C'est La Gar

After twelve hours in the tail, fifteen if you counted ground time, the balding technical sergeant was weary and his knees ached from lack of movement. It was no small pleasure pulling off the heavy boots and feeling the cool evaporation of trapped sweat. After two beers he wanted to talk about what a gunner’s life was like once he was airborne in a B-52. Few people other than gunners themselves had any idea that directly behind and below the vertical fin of early B-52’s the tail gunner sat in a small compartment no larger than the cockpit of a fighter. By looking through the windows above him, he could visually check the airplane taillight for operation and observe the movement of the tall rudder when one of the pilots 145 feet away pushed on his pedals.  If the gunner moved his elbows only inches away from his body they would touch the side panels, and with the seat forward his knees straddled the control column for the guns. Depending on his torso height and seat adjustment, the clearance between his head and the top of the small space he rode in was less than the width of a deck of cards. Unable to stand and with no way to fully stretch without unbuckling himself from the harness holding him in place, a tail gunner was isolated from the five forward crewmembers by a long unpressurized fuselage main body. Unless emergency conditions existed he did not go to the front of the aircraft in flight and often spent twelve and sometimes more than twenty-four hours alone, without seeing another human being.

To enable a gunner to urinate in flight, the same fifty thou’ a year engineers who designed the multi-million dollar B-52 thoughtfully designed a buck and a half arrangement. A small funnel connected to a rubber hose running thirty inches or so down to a two-quart can snapped into a panel alongside the base of the gunner’s seat. This rig, cumbersome at best, never worked well in practice. Because it was filthy and smelled of stale urine, maintenance people didn’t like to work on it. When clogged, the standard fix was to cut out the clogged section and slide the pieces together over a smaller tube. In time the tubes became so short that urinating became a test of aim and was no simple process. Gunners who wrote the relief tubes up for being too short could expect numerous caustic comments about just what was too short, so mostly they didn’t write them up. A long tube worked better than a short one, but crimped easily. Then the procedure required the gunner to pinch himself off with one hand while he held the tube eye level to remove the crimp and let the funnel drain out. This method although standard, was complicated by turbulence.

The sergeant shifted on the makeshift desk, lit a cigarette and looked at the tall maintenance three-striper, in green fatigues who was standing alongside another gunner wearing a flight suit.

“Have you ever seen a ball of piss floating eye level?” he asked, and without waiting for an answer continued, “The damn relief tube wouldn’t work and I’d already pissed all over my hands so I unsnapped the can from the side panel, put it in my lap and took the lid off.

“As usual it was about three-quarters full because somebody didn’t dump it after the last flight and I was holding it between my legs trying to piss in it. At the time we were just starting refueling and coming up on the tanker. The next thing I know, the navigator tells the pilot our closure rate is too fast.

“The Ace tells the co-pilot to go to airbrakes two and the damn idiot slams it into airbrakes six.[1]

 “The negative G’s caused the piss to rise even with my visor. I sat there moving the can back and forth trying to get under it.” He used hand gestures to describe his plight. “Then the damn idiot slams it into airbrakes nothing.”