to shit in one's own mess-kit

[George Thompson]

When I was in grad school, one of my apartment mates was a guy named J. J. McDonough, born in Southie (South Boston) in the mid 1920s, and a veteran of WWII.  (How he came to be the apartment mate of a 23-year-old, in 1964, was that after discharge he had taken 15 years out to get drunk.)

In any event, a story in today's NYTimes, about home-owners who have given up trying to pay off their mortgages and are challenging their bank to foreclose and evict them, quotes a representative of a bank as saying that these people are exploiting the system.  This brings to mind a frequent expression of J. J.'s, describing some grievous blunder surely to be followed by bitter regret -- "he shit in his own mess-kit".  It's not the first time that this phrase has come into my thoughts, when reading of the sorrows of bankers and stock brokers.

I find the expression in the OED, but not in J. J.'s sense:
    b. U.S. slang (humorous). I hope to spit in your mess kit and variants: (as a mild oath) ‘beyond a doubt’, ‘certainly’, ‘I'm telling the truth’.
1924 Adventure 20 June 168, I hope to spit in your messkit I can! 1968 W. C. ANDERSON Gooney Bird 84 Ah hope to spit in yo' mess kit. They're wilder'n a Texas widow in heat. 1984 J. R. ELTING et al. Dict. Soldier Talk 197/2 Among soldiers and veterans of World Wars I and II, ‘Hope to spit (or worse) in your mess kit!’ was an emphatic expression of agreement.

Providentially, JL also put this expression under mess-kit, not shit, so that it is not mouldering in the volume of HDAS that Oxford University Press isn't publishing.  HDAS has J. J.'s meaning:
"2. to blunder seriously; to get oneself in trouble -- usu. considered vulgar" (Really?  J. J. utter a vulgarity?  Surely not!)  But HDAS has this from only 1989 & "1968-1990".  JL has been reading deeply in military memoirs lately -- does he have anything more?

The banks are made of marble, with a guard at every door.  The vaults are stuffed with silver, that the worker sweated for.  --This also has been coming to mind with some frequency of late.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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