Everybody Poops

Tom Ricks is a decorated journalist, having won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work with The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. His work focuses primarily on military and national security issues. He is, in short, a serious dude.

If you follow him on Twitter, you know that he's also witty, irreverent, and smart.

Recently, though, he's been full of shit. Or at least some of his journalistic work has been.

Ricks writes a blog at Task & Purpose, a site focused on a broad range of military and veterans' issues. His posts vary widely, from military history to tactics to policy to military-based video games. And of late, shit.

In early September, Ricks launched a contest for his readers, asking for submissions about the most memorable combat craps they'd taken.

There weren't a lot of entries, but the final one was a doozy. In the midst of a firefight with the Viet Cong, a young officer felt nature's call. As he concludes, "Despite all mortal reasons not to, I finally succumbed to the most powerful force on earth—a shit whose time had come."

That's a story worth reading.

So's this one about a dickhead officer who got what had long been coming to him. The kicker: "The door was blown open by the Majah who stumbled out. He was covered from head to toe with a colorful mixture of shit and toilet paper as if he had been tarred and feathered in different material."

In this time where nearly everything seems covered in shit of one form or another, a couple of good old fashioned poop stories seem the kind of mindless crap we all need. Your mileage may vary.