War has been described as long periods of boredom punctuated with moments of sheer terror. This is true.
During one of those long periods of boredom my track commander and I were sitting around in front of our M-88
playing
Battleship (homemade from an
MRE box and
pipe cleaners). Bob, my track commander, was sitting on a 5 gallon Jerry can. Our super deluxe
boardgame was sitting on a couple of cases of bottled water. I was sitting on a broken
G.I. cot.
The only chair I had that had a back-rest on it was the driver's seat of my track. I had been sitting in it for five months now and was wanting to be able to sit outside comfortably. Thus was born the idea of a chair from a broken G.I cot.
Bob and I wrapped up our game with him being crowned Grand Champion of Battleship in Iraq. I started tinkering with the materials at hand embarking on my chair quest.
The cot was broken on one side. One of the long square tubes on the side had been crushed by a hydraulic cylinder in my M-88. The rest of the cot was intact and serviceable.
My first step was to use a chisel to cut off the rivets attaching the center legs of the cot. I did the same for the end legs from the broken end. From my trusty "nut, bolt and whatever" ammo can I scrounged a couple of inch and a half long bolts with nuts. I reattached the end legs from the broken end to the good end. This gave me a sound sitting platform. Now for the back-rest.
Using the center legs from the cot to support the back-rest was the plan. With the cot opened up I slid the center legs down onto the side tubes with the legs pointing upward. The excess cloth from the broken end had sleeves sewn in where the frame side tubes had gone through it. The sleeves were slid down the upward turned legs and supported the back-rest well enough. The cloth on the seat portion was slid forward to create a comfortable angle for the back-rest.
Everyone that came by my position had to sit on it and they all loved it. A few even made one for themselves.
Voila! There you have it in a nutshell. A very comfortable camp type chair made from a broken G.I Cot.