Beer rations??

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56689-2003Mar19.html
Damn…I joined the wrong military.

American sailors get 'em too.

The difference is that the Brits get good bitter every day, while American sailors are issued two cans of watery Budweiser, and that only after 45 straight days underway.

If not a sign, certainly a reason for.

When my husband was in ‘Nam, they got a can of beer every day with a meal. He’d trade candybars for other guys’ beer and had himself a good ol’ time.

We had one of the first navy beer days when I was on the Constellation in '81. Very tightly controlled. We were on station so had to have a stand down day since a majority of the crew would be potentially unfit for duty. A small portion of the crew stood waches and alert fighters and had their beer the following day. I was standing watch. Everyone was issued two cans with the noon meal and had to turn in the cans before laving the mess deck. Alcoholics were paying up to $75 per beer to those that didn’t want them. I would have preferred the money to the beer.

Later we had some visiting sailors from the HMS Invinceble who couldn’t believe we didn’t get beer every day.

Wow. You know I never actually thought about this topic before. I just took it for granted I could drive across the street to the Class 6 and grab as much brew as I wanted any time.

I knew there was an as-yet unexplained reason I went Army instead of Navy.

:wink:

And if you’d joined 200 hundred years ago, life would have been even better …drunker anyway

:eek:

A gallon?

Wow.

As I recall, the French Troops in the Gulf War (Episode I) had wine in their field meals (equivalent of MREs).

I worked for a military aircraft maintenance company. We had guys stationed in Italy, and SOP for them was to walk up the hill and pump wine out of a GAS TANK kind of gizmo. Cool, eh?

Kalhoun: The home vintner in me just shudders at the quality of wine they’d get out of that kind of equipment… gah.

While I was in RVN our beer ration was 2 per day (plus two sodas a day). In my unit, we voted to dump all of the beer ration into a kitty and then sold the beers back to ourselves. Each man could buy up to six per day. We took the money and bought more beer at the PX. With the ration from those that didn’t drink beer, and the money we made selling beer to ourselves, everyone (that wanted it) always had plenty of beer.

I like beer.


Fagjunk Theology: Not just for sodomite propagandists anymore.

quote:

(The British sailor) was entitled to half a pint of spirits, or a pint of wine, or a gallon of beer, every day

Note that this would have been rum (or other spirits) mixed with water or “small beer” (low alcohol)., and not as intoxicating as it sounds Beer was usually issued in port (wine in the Mediterranean), with rum issued at sea, but this varied depending on what was available, especially in non-british ports.

Royal Navy officers could drink whatever they could afford, either personally or through the officer’s mess. (Of course this was true of everyday life as well - the period was a hard-drinkin’ one!)

I always figured that the US Navy was being punished by puritanistic descendants of the Pilgrims.