when it fails there is some kind of reverse suction anamoly that results in raw sewage spraying up behind the refrigerator, in the refrigerator, around the side of the refrigerator, and out under the front of the refrigerator.
The sound that was made when I hit the ejection switch was the sound of that valve failing, and the next time that waste ejector was triggered, we were going to be eating ham and shit sandwiches, with 2% shit milk, with shit soup and shit sauce for the next 10 weeks.
There was no escaping the facts: I was gonna have to fix that valve.
Right now.
The second prong in the two pronged approach the engineers used in completely fucking up this valve was to locate the oft-failing underbuilt valve in an absolutely impossible spot to access for maintenance or replacement.
The head hitting, knuckle skinning, eye poking, shin thwacking path to that valve made the treacherous path I had just taken from the bunks to the bathroom look like a wide sunlit boulevard, with flowers and butterflies and children running and laughing.
It was accessible only through the crawlspace under the sub floor, which was accessible only by a hatch built for the same midget that they used for the toilet seat. Once in the crawlspace, you had to navigate the entire length of the trailer on your elbows, weaving in and out of pipes, and wires and poisonous spiders and moldy refrigerator condensation. When you finally dragged your ass to the spot with the valve, you would remember the tool you forgot, take a moment to sob quietly, and then crawl all the way back out to get the bimetal induction spanner.
This was the task ahead of me, and having gone the shit sandwich route, I knew that there was no way out of it.
I gathered the tools (minus whatever the one was that I was going to forget) and then weaved and wiggled the torturous 40 feet back to the wretched little broken thing. I twisted myself into a ball, jamming my foot into the chain gun mounting, arching my back viciously, smashing my face into the damp jagged metal under the wheel well, and then settled my entire body weight on one little muscle in my shoulder that had only just healed from the last valve replacement trip.
I felt like the coke crazed maniac on "Cops" as the five officers pin him to the ground after the high speed chase through the everglades.
The only difference was that nobody was screaming "GET DOWN ON THE GROUND...NOW!" as they jammed their boot in the back of my neck.
I started working on one of the 12 screws that held it in...1/4 turn at a time...and started trying to think about something else...anything else.
I successfully engaged my imagination as I performed the repetitive task...reworking again and again the battle plan for the morning, knowing that I would be attempting it on less than an hour of sleep - but on a full breakfast completely devoid of shit.
Aside from the screaming pain in my shoulder, arms, legs, back and face the time went relatively quickly and soon the last screw came out, slipped through my hands and dropped down into some dark crack to be lost forever.
All the screws were permanently lost...but the valve was off.
I put it down and shifted some of the weight off my shoulder, resting briefly before putting the replacement (and soon to fail) valve back on.
It was at that point that I heard another sound.
It was kind of a thump...kind of a wifely sounding thump.
I stopped and listened for a moment, and then I heard the distinct sound of my wife's footsteps navigating through our submarine. What the hell is she up to? I thought. She's a pretty sound sleeper...I wonder what she is doing...
I listened to the footsteps as they navigated through the galley, and then a chill ran up my spine.
She was heading for the bathroom.
I heard the door open, and the fitting of her ass into the midget seat.
I briefly evaluated my current position, jammed sideways in the bowels of the combat trailer, my face about 2 inches from the open sewage pipe that at the moment was leading directly back to my wife's slowly...puckering...ass.
I had mere seconds to take action, or I was going to experience the grandmother of all nightmares.
My wife was an extremely decisive pooper, and it would take several minutes to disentangle myself from the contorted position I was in, so extraction was out of the question.
The list of options was real short, and "yelling frantically" was quickly identified as the winner.
Here's how it went.
I yelled: "Honey, DON'T FLUSH"
She heard: "WHAHA...WHABUAL BALAH!"
She said: "WHAT?"
I yelled: "DOOOON'T ***FLUSH***"
She heard: "HONT BLUSH!"
She said: "I can't hear you...I'm on the can!"
"HONT BLUSH!"
WHAT?
"HONT BLUSH!"..."HONT BLUSH!"..."HONT BLUSH!"...
"Hold on, I'll be out in a second...I can't hear a word you're saying!"
(With increasing desperation)
"HONT BLUSH!"..."HONT BLUSH!"..."HONT BLUSH!"...
(The sound of flushing)
"AWWWWWWWW"
(Pause as the sound of flushing fades)
It was bad.
It was so bad it was funny for just a small fraction of a second.
Then it surpassed funny and plowed right ahead into being horrible beyond all description.
It was bad beyond all memory of what could be bad.
It redefined bad in my mind, all previous bad seemed silly and laughably un-bad compared to this bad.
It was so bad that it wasn't even funny later.
It was so bad that my wife didn't laugh, which is a signal that we had entered a formerly unexplored level of extreme bad.
After flushing her load, my wife set about looking for her mysteriously absent husband...humming softly to herself. She found me as I was extracting myself up from the floor hatch. The gravity of what happened had not yet revealed itself to her, so she was still engaged in mundane household matters...
"Honey, did you see the note from the park manager? She said that our holding tank is leaking so she turned off the water to the trailer. Guess we'll have to do without showers this morning"...
She pauses for a moment as the sight and smell of me hits her.
"Sweet Jesus...what the hell happened to you?"
When she saw the look of deep sadness in my eyes...she paused in surprise at just how hollow and shocked I looked...then she saw the tools in my hand and the broken valve. Having fixed it herself a few times, there was a moment of pending realization as she put the pieces together. The wheel turned one more time and the realization of what had just happened took her breath away.
It was quiet a moment, realizing that her actions had just caused the man she loved and fought beside to be drenched in hot shit.
We both sat there speechless for a moment.
What to say in such a situation?
She gestured back towards the bathroom
"I just flushed that crap on you..."
"Yep..."
"That was the nastiest fucking load of crap...It was all that Mexican food we got at the truck stop last night...my god...my god...I dropped that motherfucker right on you!..."
"Yes honey...ya did..."
(Pause)
"Do you still love me?"
"Yes...yes I do...
That's amazing.
"Yes...I guess you're right...it is kind of amazing...
"wow."
"wow."
(Slow fade to black as they look at each other in amazement)
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