(bolding mine)
Wished I would have caught that. 
OP are you seriously unaware of the existence of Jerry cans with spigots attached to the side at the bottom? Or a hanging plastic bag with a tube clamp?
True, but haven’t most modern militaries adopted cleanliness discipline in response to times (relatively recently - US Civil War, Crimean War, perhaps even World War I) where more soldiers were incapacitated by disease and illness than the enemy?
I know relatively little about hygiene in the military, but especially regarding what I’ve read of history, it seems like lots of the discipline instilled during training and in active service is to try to take young recruits with varying hygiene habits and at least make them all attempt to reach some minimum standard where a large body of troops could move and fight without having to worry too much about decrepit hygiene practices causing inability of too many soldiers to do either.
Obviously that doesn’t mean washing hands takes priority over cleaning a rifle, but just that to some extent handwashing cannot be entirely ignored.
Tell that to all those NFL players in Roman legions getting the shit kicked out of them.
It is an important part of military discipline, critical to a soldier’s psychological well-being, that soldiers shave, etc., when they can, “regularly.” They are trained to maintain a sense of self discipline apart from only kill and avoid being killed, among other possible pathologies.
What’s a tube clamp?
It’s a plastic box with a offset wheel to pinch off a piece of rubber tube run through it.
I’m not really sure what you mean do you have a picture of it?
Think of an IV bag. The clamp they use to control the drip rate.
Is there a version of that they use in the military to wash their hands? I would be interested in buying it for camping use.
There are ones sold for civilians for camping. Solar Shower. Unless washing your hands with a device intended for showering violates the rules of your world.
That device doesn’t look like it has the " tube clamp" he was talking about. I am looking for the one they use in the military.
Air Force chiming in here. I spent six months at Kandahar Air Field (which is colocated on the site of Kandahar International Airport, leading to a philosophical question: If I spent six months at the airport, was I ever really in Afghanistan?)
Anyways, our camp didn’t strictly have running water. We had a great big water tank (kind of a baby water tower) connected to four trailers. One served as the female latrine and showers, two more served as male latrine and showers, and the fourth was our laundry trailer. For drinking water, we’d get a couple pallets of bottled water delivered every week or so. At various places around the base, it wasn’t uncommon to see portable handwashing stations like shown on the first page. Basically a little standalone contraption made from the same type of plastic that Portojohns are made from, with a foot pump to get the water out so you could wash your hands. There was also lots of hand sanitizer to be found.
That said, this was on the airfield, where we had chow halls serving hot food and restaurants serving gyros and burgers and pizza (all the finest food of Western democratic civilizations) if we got tired of that. I’m assuming soldiers “outside the wire” probably had to keep clean the same way we did when I was in the Boy Scouts, and that means pretty much what everyone has already said. Wash hands with water poured from a container (such as a Jerry Can or a Water Buffalo) or use bottled water, or else just deal with it and try not to lick your hands too much.
EDIT: As for “what they use in the military,” the simple fact of the matter is that the military will use whatever it needs to make things work. In ideal situations, you have particular prescribed material and methods that you use, and in more trying times, where you might be dealing with limited supplies, a short timetable, or the need to stay on the move, you might just make do with whatever you can improvise or get a hold of. For a rubber hose hanging down from a Camelbak type devices, assuming that there wasn’t a factory-installed valve on the tube, you could probably make due with some kind of clip, such as the ones used for hanging laundry.
But I’ve already explained to you what we use in the military. I’ve spent up to 2 weeks at a time outside the wire without returning to any base at all; just living in a hole in the ground. If my hands required washing for some reason, I used water bottles. Most of the time, Joey Wipes did the trick! But if my hands needed something more, then sand and water was likely enough.
If this is really confusing to you, I bet it would blow your mind to learn how we piss and shit on small outposts.
Oh yeah, I forgot, there are also hand and body wipes. I prefered the alcohol-based wipes, they just felt like they cleaned better when I needed to use them.
EDIT: Bear, that urinal looks quite clever, and somewhat quaint. I guess that keeps the smell under control? Otherwise I just don’t see the point of that versus a regular old pit latrine, which seems like it’d be less work.
Oh, and the aforementioned latrine trailers I mentioned, that stuff got collected and carried away to the Poo Pond. It is, unfortunately, exactly what it sounds like. I’m told that it’s much better than it used to be, before they started treating it with chemicals to neutralize the smell somewhat, but it’s still the collected bodily waste of some 30,000 people in a giant pond.
Not military, but a plastic basin/bucket and a cheap cup with a handle is pretty standard hand washing gear worldwide. You wash one hand at a time by scooping water from the basin, pouring it over your hand, soaping that hand up, and then pouring again, with the waste water falling on the ground. The same effect can also be achieved with a small tea kettle.
Without sounding to graphic wouldn’t wiping your hands with a wet wipe after taking a shit not remover the bacteria and possibly fecal matter under your nails ( if your finger went through the toilet paper)
FFS, you have difficulty wiping your ass too? You would do better to keep your fingernails clipped and probably use a better quality shit paper, or at least a few extra folds. With that said, if wet wipes are effective at removing bacteria and fecal mater from a baby’s ass, why do you expect it couldn’t do the same for your finger? I think hand washing might be the least of your problems here. I don’t think most people have the same problems keeping shit off their hands or washing with a bottle that you seem to experience.
If you do need to get under your fingernails, just fold the wipe to make a pointy bit that you can get under your nail. But yeah, in the military, your nails shouldn’t be very long anyways, just like how most guys in the military don’t have to worry about having trouble seeing due to hair getting in our faces.