Don't ever ask me to fill up your car.

When I was in Iraq, my team lived with an Iraqi Army battalion on a small, 1930s-era British military base on the Euphrates River, about an hour's drive west of Fallujah. Some contractors and American units who lived on the camp had little white Nissan trucks to drive around, and it worked out nicely for my us, because it ended up being one truck for each of our four-man teams that lived on the base.

One night, me and one of the guys on my team -- Matt -- were coming back to our building from somewhere else on the camp, and we needed to stop at the fueling place to fill up our Nissan. Keep in mind that this wasn't like an Exxon gas station -- it was a tent with fuel bladders lying in a huge pit. There were three nozzles for diesel and one nozzle for what they called "mogas," which was the regular-type gas the Nissans used.

It was late and very dark, and I had never operated the mogas pump before, while Matt had only used it once. It wouldn't pump, even when he moved the lever on the pump all the way down, which opened the nozzle completely. So he went into the tent to ask the guy on duty what the deal was, and I held onto the pump. A couple minutes later he came back with a groggy lance corporal, who had obviously been sleeping, and the guy started to yank the cord to start the generator, which would turn on the gas pump.

I was standing at the truck holding the nozzle in the tank, waiting for the generator to start so I could pump the gas. What Matt and I had both forgotten was that the lever was still all the way down -- and whoever designed this pump decided it would be better for the lever to regulate fuel output rather than the handle that you squeeze. The gas started rocketing out of the industrial-grade fuel pump without me ever having pulled the handle, and our poor Nissan just couldn't handle the raw pumping power. You know how when you hold a spoon under a faucet, the water sprays everywhere? It was like that.

Since I was unfamiliar with the pump, I didn't even think to turn the lever up to shut off the gas flow. So I was yelling at this lance corporal to turn off the generator, while at the same time yanking the pump out of the truck and spraying it in all different directions to try and find a spot where it wouldn't spray on me or anyone else. It was like the gasoline-fight scene in Zoolander, only without the smiles and the orange mocha frappachinos.

The guy finally turned off the generator, but not before I had completely soaked myself from head to toe in gasoline, while somehow angling the gas flow just right to get about an inch of standing gas on the floor mats of the Nissan. Matt, naturally, escaped getting any gas on him whatsoever, even though this was largely his fault for leaving the lever down, and even though he had prior experience with the devil pump.

So as I'm standing there, drenched in gasoline, pump still in hand as the last remnants of gas drip onto the ground, I look around to survey the damage. It's then that the gas from my hair runs down into both of my eyes. This isn't like getting shampoo in your eyes in the shower. I've never felt such burning pain. This is what it must be like to get pepper sprayed. My eyes immediately shut and wouldn't open, no matter how hard I tried. Since I couldn't even open my eyes, the lance corporal led me by the arm to the emergency eyewash station and, after completely emptying the thing into my face, I finally got most of the gas out of my eyes.

We got back and told our captain what had happened, and after he finished hysterically laughing at us, he asked if we were alright. I said I was fine physically, but I wasn't fine emotionally. I tried to wash my cammies, but that stench was there to stay. So I burned them. The Nissan still hinted of gas for the rest of the deployment.

The very next time I went to fill up the Nissan, the same attendant said, "Make sure the lever is all the way up before I start the generator, some dumbass sprayed gas everywhere the other day and almost blew up the fuel farm."