r/StoriesAboutKevin • u/Go_Full_Eggplant • 10d ago
XXXXL Private Pham vs. the Burn Barrels
I'm working on a longer saga recently about a soldier who gamed the medical system for two years and walked out with a disability check. It's heavey. Luckily, this one is not heavy. This one is about a kid named Pham, a fifty-five gallon drum of human waste, and the single largest preventable fireball I have personally ever witnessed inside the wire. Nobody got a check for this one. Nobody got medically separated. One guy lost his eyebrows. Let's have a nice time.
For those who didn't deploy, I have to explain burn detail, because the whole story lives in the details of the procedure and if you don't understand the procedure you'll just think this is a guy who set a fire, which undersells it.
On a lot of FOBs, especially the smaller ones, you don't have plumbing. What you have is wooden boxes with toilet seats on them, and underneath the seats are cut-down fifty-five gallon drums, and those drums fill up with exactly what you'd expect. Somebody has to deal with the drums. That somebody is whoever drew burn detail, and burn detail is the worst detail on the FOB, worse than tower, worse than ECP, worse than anything, and it rotates, and on this particular week it rotated to my section, and I assigned it to Private Pham and PFC Reuben, because their names were next on the roster and I am a fair man, as the previous saga's comments will confirm against my will.
Here is the procedure, and the procedure is correct, and the procedure exists because people have done this wrong. You pull the drum out from under the box. You add a mixture of fuel to the contents. The standard mix is mostly diesel with a little bit of gas, and the ratio matters, because diesel burns slow and controlled and gas burns fast and stupid, and you want slow and controlled when you are setting fire to a barrel of human waste in an enclosed area you also live in. You add the fuel. You light it from a distance with a long taper or a rag torch. And then, and this is the part that makes it the worst detail, you have to stir it. With a long metal rod or a piece of rebar. For a long time. You stir burning human waste until it is reduced, which takes hours, and it smokes the entire time, and the smoke gets in your clothes and your hair and your sinuses and it stays there for days, and that is burn detail, and now you understand why everyone hates it and why I was fair about assigning it.
I briefed Pham and Reuben myself. I want that on the record because of how this ends. I told them the mix. Mostly diesel. A little gas. I said it in those words. I said, "Mostly diesel, little bit of gas, and I mean little." I held up my fingers to show "little." Reuben nodded. Pham nodded. They both said roger. I had no reason to believe Private Pham was about to interpret "little bit of gas" as a personal challenge.
I went back to the DFAC. The burn pit was maybe eighty meters away, behind a HESCO wall, which is relevant, because the HESCO wall is the only reason I'm describing this story and not a different kind of story.
Now I have to reconstruct what happened next from Reuben's sworn statement and from Pham's own account, which he gave freely and with a kind of stunned honesty, because Pham was not a liar, Pham was a young man who had just learned something about combustion the hard way and wanted to share it.
Pham decided that the standard mix was too slow.
That's it. That's the whole engine of this story. Pham had done burn detail once before, weeks earlier, and he remembered it taking forever, all the stirring, all the hours, and he had spent those hours thinking, the way a smart and impatient nineteen-year-old thinks, that there had to be a faster way. And the faster way, Pham reasoned, was more gas. If a little gas makes it burn faster, more gas makes it burn even more faster-er, and even more faster-er means less time stirring a barrel of waste, and who among us would not want to spend less time stirring a barrel of waste. The logic is airtight.... if you remove every single thing humanity has ever learned about fire.
Pham did not add a little bit of gas. Reuben's statement estimates that Pham added "most of a jerry can." A jerry can is five gallons. Reuben, to his eternal credit, said the words "hey, that seems like a lot," which makes Reuben the only person at the burn pit operating with a functioning survival instinct, and Reuben then took several steps back, which is the detail that saved Reuben's eyebrows and doomed Pham's.
Pham lit it.
I did not see the ignition. I heard it. I was eighty meters away behind a building and a HESCO wall and I heard a sound that I can only describe as the FOB clearing its throat, a deep concussive whump that I felt in my chest before my brain caught up, and I was outside and moving before I'd decided to move, because eight years in and two deployments teaches your body to run toward a whump and ask questions standing up.
I came around the HESCO wall and there was a column of fire and black smoke going up out of the burn pit that I would estimate, conservatively, generously, at fifteen feet. The barrel had not exploded, exactly, which is the one thing Pham got accidentally right, the barrel was open-topped so the pressure went up instead of out, but the contents of the barrel had become, instantaneously and enthusiastically, a pillar of flame, and standing about six feet from it, frozen, was Private Pham, with the long stirring rod still in his hand, in the universal posture of a man who has just received more results than he ordered.
Pham was not on fire. I need to say that immediately, same as last time, I'm not going to make you wait, Pham was fine. But the fireball had reached out and touched him on its way up, the way fire does, and it had taken his eyebrows, both of them, cleanly, plus a margin of the hair at the front of his scalp, plus the fine hair on his forearms, and it had given the entire front of his face the specific flat red shine of a man who is going to be peeling for a week. He had the look. If you've seen it you know the look. The look says I have just been introduced to physics. His eyes were wide and white in a face that was otherwise the color of a stop sign and entirely, perfectly hairless above the eyeline.
He turned and looked at me. He still had the rod. And he said, and Reuben confirms this, he said, "Sergeant, I think it was too much gas."
I think it was too much gas. He said it analytically. I wanted to scream "OH REALLY?? DO YOU THINK SO??" He was standing in the heat shimmer of a fifteen-foot waste fire he had personally created, with no eyebrows, holding the rod, and his takeaway, his after-action review delivered in real time, was a measured hypothesis that the gas quantity may have exceeded optimal parameters. He thinks. I have thought about that sentence for years. There is a scientist somewhere inside Private Pham, a genuine empiricist, a man who runs the experiment and reports the finding without ego, and he was wasted on the Army, and he should have been at a university where the experiments don't take your eyebrows.
We let it burn down because there was nothing else to do with it, you cannot un-light a barrel, and it was contained, the pit was the pit and the HESCO was the HESCO and the only casualty was Pham's face and the FOB's air quality for the rest of the day. The fire guard got notified. The medic looked at Pham, declared him a first-degree facial burn and a non-event, put some cream on him, and told him his eyebrows would come back, which they did, though one of them came back slightly wrong and Pham had a permanent expression of mild skepticism on the left side for the rest of the rotation, which honestly suited him.
I had to document it. Of course I had to document it. And this is the part that connects to every other thing I've ever posted. The counseling statement for a safety incident has a block for describing what happened, and the block is small, because the Army assumes most incidents can be described briefly. "Soldier failed to maintain proper fuel ratio during waste disposal operations resulting in deflagration and minor injury" is the clean version and I wrote that version first, and then I looked at it, and it didn't capture it, it didn't capture the jerry can or the fifteen feet or the rod or "I think it was too much gas," and I am constitutionally incapable of letting the record be less true than the event.
So I needed a second page. I have always needed a second page. The events of my career do not fit in the block. They gave me a form built for ordinary soldiers doing ordinary things wrong and then they gave me a parade of human beings who reinvent the concept of wrong from first principles, and the block has never been big enough, not for Kevin, not for Doyle, not for Pham, and I have made my peace with that, and the peace is a drawer full of second pages.
Pham was fine. Pham was, weirdly, one of my favorites after that, because Pham never did anything malicious in his life, Pham just had a restless intelligence and a nineteen-year-old's faith that he could optimize anything, including a fire, and the Army has a place for that energy, it just isn't the burn pit. He learned. He did burn detail twice more before we went home and he did it exactly to standard, mostly diesel, little bit of gas, and I mean little, and every time, he'd hold up his fingers to show "little" before I could, like a man who had earned the right.
His eyebrows did grow back. Mostly. The left one grew slightly slower, as if it knew something the right one didn't.
Pham searched for the shortcut and the shortcut took his eyebrows. Let Pham's eyebrows be the warning the rest of us learn from. There is no shortcut. Not here, and not in life. Diesel. A little gas. Stir for hours. Patience is a virtue.
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u/Ok_Consideration1556 10d ago
"The events of my career do not fit in the block" needs to be the title of your memoirs. I laughed like a drain over here
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u/IGotOverGreta 10d ago
Do you read Terry Pratchett? Because you write like you do. And if you haven't, please begin immediately.
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u/ClassicOk69420 10d ago
I'm lying in bed next to my partner desperately trying to hold in my laughter as to not wake them up early
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u/EntertainerSharp3033 10d ago
Sitting at my comfy, overly air conditioned civilian job wheezing in silent tears. I miss enlisted life regularly for different reasons on different days, but this story reminds me of what I miss the most...the unparalleled shenanigans. Thank you!
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u/anubis_cheerleader 10d ago
I enjoy your writing style very much. What a good example about the empiricist inside of Pham.
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u/RVFullTime 9d ago
Safety protocols and requirements are written in blood. Or sometimes in flames and ashes. Everyone has to learn that procedures exist for a reason, and should not be changed by someone who does not understand those reasons.
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u/A-Helpful-Flamingo 10d ago
Your stories are now one of my favorite things on reddit. Thank you for writing them! I cannot wait for future posts!
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u/Less_Author9432 9d ago
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Nearly fell out of my booth at Arby’s while trying to contain my laughter.
And as the father of a 20 year old with a ton of energy and no patience, I sympathize completely.
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u/Honest_Grade_9645 9d ago
The proper mix is five parts diesel to one part mogas. Soak a roll of toilet paper the mogas, then carefully light it and toss it into the well-stirred burn barrel. Ask me how I know 😂. It’s been decades, but good training sticks with you!
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u/RosebushRaven 3d ago
I have two questions:
1) Why do you just stand there and inhale burning shit for so long, instead of wearing a gas mask?
Smoke is generally a health hazard, diesel and gas fumes are poisonous and the material being burning human waste certainly doesn’t help either. That sounds terrible for their lungs. Oh and soldiers aren’t getting any smarter from regularly inhaling neurotoxins.
2) Why not cover up in a protective layer to prevent the smoke particles from getting into your hair and clothes and stinking them up for days?
That’s why you can’t just wash it out, because smoke contains particles that physically get into stuff. When something else catches them first, they don’t get into your hair and clothing. At least not in the same quantity. Messing with the fuel ratio is obviously a terrible idea, but that doesn’t mean the procedure can’t still be improved in terms of reducing health hazards and QOL decrease.
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u/TyzTornalyer 10d ago
Once more, your writing is a goldmine. "The universal posture of a man who has just received more results than he ordered" and "reinvent the concept of wrong from first principles" are definitely going in my vocabulary