Shitters

This snapshot was taken on a small fire-base in July 1970 during the rainy season.  In the immediate foreground is a 105 mm Howitzer, surrounded by a wall of sandbags.
On the far side of the sandbag wall, you can see four wooden boxes called shitters.

Each shitter is about three foot square at the base and six feet high.  Back home, after a cup of coffee in the morning, you generally go looking for a bathroom.  On a small firebase in Vietnam, after a cup of coffee in the morning, you go looking for a shitter.

Each shitter was open in front so they faced the berm to provide a bit of privacy.  Another benefit of facing the berm was the soldier sitting there could keep an eye out for attacking enemy soldiers.  I never did see any enemy soldiers while sitting on a shitter, by the way, during my tour in Vietnam.

There was a platform to sit on with a hole in the middle that emptied into half of a fifty-five gallon drum.  The drum was accessible from the rear of the shitter via a hinged door so when the drum was reasonably full, it could be easily replaced with an empty one by the shit burner.
The shit burner performed his work in the area behind the shitters.   Morning and evening, he mixed kerosene with the shit and toilet paper mix and then lit it on fire.  When the barrel had burned itself out and cooled, the shit burner tipped it over and drummed out the ash.  During the day, when not burning shit, the shit burner could read, sleep, eat at the mess hall, drink beer and smoke ganja (as long as he avoided getting caught).

After spending a couple of months as an infantry soldier living in the jungle for fifteen days at a time hunting Vietcong soldiers,  I could appreciate why someone would take the job.