Stewed

The most innocuous word can release a repressed traumatic memory.

A character in a 1930s movie that I watched on TCM yesterday referred to a drunken friend as being "stewed". I shuddered as my mind raced back to Basic Training in the summer of '69. We had just returned from a Field Training Exercise, 72 hours of simulated combat. To insure that the woods and dales of Indiantown Gap Military Reservation were not covered in human waste from the thousands of ROTC cadets training there, the Army kept us on short and binding rations during FTXs. When we returned to the barracks though, the Army recognized that a constipated cadet was not a happy, healthy cadet. Our first breakfast in the mess hall consisted of all-bran flakes and a bowl of stewed prunes.

"You can take or leave the cereal, son, but you've got to eat those stewed prunes," said the Mess Sergeant. Our Tac Officer made sure that we consumed every morsel of steaming, roughage-rich goodness. Little encouragement was necessary. Hot, tasty food was a welcome relief after three days of cold rations. Then the stewed prunes did their magic.

Our barracks had six water closets for 60 cadets. The water closets saw a month's worth of usage in two hours. With an anguished comrade-in-arms waiting, one tended to bypass many of the standard hygienic, clean-up requirements. Our latrine soon resembled that public latrine from "Slumdog Millionaire".

This was particularly distressing to me and Jim Corbett because we were Latrine Orderlies that cursed day. After the last bit of stewed prunes had cleared the collective alimentary tracts of Training Platoon 3/A/3, we covered our mouths and noses with a rag dipped in Clorox against the stench and began scrubbing and cleaning.

It's a memory I've repressed for 41 years. Then a simple comment from an old movie and the horror returns.