‘That Dreaded OBA’

How many of you Ol’ Coots remember not long ago when we were using this Breathing Device long known as the ‘OBA’ or Oxygen Breathing Apparatus?!?

This is where some enterprising genius discovered that if you are retired Navy and you build something half-ass, the Canoe Club Brass will buy it for six times the going price! I mean sons-a-bitches were a gauddamned death trap at best!! When the instructors at firefighting school were using SCBAs instead of what we were wearing onboard ship, you could recognize it for pure, unadulterated horseshit … if not you need to check into the Betty Ford clinic and get the hell off whatever it is you're lighting up!!!

It was a pretty easy contraption to operate, but very important that you learned how to use properly! For instance, there were the RED canisters and the GREEN canisters!! RED was for training, and I’ll be gauddamned if I’d ever actually used one in training!! It was enough to confuse the shit out of me, you and the whole lot of us!!!

Once donned, and the canister was actuated, you had a thirty minute timer! But like anything else, they rarely lasted fifteen minutes … it’s been awhile so my numbers are probably off!! Sometimes trying to breath in those damned things was like sipping the contents of a Pakistani septic tank through a straw … In other words, if you ran out of air, you were screwed!!!

When removing the son-of-a-bitch, you had to be real careful not to burn your hands as the canister got real gauddamned hot! There was a chemical inside the canister that was like a caustic soda and it made it so you had to use an oven mitt or lean over a trashcan to get rid of the monstrosity!! Never mind the fact this little box of chemicals could cause a violent explosion right around your chesticles!!!

That’s right, mixing any type of petroleum based substance, water and the canister could turn you into a regular onboard jihadi suicide bomber without the “Allah Akbar!”  So what are you expecting to crawl around in during a main space fire anyway?!? That’s Right … water and oil! You could be waste deep in the muck, trip over some refuse and “KABOOM!!”  It could be lights out!! I mean, who came up with this asinine idea anyway?!? Yet we used OBAs for a good forty or fifty years before we finally got the modern day SCBAs you see at your local fire house!!!

If that wasn’t bad enough, you had to fit the gauddamned thing over a huge Fire Fighter Ensemble! Now that made you feel like you were dressed up like an organ grinders monkey!! If you were one of those smaller Crackerjack types, one of the sons-a-bitches could weigh as much as the poor bastard wearing it! You’d need a lifeguard in case you accidentally fell in!!!

If you were built like a beef cake, it was some real entertainment watching you try to stuff yourself inside one of them things! I mean how much shit can you stuff into a tampon tube anyway?!? I guess it’s better than ending up looking like a Pompeii lava victim!!!

But hey, we were young, stupid and fearless as hell! An old Grizzly face Chief getting red faced while breathing down your neck to get dressed out and go fight that fire …

"Jesus, how'n the hell did I end up in this shithole?"

From then on, it was simple… While operating in a space a little larger than your granny’s bread box…

"Team Leader, my mask is fogged and I can't see a fuck’n thing!”

But we did it, smelling weird, breathing lousy air, and sweat’n like a whore in church … nothing worth mentioning! It was all long ago ...  But we were young and ten feet tall!! The years passed and somewhere, somehow without realizing it, we became fabled members of the 'Old School Navy’ where men ran ships and boys ran scared!!!