Being a Good Scout

While I was stationed in Keflavik, Iceland, the Boy Scout leaders decided to have the first Boy Scout “World Jamboree” and asked the commander of our naval base to supply an ambulance and some corpsmen in case of injury or illness.

Three of us volunteered to man the first aid station. It was our weekend off and nice to have something different to do. We were issued a “cracker box” ambulance for transportation and we loaded it up with things that we thought we would need; food, bandages, food, a large tent, food, water and more food.

When we reached the site, we set up our first aid tent. It was an old canvas tent with matching floor, windows, door flap, and a vent for a stove pipe to exit.  The sponsors gathered a dozen wooden skids for firewood. We knew that wouldn’t last the entire weekend and we searched the field around us, collecting all the dried sheep dung we could find and piled it inside the tent to stay dry.

One of the corpsmen made a stove out of a rectangular tin box that had once held five pounds of coffee. Using snips and wire he made two doors, one for feeding the fuel and the other to remove ashes.

The stoves legs war made out of thick twisted strands of wire. The same heavy wires crisscrossed on the inside of the box to create a grate suspending the burning fuel above the bottom of the ash pit. Three pieces of metal stovepipe ran out through the vent hole and turned upward. The stove was ready for business.

Our tent remained warm, snug, and dry. Which was a good thing, because most of the weekend, it rained. The wood from the pallets was gone before too long. Now the dung in the fields was too wet to burn. But we had an ample supply. The smoke from the dung actually had a pleasant smell. We had a steady stream of scouts coming into the tent to “see what we were cooking.” They couldn’t believe it was actually the smoke from the dung that they were smelling. We could have offered them some pieces of liver that we were cooking when they visited, but they wouldn’t have eaten it anyway.