I spent four-and-a-half years proudly serving my country aboard the USS Enterprise. If you've never been aboard an aircraft carrier, let me try to describe the environment. Everything is painted gray or white. Cables, pipes, and valves jut out or pass through every wall (we call them bulkheads). No decor or any sort of "softness" in the architecture or accoutrements -- just steel covered in paint. The hum and type of activity is very much what you'd find in a factory -- a hellish factory, a factory run by some demon CEO with a perverse preoccupation with cleanliness and gray and white paint. Boredom pervades every nook and cranny of a naval vessel. The brass keeps you working anywhere from twelve to sixteen hours a day (only eight hours on Sunday); and in those few precious hours when you're not working or sleeping, there is hardly anything to do. Some sailors spend this time chatting, others in pursuit of education, or religious enlightenment, or crafts, or so on.

On one cruise we had a sailor who entertained himself by guerrilla shitting. He would go around the ship, find an unoccupied room (we call them spaces), and take a dump right on the floor (deck). He was known throughout the ship as The Mad Shitter. I think only in the Navy could someone attain folk hero status merely by shitting.

The first discovery of mad shitting occurred two weeks into the cruise -- cruises typically last six months. A sailor had gone into the bathroom (the head) to take a shower; and there on the floor was a coiled brown monster. This guy immediately called his shipmates in to see the turd. Photographs were taken and good fun was had by all, except for the poor bastard responsible for cleaning the head on duty at that time.

The Mad Shitter got more and more brazen as the weeks wore on. He even took a crap out on the Mess Decks -- a kind of public thoroughfare -- although how he managed that, I have no idea. This mad shitting was a huge morale boost for the ship. It provided tons of entertainment. Whenever there was another episode, people would flock to the scene in droves. Can you imagine someone disrupting his sleep or other activities merely to look at a pile of shit??? Sounds incredible, doesn't it? Yet, to anyone who has ever been in the Navy, it makes perfect sense.

These acts had an almost mystic quality about them. You could swear that no one had entered a space, or that too many sailors were around to execute such an attack -- and yet, right there, almost as if by magic, a turd would suddenly manifest itself!

Other locations struck by the Mad Shitter included telephone storage boxes. These boxes were scattered throughout the ship and contained a sort of "strap-on" telephone that we would use during General Quarters. Whenever there was a GQ drill, word would go throughout the ship as to whose telephone had been targeted.

Another favorite of his was to take a crap in someone's helmet. These helmets were stored at every GQ station. It was great fun to watch the poor victim discover a coiled-up turd in his helmet just before placing it on his head.

Towards the end of the cruise, there were so many episodes of mad shitting that there must have been copycats. My personal favorite was the time when we were painting one of our spaces. There were four of us painting, and we each had a five-gallon can of white paint. In the middle of this, GQ was called, so we closed our cans of paint and rushed off to our GQ stations. When they secured GQ, we returned back to our painting job. When I opened up my paint can, I saw it: there, floating in the paint, was a mini-turd. The Mad Shitter had struck again! It had been sitting there long enough that a brownish corona of feces had leached into the paint, forming a halo around the turd.

But more was to come. As each one of the guys opened his own can of paint, we discovered the Mad Shitter had targeted all four of us! I can only imagine how acrobatic his sphincter must have been to parcel up a turd into four equal portions; but somehow, he managed it.

All this fun and frivolity came to an halt about a month before the cruise ended. Like Icarus, The Mad Shitter reached too far and overstepped the bounds of propriety. There was a passageway on the ship called Officer Country -- only officers could use it. One evening the Mad Shitter placed a depth charge right at the entrance to this passageway. Heretofore, he had just attacked enlisted spaces -- but now that he had dared to desecrate the officers' spaces (gasp!), the captain pulled out all stops to catch him. Twenty-four hour guards were posted all over the ship in just about every space. NIS was brought aboard. Coercive lectures given to the crew. Rewards were posted. And more. In fact, the ship's capability was greatly reduced due to taking sailors away from their normal duties (air cover, operations, cryptography, etc.) and assigning them to shit patrol.

The identity of the Mad Shitter was never discovered.

But if I ever met him, I'd shake his hand (after handing him a clean wipe) for providing us with so much entertainment on an otherwise-monotonous six-month cruise.