A lyster bag for those of you who never got to spend time in the field or at a Forward Operating Base (FOB) with the military. It is a cylinder-shaped canvas water bag with spigots around on the bottom. It has been used for decades to dispense clean water and is usually used for drinking or washing.
As all the water they had us drink in Iraq was bottled, I don’t think it was used for drinking while in Iraq. It was usually set up next to the porta-potties, so people could wash their hands after going to the bathroom.
The alternative to hand washing was hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizer would kill germ, but it doesn’t remove dirt, grim, or poo from your skin. Overuse of hand sanitizer also dries the skin and strips helpful bacteria from a person. So, it is better to use it sparingly than using it all the time.
At one point during a deployment to Iraq we had a quite a few people getting sick on the FOB, enough that the Corpsman at the Aid station, First Sergeant, and the Company Gunny were all concerned. Rightfully you don’t want sickness putting everyone down for the count in any setting, let alone on a small base during the early stages of an insurgent war.
If I remember correctly, it was believed many people weren’t washing their hands after the bathroom, so the lister bags were monitored. Well, what they found out, was the Iraqi water truck guy who cleaned the porta-potties would put the hose to fill the water in the toilet tanks. Then before he left, he would go over to the lyster bags and put that same hose in the bag to top the water off. Holy crap no wonder half the camp was sick.
Turns out people were washing, but the washing water wasn’t clean. Those bags weren’t thrown away and replaced; they should have been. You can believe that no one ever used the lyster bags again, we had the dirtiest sterile hands with all the hand sanitizer we switched to.
What does this mean to you? Well in an austere environment: living in the field, camping, grid down, prolonged power outage, etc. make sure to keep your clean water clean and keep your poo away from everything.
There is also a lesson there on trusting stupid and/or malicious people with a simple task that happens to be crucial to health and wellbeing.
-Joseph
Outpost 95 