The cobalt North Sea sparkled far below. I told Myers I was going back to arm the bombs before we reached ten thousand feet, at which point I’d need to wear my oxygen. I was getting awfully tired of the oxygen masks, the way they would freeze to your face and the hose that was always in the way. But wearing a mask was vital above 10,000 feet. Without it you would feel an immense fatigue that would gradually overcome you until you lost consciousness. At 20,000 feet, you could be dead in five minutes. Myers had us check in every half hour to show we were still breathing.
The stink trapped in the closed system was getting worse, too. Despite efforts to give us less gas-inducing foods, the menus often featured cabbage and broccoli. Nobody’s digestion was in good order, so there was a lot of farting and belching. Rank human odors got trapped in the hoses along with the smells of cordite, aircraft fuel and urine. When I first put on my mask, it sometimes smelled bad enough to make me gag. After a while, I got used to it, but it was never pleasant.
Bodily functions in general were a problem. There was a funnel and tube bolted to a bulkhead above the bomb bay designed for a man to stand and relieve himself, the slipstream carrying away the urine. It was a bad design. The inside temperature was usually thirty below zero. Our bunny suits were plugged into the plane so we couldn’t move around. They also didn’t have a fly, another crucial design flaw. At altitude, frozen urine blocked the tube so the rest of the piss spattered on the deck to become a slippery glaze that made the plane stink like a skid-row alley when it thawed.
Most of us cut a hole in our bunny suit and carried some kind of container to piss in. Ammo cans and even cardboard boxes were common. Even so, you needed to be careful because the suits could short out if they got wet. There was a story about a scared guy who pissed himself. The shorted-out suit gave him third-degree burns on his balls, earning him a Purple Heart.