But it felt like the blink of an eye only in hindsight, right?
Yeah, you only had to decide what was cleanest or least wrinkled.
That’s a great example of track toad reasoning.
There are some things you stop noticing until they’re gone. One night I went from fast asleep in my hooch to wide awake and alert in my fighting hole wearing boots, helmet, web gear, M-16a1, tee shirt and boxers in 3 seconds. It took me 20 more seconds to realize what woke me was the generator had stopped running.
C-rats weren’t that bad. But yeah, MREs are better.
One thing about the military is that it lowers your standards for food (and coffee) that by comparison, just about anything else tastes good.
Dad (Naval officer): The Army does the work, the Navy gets the pay, and the Marines get the credit.
Tell your Dad: for Marines, the enlisted folks do the work, and often times the officers get the credit, sir.
Signed,
Gunny Bullitt
That would be difficult. He was buried at sea.
Sorry, dude.
[quote=“Johnny_L.A, post:18, topic:702542”]
I like MREs! 
Who said I was talking about MREs?!? There’s lots of other bad food including chewy coffee! 
Great story about your wife which points out some differences in humor between military and civilian workplaces. If I worked on generalizing that I could have another point for the thread.
Wouldn’t trade my time in the Air Force for all the tea in China.
mrAru spent 20 years as a submariner. He wants to be cremated and buried in a TDU can in a deep trench. 
No. It still sucked but it really wasn’t that bad. I was much more tolerant of such things. 27 years later I’m still in the Guard. 2 weeks of annual training feels like a year of torture. But back then I only had a barracks room to go back to. I was already hanging out with the guys I would be hanging out with back on base. The only thing missing was (mostly) the beer. Now I have a home and a family to miss. And I’m old and cranky.
Other than the ham & lima beans, C-rats weren’t bad.
AF
Iraq is surprisingly pretty.
Mosul had the best food.
I’ve met some of the stupidest people ever in the military.
When you have a practically unlimited supply of eggs, you can learn fairly rapidly to crack four at a time (two in each hand) without getting any stray eggshell into what will be cooked.
Ha!
Dad’s ashes were in a box. Somewhere I have a video of the burial. There’s a plank over the railing, and a flag over the box. After the chaplain says his words, there’s a rifle salute (they sent three spent 5.56 x 45 mm blank cartridges to us), and then they tip the plank and the box slides into the sea. Then they fold the flag.
If you can move it pawn it., if you can’t move it paint it.
And no matter where you are told to drop and do push ups at Ft. Jackson SC, there are always fire ants and red clay.
I always carried a small jar of dried herbs to add to C-rats. Ham and lima beans were ditched somewhere along the way and replaced with ham and eggs; it wasn’t an improvement, and they were still called “ham and motherfuckers” by everybody.
The ham & eggs was like some kind of off-brand Spam to me. Tasted about like Spam, but the color and texture were off. I never could detect any egg flavor. Ham & lima beans was just plain inedible. Other than ham & MFers, I’ve never gotten the hate for C-rats. They were just canned food, not really different from canned food that one might buy in a grocery store save for the nifty OD color of the cans. I’ve never had much of a sweet tooth, but I remember that most grunts really, really liked c-rat pound cake a lot. One could generally make favorable trades with it for smokes or other items.
“Sir, my 12th General Order is to walk my beat, beat my meat, and fuck everything within 15 feet! Sir, you’re standing much too close, sir!”
I had a guy in my squad who could make H&MFers taste good. I don’t know how he did it and he’d never reveal his secret. He said, “If I told you how to do it, you have no reason not to put me on point all the time.” FTR, I gave him the same amount of point time as I gave everyone else. The only people I didn’t put on point were the ASL, the medic, the guy wearing the Prick 77, and the guy carrying the M-60.
All I remember about it is this:
They weren’t horrible, but the old LRP-rats and MREs are better, and much less weight on your back.