Camp Latrine 12/01/06

Our valiant uncivil aeronaut has taken time off yanking his joystick to stroke his needle tipped pen against another compliant page to gush streams

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of ecstatic prose over his chance to fly in a real World War II bomber.

He pays tribute to the B-17 and the crews that flew in her and the devastation they wrought against Germany throughout the war.

How fitting this homage should come just as the war in Iraq has now surpassed the number of days America committed to World War II. Perhaps now the false analogy, the struggle between democracy and tyranny invoked by the Right, always erecting its ugly little head to stifle debate, shall finally go limp.

But there is a hint of fuselage envy in Mr. Camp’s singular column. He admires the B-17 which, after all, is a sleek, elegant craft, while he has always failed to mention the plane in which his long boring patrols took place. The clue he offers bluntly points to the boxy PB4Y, a variant more commonly known as the B-24 Liberator. The Liberator was a respectable craft; whence this adolescent coyness?

As if to answer on cue our last inquisitive critique in which it was speculated that urine and its untimely release somehow played a role in Van Camp’s outlook upon the world, Van Camp obligingly, if obliquely, reveals a deep, dark secret. He tells us he was a tail gunner in that secret plane, and then ten paragraphs later, reminded by the B-17 urinal he is sitting by, notes there was a similar arrangement on his plane and that “every drop found its way to the tail turret window.”

Here for your analysis is a wartime humiliation: a young man, fixed at the posterior end of a flying tube for ten hours a day, and the wartime action he gets is golden showers. There is no Purple Heart, no medal for fifty-two flights for being piddled on by twelve of your crewmates.

No wonder Van Camp is pissed.