Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire US miltiary meals?

In 1963, they told us every branch of service ate the same meals each day.

I still wonder about that?

Chow in basic training (Ft. Jackson Jan-Feb 1972) was pretty good since it was a company mess facility and they knew when we'd be there so it was hot and ready to go when we got there.

AIT was probably the worst or at least the most inconsistent since it was a battalion facility and individual companies would stream in at any time so you often got stuff that had been sitting out for an hour or more.

Duty post in West Berlin was very good overall. Another battalion dining facility but they did a good job of providing a variety of food; you could get burgers hot off the grill or go with whatever balanced main dish they had. They even had a serve yourself salad bar in the last year I was there. Berlin had a big segment of Turkish "guest workers" - the forerunner of the Muslim invasion - so they had Turkish women doing KP clearing tables and such. You know you're a horny GI when you're getting turned on staring at the ass of a 45 year old woman with a mustache...

The local Air Force detachment at Tempelhof airport lived the life of Riley, their facilities were first class so we'd head over to their EM club for a steak dinner and drinks on a Friday or Saturday night.

Only ate C-rats when we went down to southern Germany for semi-annual field training so they were more of a novelty than a culinary burden. That was when they still had a 4 pack of cigarettes in each one so the non-smokers would trade them with the smokers for the better stuff. Local kids would come around and harass us to give them the chocolate bars and peanut butter.


Btw, still have my P38 as well.

USN (stateside for 2 yrs and all over the Pacific for the second two) and don't recall any bad grub ever. Mostly worked swing shifts if possible and one could request either dinner or breakfast items for his midnight meal.

Cooks always had the best duty schedules as it was often said one did not want to risk pissing off the cooks.

It was also said the sub crews got the absolute best of everything.

Never did any C-rats or MRE's.

In 1968-1969, the US military bought shiploads of sheep meat from Australia and took it to the mess halls in Vietnam. Ugly stuff, when they were cooking it you could smell that chit from 2 miles out on final approach.

There were times in Vietnam when we were damn glad to get a C ration.

Had one pilot, a Major, who was a horrible alcoholic, he would stagger out to the airplane in the early morning, climb up in the right seat and leave the flying to whichever other pilot showed up. Soon as we got gear up and on heading, he would get into his helmet bag and open up a can of "Ham and Eggs Chopped" (ghastly concoction), down the hatch and he would be bright eyed and bushy tailed for the rest of the day.

Those days were somewhat like now, lots of racial and ethnic strife in the US and of course it carried over into the military. McNamera decreed that the mess halls would have "ethnic days" in which they would serve food favored by this group or another. We had Mexican food, Chinese food, etc, one day it got down to chitlins, never heard of them but tried them anyway, absolutely could not swallow a bite, first and last time for that dish.

My 1st tour in RVN was spent almost entirely in the field and we were resupplied about once a week. C rats were it, peaches and beanie weenies were like gold. My 1st Thanksgiving a real dinner was flown in, by the time my platoon got to eat it was raining so hard that it washed the grub out of the tray. My next 2 tours in recon we lived on cold LRRPs and amphetamines in the field for 3-5 days at a time and had real chow when in the rear. I fantasized about food almost as often as I did sex.


mike r

My tour of duty in the Air Force ran from Oct 1960 to Oct 1964. The first meal I had was SOS. I looked at that stuff and thought somebody had puked on the toast. Didn't taste bad and as time went on got to like the stuff. Meals were fair at Lackland but as has been said, 'Tastes like schit but you can live on it." Tech school was a Chanute in Illynoise and the food was much worse than at Lackland.
Finally got my first duty station, Nellis AFB in Las Vegas Nevada. I wouldn't wish that place to even my worst enemy. GIs were not treated like citizens, only something to be tolerated as long as the spent their meager paychecks in town. For what was supposed to be a show base, food was only fair as the best and worse most of the time. Not surprised as VIPs probably ate at the officer's mess. During mid 1962, IIRC the food really got not bad but totally terrible. Got so bad I reused to eat as the chow hall. On of my buddies finked me out to the CO and he called me into his office for a little chat. He ordered me to eat at the chow hall. I refused. I'd been on a hunger strike for three days when my money ran out. He did ask why and told him the food had gotten so bad I could not eat it. Come lunch time he ordered me to accompany him to the chow hall and he went through the line with me. he saw what I was complaining about and took the tray of "food" and went to the base commander's office requesting and immediate interview. The meal FWIW was liver and onions and the liver was green in color and had a bad smell. Dunno what transpired at that meeting but in less that a week, all the civilian cooks and KPs were fired and AK Officers, NCOs and KPs were all now AP personnel.
The best meals at Nellis were not at Nellis but up the road at Indian Springs gunnery range. We litrally ate steak every day cooked to order. Springs had a small crew but was supposed to be staffed with up to 250 people. Usually less that 100 most of the time. We ate good.
While at Springs our weather crew which consisted of my buddy and I were part of a project where C-rats were packed into those droppable wing tanks and dropped as low level at the slowest speed possible. Guess it wasn't slow enough because in five days they made five drops and not one tank survived to keep the C-rats intact. Most were dated 1942/43 with some as early as 1941. They were for the most part still good to eat and some were very good. The best was labeled pork steak and I liked that one. Cigarets were in full 20 smoke packs and the Lucky Strikes were still in the green packs. I opened one up and the tobacco just dribbled on out so they got thrown away. I wonder what those green LS packs would be worth to a collector today.
From Nellis I finished my tour at Osan Korea and most of the time the food was pretty darn good. Again though, he best of the best was when I got to do a three month TDY at Koon-ni range, not too far from Suwon. Again a base supposed to be manned by a compliment 250 to 300 people and my and a buddy plus the Korean cook, houseboy and bottle washer, just the three of up. Needless to say we ate good. There some other fringe bennies better left unsaid. Let's just say that was one TDY duty I hated to see come to an end. Come to think of it, I hate to see that tour of duty come to and.
Paul B.

What stands out in my mind the most was eating at the chow hall at Eielson AFB in the late 1970's. Once a week they offered king crab or huge lobster tails for the entrée and prime rib was served once a week as well. Midnight chow was the place to be after the movies or a decent round of drinking. Without a doubt the best AF chow hall I experienced in 21 years.

My favorites (C-Rats) were the dead Duke discs (round chocolate toffee bars some called John Wayne bars but at Bragg we called them dead Duke discs) ... and I loved the fruit cake with jam or jelly or melted sugar water poured into the can to soften it up. There was also good pound cake in C-Rats.

Other notable C-Rats were the turkey roll and the ham.

Mess halls were good at Bragg especially in the Falcon Brigade ... White Falcon mess hall was legendary. We used to have guys sneak over from other battalions to eat there especially on fried catfish nights and on country fried steak and rice nights.

Over in Italy, in Vicenza, both tours first 509th (nickel oh nasty) and later with the 4th of the 325th Airborne Combat Team .... that chow hall was Nuke'm Needham's pet peeve. It was open to troops 24/7/365 and it served up some good chow and midnight snacks. Thanksgiving and Christmas particularly ... it was good eatin.

MREs we started getting maybe in the early 80s, I don't remember exactly when but we were pretty happy with those. Again, the turkey and ham but also they had a spiced ham and they had tuna ... come to think of it the C-Rats tuna was pretty good too.

We did - at least when I was in ('66-'69). My favorite shift was the 4-8 morning when on 'below-decks' duty.. I 'd cruise by the galley a grab a bowl, fill it with breakfast sausage and go about my check routines..

Tied up at the (say) USS Sperry at the piers in Point Loma, many times we'd have fried trout, with eggs etc for breakfast.... Deep-fried shrimp and potatoes at the evening meals and anyone that wanted anything else was welcome fix their own between meals as long as they cleaned up when done.. I remember a pallet of 2-gallon pails of ice cream and about 30 fresh pies arriving on the docks at times before noon. Man, that stuff got put into the sub and stored PRONTO.. LOL

I ate good chow in quatar at the afb there in the early 2000s

Usns ships I rode and protected in the gulf were by far the best underway food.

However, when I’m hungry I will eat anything.

One of my memory's, is a big heavy black cook stirring scrambled eggs with a big spoon, while the sweat dripped off his bald head and face into the eggs, YUCK!! about a week later we picked him up for cutting a whores head off with a strait razor, his cooking wasn't the best.
Rio7

Yuck

I figured you sub guys ate good. I only once visited a sub, below decks, and the first thing I noticed was all the food stored in the centerline passage ways (you had to walk on the boxes of chow) and also stuffed into the torpedo tubes.

I helped a big black quiet cook make salad dressing., he took pity on me, my eyes were crying so bad.

I recall him measuring cottonseed oil from a tin plated five gallon can.

The dressing was great!

I remember c rats, mre's, and my all time favorite, LRRP rations. Mess hall food varied from edible to fabulous.

For the most part most of the Army meals I had was not memorable . In our rear area we were able to eat at a MASH unit which suposably better. Even that was not good. In the field it was Cs and LRPs. My dog ate better than we did.

We had northern boys in boot that had never seen okra.

Pop served in the 50’s.

To this day he won’t touch anything with sage. I don’t know if it was just his experience, but apparently everything he was given to eat contained mass amounts of sage. 60+ years later and a strong whiff of the stuff will put him off a feed. Lol.

yep 81-87.

I'm not a military veteran, but when I was a Civil War re-enactor we subsisted on hardtack, coffee, bacon, potato's, and sometimes beans of whatever variety was local to our campsite. We always managed to get a local state or national guard unit to drop off a water bowser for potable water. I can't see how they did it for the duration of the war.