Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire KP, in the Military?

Man, don't let these guys bullshit ya.'

An army lives on its stomach, and no army is better fed than the US Army.

Had KP once at Leonard Wood. Ate well that day ( at my own pace) and didn’t get harassed, so it was like a vacation. Had plenty of the breakfast, army, one each, and still try to make it for my kids sometimes, though they don’t see the attraction. Went hungry plenty of times in the field because my troops always ate first. At least they saved me some coffee most days.

Old70

Define "better fed"
We definitely got the nutrition we needed but as for flavor, that's highly dependent on the DFAC in question. There is a reason many of us develop a life long need to excessively salt, pepper and hot sauce our food.

In that case they should leave the for prison use off the box. Not right to use prison and military in the same sentence.

Those hours on the concrete floor were hard on the old legs.

The scalding hot water wasn't fun either.

Yup. Did KP a couple times while at the recruit intake center at Ft. McClellan before getting sent to my BT company. The dishes, silverware and trays were done by civilian employees because they were operating commercial dishwashers. But all the pots and pans were washed by hand us lower than whale schitt privates that didn't even have a unit that we could say we were a part of yet.





One of my favorite old movies.





Mess hall breakfasts are THE schitt regardless of what branch you're in. Even the Air Farce or Denny's can't improve on them, and they were the only effective hangover cures I ever found. I learned how to make my own omelets at home from watching the cooks work their magic on the griddle.

The best mess hall I ever ate in outside of an Air Farce base was the one at Ft. Monroe, VA where TRADOC HQ was located at the time. Being the only mess hall on a post with an 800/200 officer/enlisted ratio, it had to meet the quality demands of all the generals assigned there. I don't ever recall having a bad or mediocre meal there.





I'm pretty well convinced that the "steaks" we were served over in Korea on 'Surf & Turf" night were carved from a horse. They were meat, but very lean, tough and dry with an off, not-so-beefy taste to them. The lobster tails were okay, but I really didn't know much about seafood at the time, so they could have served me over-sized crawdad tails and I wouldn't have known the difference.

We had a cook who was a heavy duty alcoholic. Someone told him that you could filter gasoline through a loaf of bread and it would filter out the poisons so you could drink it. He was so far gone that he actually tried it with the expected results. He survived it, barely, but we didn't see him the rest of the cycle. Can you imagine what your guts would feel like after that? Death would be too kind.

KP one time at Polk , BCT 1968. Typical potato peeling with a knife, and scrubbing griddles with scrubbies and vinegar. One thing sticks in my mind. Lunch was chinese pork over crisp noodles. The cook did a good job with it. The server dipped out of the top of the 10 gallon cookpot, so all everyone got was a soupy liquid with no meat in it. At the end of the meal, the pot was thrown out with about 20 lbs of cooked pork at the bottom. My first exposure to government waste.

While in OCS at Ft Belvoir in 1968, I'd volunteer for KP and then do the pots and pans. The other candidates would be out in the mess hall getting harassed and trying to eat at attention and square meals, and I would be back in the kitchen not being harassed and eating all that I wanted from the serving pots and pans.

I had KP so may time I thought my branch insignia would be two mops crossed over a bucket.

We rarely ate hot meals. MREs for 8 months. Crapping a cinder block once each week.

I remember one hot meal that the USMC sprung for. I will say that one of the most memorable meals involved a cow we slaughtered wandering through our sector. Somehow our First Sgt had some lobster shipped to us and a few days later we feasted on surf and turf!

In my company we had and excellent mess sgt. and cooks. Sgt. would trade around the post for good stuff and the cooks were good guys. They expected you to do your job and if you did they wouldn't mess with you. All KP's ate good. There were two KP's in the dining room,DRO's, one KP doing trays and silverware, two KP"s cleaning constantly on the kitchen. I always took the pots and pans as no one ever bothered me there. My favorite breakfast meal was the SOS. Loved that stuff. This all took place back in the early to mid 60's.

I'm with you Skeen, in the army from '64 to '67, I ate better than I ever did at home. In the engineer units I was in the cooks worked their asses off and took pride in their work.

Them green scrambled eggs gave me the $hits so bad. I couldn't eat them unless I knew I was going to be close to a toilet all day.

kwg

Helluva first post !

Only had it twice in basic at Jackson in 81
Pots and pans.
Second time I volunteered for it cause my buddy was scheduled to do it the day we graduated from basic.
He had family coming in for the ceremony, I didn't.

To this day my wife can not figure out why I like SOS as much as I do.

Best chow I ever had was at the Corpus Christie NAS when I was down there TDY for an airframe overhaul school.
Surf and turf the first night.
Sitting at the table and the chief cook came over and asked us dogfaces if we liked it and were any of us still hungry.
Told us the sailors were allowed to go back for seconds and we were too.
Damn near fell outa my chair getting back in line.

Had some great chow in the galleys at GTMO, prepped by TCNs that knew their way around a kitchen, and since I was the facilities engineer and did a lot of work for them, got taken care of on surf and turf day, or any other special meals. Cannot gripe about navy chow.

Old70

Kitchen commandos.



"Death from within"

Actually what they gave us in our chow halls was good. So the above is a joke , but I always thought it was funny. I know a S/Sgt who was in charge of a galley crew that had a T-Shirt with a skull that had a gagging expression on it, with that line printed underneath.

It was great.

Elvis Presley did Basic at Ft. Chaffee. I damnere got frostbite there in 1979, it was colder than Hillary Clinton's heart when we were there for an off-post exercise one winter. Not a real fun place to be.

When I went to Pensacola to photo school, I got sent to the mess hall to fill in the time until my class formed up. It was supposed to be for only a week or two, ended up being a month or two.

We slept in a bunkroom in the same building, because we needed to be up at 0330 to get breakfast started. I don't think we had any days off all the time I was there.

All we temporary, cheap help did was fill the milk dispenser, make the coffee, swab the decks, operate the institutional toaster and scrub down the griddles after meals.

The MAA's would bring in the prisoners from the brig ahead of the regular meal schedule, get them fed and out of there before everyone else showed up. They weren't allowed to speak to or otherwise interact with anyone else.

There was a second class commissaryman who bunked in the bunkroom with us, his name was Yancey. I think maybe he was supposed to be petty-officer-in-charge. Scuttlebutt had it that he'd been a chief at one time, but got busted down to 2nd class. We each had two lockers for uniforms and personal belongings. One of Yancey's was usually about a third full of empty Smirnoff vodka bottles. I never saw anyone who had it as bad as he did. Every morning, before he got out of his rack, he'd reach over to his locker closer to the rack and pull out a fresh quart bottle of Smirnoff's. While still in the rack, propped up on one elbow, he'd chug half of that quart bottle, then he'd shake his head and swing around to put his feet on the floor. He'd then chug the second half and the empty would go in the locker where the empties went. He'd then reach in for another full one and, sitting on the edge of his rack, chug half of it before standing up. He'd work on the remainder of that bottle the rest of the morning, drinking from his coffee cup with just enough coffee to color the vodka. One morning, he wasn't there, he'd never come in the night before. Next time we saw him was a few days later in the brig line. He had a bare spot on the sleeve of his chambray dungaree shirt where his 2nd class crow had been. He'd been busted down to E-1. Amazing schitt for a young guy from rural Northern New York to see.