I constantly see soldiers earning medals and accolades for bravery on the battlefield or serving extra terms but I’d like to ask, what about the cooks?
Have you ever seen for example, a cook earning the bronze star or some other reward or medal for valor or service? Is their work rewarded as much as say a pilot, or machine gunner?
Does their service ever get recognized even if they really go above and beyond to give the men good food?
Cooks were armed at the Battle of the Bulge. I don’t know if any acquired medals or not.
A lot of the cooking is put out to civilian contractors these days, at least on the big static bases in-country.
There is a distinction between awards for valor and meritorious service, and a range of awards available for doing so.
Is there necessarily even some specific individual who is “the cook”? My understanding was that everyone would take their turn on kitchen duties, whether voluntarily, as part of an ordinary duty rotation, or as some sort of punishment.
In the documentary I saw called Under Siege, Casey Ryback was a cook on a US Navy vessel who fought off a band of mercenaries. I’m not sure if he earned a medal but he should have. Not for his cooking though.
It doesn’t make sense to me to punish someone by making them cook. They are going to take it out on the food. An army marches on it’s stomach, Napoleon said.
Cooks are a seperate MOS. I was roommates with one who had won a pastry contest for all Army cooks in Europe.
During my time (88-92), mess halls were a mixture of contractors and soldiers. I never once pulled KP or knew someone who did.
In the Navy there is the Culinary Specialist (CS) rating. A newbie can be assigned to mess cooking duty, particularly if he has no rate designation. Also, fuck-ups are sometimes sent to work in the galley, but I’m not sure of the wisdom of that. The Army also has a Food Service Specialist MOS, and I’m sure the USAF does, also.
There’s two major categories for awards - service and achievement. Think of it more as long term of doing a good job versus a relatively confined incident that was awesome. Achievement awards include a subset that require valor.
Valor awards are obviously harder if you aren’t in areas typically in contact with the enemy. There’s less chance to be a hero if your odds of being in contact with the enemy are low. It still happens though.
There are also lower forms of recognition such as certificates, letters of appreciation, plaques, etc that don’t come with a pretty ribbon to wear on dress uniforms as well. Certificates of Achievement signed by a Battalion Commander are even worth promotion points like Medals.
I’ve personally been a part of recognizing cooks from the strictly informal punch on the shoulder with a “good job” all the way up to the award of the Army Commendation Medal without the V Device for valor. I once advocated for a Soldier’s Medal for heroism not involving conflict with an enemy; he had run up to a burning car to help the trapped civilian occupant here in the US. I still think he should have gotten it rather than the ARCOM they gave him too.
He’s legendary in the Nav.
KP duty isn’t cooking, it’s pots, pans and general clean-up. As mentioned, there is a distinct MOS for “cook.” KP people may end up on the serving line, but they don’t make the food.
This used to be the Mess Management Specials (MS) rate (Rating is pay grade - Rate is job specialty). Pretty much anyone surplus to operational needs can be assigned to Mess Duty (“Mess Crank” aka “Cranking”), though as a practical matter, it’s generally restricted to non-rates and junior rated personnel. That said, I’ve seen E-5s cranking.
I personally have never seen someone sent to the mess decks for being a fuck-up. You don’t want an angry person working with your food - not even washing dishes. Those folks as got restricted to the ship or boat, or assigned extra duty, were generally offered other unpleasant tasks to fill their time.
Thanks, silenus. You fight ignorance.
I laughed for a good few minutes about this. Just the first sentence set me off.
That went through my head too, then thinking of a MAS*H Episode where Ed Begley Jr. did that magic with SPAM.
I wish I had more to offer to OP, but thats as far as my knowledge goes.
Methinks though that if the cook service is passed to civilian contractors, the food quality would be worse than cafeteria style, like Public School Lunch (hey some of it was tasty) or Prison food. Just a feeling.
When I read that he was on the Indianapolis, I thought, “Uh oh”, but it was on another ship that he died.
As mentioned, KP is a task you might get assigned to as a soldier, but “cook” is a specific job you are trained for after basic, as a military occupational specialty. In my experience, KP happened in basic training, and on request from the cooks, in Iraq. It wasn’t a “regular army” duty, like cleaning (I always joked that I did more sweeping and mopping than my regular MOS) or preventative maintenance on your equipment and vehicles.
By the way, we had some terrible cooks on my first tour in Iraq. They didn’t even cook, they got hot food from KBR contractors and just set it up in the DFAC and served it. And they got us (mechanics, technicians, other non-grunt personnel on post assigned to KP duty) to actually do all the setup and serving and cleaning and tear down.
So basically they took a ten minute drive somewhere to pick up food three times a day. An entire team of cooks was required to do this, I guess. And they didn’t have to do any guard duty like the rest of us, because the guard shift changes always happened around meal time, when apparently every last cook on the FOB was needed to pick up aluminum trays from somewhere. To top it all off, the food was terrible.
Once, we only had bones. They served hot bones that were supposed to be “rib roasts” or something, but they had no meat on them and hardly any fat. Literally just bones. There were some boiled potatoes to go with the bones, but they ran out, so they started piling more bones on people’s plates, like that was going to fill them up!
Once, several months into our tour, there was a giant bowl of twinkies in the DFAC at dinner time, and everybody was excited to get a treat, finally. Well it turns out every last twinkie was covered in green mold. These cooks!
They even hoarded soda! As a maintenance platoon, we got a few females transferred over from the rest of our unit at the base next door, and they were cute enough to talk the cooks into sharing some of their Fanta, I guess. That’s how we found out the cooks were holding out on us.
My second tour in Iraq, the food was all provided, served and staffed by Filipino and Indian contractors, and was delicious, hot, fast, and plenty. No offense to other military or Army cooks. I’m sure you guys were great, and I had other experiences in NTC for example where the cooks did a great job. But that particular crew in 2003-04 OIF was a miserable waste of space. And even then I can’t place all the blame on them, I’m sure most of the food shortages on that tour were a result of IEDs hitting food trucks and supply lines. Ah well, we had plenty of MREs at least, so nobody starved.
If they messed up that bad in the Air Force, we made them eat their meals at the nearby Army base.
Bolding mine. That’s backwards: rate=rank, rating=specialty. Carry on, shipmate.
I also remember the old Steward rating, which was largely reserved for Filipinos, who could enlist without having citizenship. A lot of them ended up doing little more than being houseboys and servants in the officer’s wardrooms. Eventually this was recognized as discriminatory practice, and Filipinos were allowed to enlist in other specialties, or cross over to another rating. I worked with a lot of them as a Seabee.