Help me out, I remember some meals. Bacon, rumored to have saltpeter in it.
A Thanksgiving meal, I;ll never forget.

Cold cereal in the box you cut open.
Liver, and onions when i was hungry. I remember the bad meals.

It;s been a while now.

There were so few people on post at holidays we actually ate really good . Thanksgiving 1977 we had real turkey with everything at Fort Knox.

midnight chow was the stuff. ginormous omelet, hashbrowns, SOS, bacon, sausage, etc.

also the holiday meals were great, especially overseas. they tried to make up for us being away from home on christmas, etc i guess. the worst was in tech school. chow hall lines around the corner and the food was generally godawful. i never liked ketchup before then. ended up putting it on everything. the worst was what they called "steak". i have no idea what grade of meat this was but it was blue with huge gristle lines running through it.

S.O.S. for breakfast.

My Dad Told me about the Green Eggs and Green Ham on the Ship to and from Korea.
He also told me that after they ate the ships would go threw storms and there would be Green Eggs and Green Ham flowing from the Bow to Stern as they went up and down in the waves.
He never really liked Eggs much as I grew up and even when I left home. He Tolerated scrambled eggs but very few.

Greens, SOS, no soup I recall, it's been over 58 years.

Had plenty MRE's

C-Rats not so much

MREs for the win !

“Breakfast, army, one each” consisted of 2-3 slices of paper thin bacon, either raw or burnt, your only options, scrambled ‘eggs’ in various shades of yellow, green, or grey, that had been boiled in a bag and broken up so if you were lucky you got the corner part that looked exactly like the corner of the bag and may have been crunchy, untoasted white bread, some form of starch, usually reconstituted hash browns or boxed grits, sometimes oatmeal that could double as pothole filler, and some diluted coffee concentrate that may have been consumable. And hot sauce and pepper. In a strange way, it was comforting in its consistency. I deployed and got to eat in a Navy Galley and concluded I may have joined the wrong service.

Old70

# 22 Mre when it existed
Shrimp Jambalaya.

Starving dog in a bombed out mig 21 bunker when we seized Mosul airfeild would turn its nose to it.
Eat any other main menu item giving to her.
Seen her months later up their at Remf central
Healthy looking friendly americanized dog👍👍👍
Glad to see she made it.
Sure as fugg didnt get that way eating shrimp jambalaya..
LOL!!!


You were soooooooo fugged if you got shrimp jambalaya.
Even the brothers in the platoon wouldn't eat that schit....

Rat fugg mre box full of #22 main menu pouches.
Gave to Haji Kids at the gate.
They would drown the taste out with the tabasco sauce.
Wouldnt want a #22 without Tabasco actually.
All the the menu,s they didnt ask for hot sauce.
Lol!!!


When your hungry you will eat anything to include menu # 22
Unless your are a starving smart dog in a bombed out mig bunker.

LOL!!!

I went in during the transition time between Cs and Gen1 MREs. Issued Cs quite a bit during Basic & AIT (OSUT) and about the first half of my first tour at my first duty station. By the time I got to ROK in '85, I never saw another C-Rat.

I could never complain much about the food either in the mess hall or the field. Of course while in ROK, I ate at some Air Farce dining halls in my travels and Osan AB was just up the road from us. It wasn't so much that AF food was better, it was the AF dining experience that was better.







Hells yeah!

Had C rats 1st 4 or 5 weeks of basic july aug 83.
Then we got the new fangled MRE,s.

Actually more quantity of food in a MRE.
Which I know I appreciated at the time.
Still got my 1st C Rat P-38 and a original Harmony Church dog tag on my truck key ring.

Stupid things that mean something....

When I was in the first Gulf War, our cooks were awesome and worked almost every day. I remember one Sunday afternoon I was walking around the compound on my guard shift and I walked by the cooks area. They were cooking steaks on the grill and dang they smelled delicious. It was their day off and they really earned it. When we returned to FT Hood, TX almost every one of our cooks got promoted.

The bacon you buy may well have saltpeter (potassium nitrate) on it. It's a preservative for meat.

Went through 11b Basic Training in Ft. Benning, GA, Harmony Church in the summer of ‘88. Brutal, hard, and unpleasant, but one of the most awesome memories I have from my teenage years. We used to despise and ridicule the “wimps” that did the 13 week training in the air-conditioned barracks of the adjacent “Sand Hill”; (aka, “Sand Hilton”), lol! I wouldn’t trade those days/experiences for anything

We were eating K rats and C rats......

MREs you guys were eating good.....

Started off with C rats. I didn't care what the meal was a long as it had canned fruit. Hated that dry azz cake. Yes Rene, I still have my P-38 on my key ring as well.

I remember alll the extra trash in the MRE . Created a big mess but used to like the one with beef stew.

B-2 unit in the C’s. Beanie weenies! My fav! Fart like a roan hack horse!!!

Never had bad chow on a Navy or Marine Corps installation . And chow on ship was good too!

Maybe ‘cause I was hungry? I dunno?

J rats peanut butter and crackers

Yep.....
D co 1/38th
Started OSUT with 144
Grad with 99 11b 14 weeks later.
Ronny Reagan sent the ash and the trash home.
Drills flat out told us only 99 were gonna make it thru.
Rest would be TDP,d Training Discharge Program.
All 99 of us COHORT privates filled in C co 1/12th mech at Carson.
2 yrs at Carson 2 yrs Germany
Mech....

Never so glad to get outta mech and go light infantry.

Learned alot on mech.
Learned alot about Mortar systems at hood when all e5 and e6 11b,s
Were given the option in 88 to either go to 2AD and go 11m bradley or go to a 1st Cav Task force as 11b

I raised my hand and said where is the cav patch

13 months dropping 4.2 mortar rds.

In the back of a 113...... SMH.....
Lol!!!

But that mortar knowledge paid dividends for years for me dealing with 60 mm company and battalion 81 mm mortars.

👍👍👍👍Lol!!!

Chitlins in heavy seas. Stink up the whole ship for days.

C-rats in Basic, AIT, '78. LRPP( long range patrol packet) and C-Rats when I got to 2/75. Had a kick ass mess hall and at night we had the Recondo Pit Stop (leg mess hall) that was open till 11pm just down the road. Kick ass sandwiches!

Damn! C company here during those 13 weeks of hell I went through at the “church”; lol! Two things I hated the most: 1.). The drill sergeants we had were “weekend warriors” from Flint, Michigan, doing their summer obligation as part of the National Guard; June-August, no less. Because they were not regular Army, they felt they had something to prove to the RA supervisors, and we suffered the results. 2.) These azz holes expected mirror-shined boots and ironed BDU’s every morning, or else pay the price with your hide!!
Oh; and the most excruciating, painful experience was when they made us sit outside all day bare-headed with our peeled noggins all day for instructional “classes” in Georgia sunshine. Needless to say, our bald, sunburned heads blistered and suffered for the next week from those “kettle pot” WW2 era helmets!!
15 mile roadmarch in full “battle-rattle” before graduation was no picnic either; I think I still have scars on my feet from those horrendous blisters on my feet at 52yrs old!!! Ha!

It's been nearly 50 years but I don't remember the food at Ft Leonard Wood being all that bad. I've eaten a lot of C-rats. The MRE's are a great improvement. I'd been out a long time before they appeared.

LOL!! Got mine hanging from my truck key ring as well. Every now and then, some youngster asks, “what is that”? Good stuff

I never had the pleasure of the C-rat canned “goods”, but I was well-informed by my Vietnam-vet Platoon sergeant about it in the late 80’s. He said it was high in calories, but left a lot to be desired in the taste department, ha!

I was in from 66-70. Mostly ate C-rats or USMC chow hall cooking. The best deal in a chow hall was mid-rats. Cooked to order omelets etc.

I actually liked C-rats pretty well. We cherry picked a few and added stuff to them when possible.There were two generations both good. Way better than MRE's
The sucky meals were the field kithchen meals. Simply awful. Boiled and luke warm or cold. Always watery.

Our holiday meals when we wereeen't in the field., everywhere were stunning especially overseas.

I also spent some time on Navy bases when travelling. Mostly Treasure Island. It was outstanding. A lot of VIP's flwe through there then.

Camp Victory, Republic of Georgia, on the border of Azerbaijan. Non-potable water only. Marines there training Georgians for Afghanistan. I was there for a week but some guys there for months. If you tried to eat the food you would chit your brains out. We hired cabs to drive an hour to the nearest town and bring back food. Any place else I saw or heard about if there wasn't hot chow there was at least MREs.

When I was at McClellan AFB with the EC-121's, we had a regular 45 day rotation to Keflavik NAS, Iceland. Best food I encountered in 20 years service, I really had to watch my weight up there. Place was the pits otherwise.

Holy Chit; I was there man! Not many Army guys there at the time. I’m guessing it was 2007-2008 or so when I was there, I can’t remember. I remember being there for a month in the Georgians’ barracks. The toilets were just an elongated “urinal/[bleep]” that extended to the floor. No place to sit to take a dump; you had to “spot and squat/hover” over the dry hole! Totally disgusting and unsanitary. For whatever reason, the running water was cut off in the restrooms in the barracks for a week in the summertime, with no options for the soldiers to relieve themselves. Dysentery ensued. It was absolutely miserable. If you’ve never had dysentery, it’s like your sphincter becomes a fire-hydrant with no turn-off valve. Many a grown man crapped their pants due to this. Lots of them dehydrated to the point of needing an IV

As an infantry Marine, we didn't ever complain about a hot meal, whether in the mess hall or in the field with vat cans. A hot meal always trumped C-rats.

Same here; US Army Infantry. Hot meals/mess halls were always a bonus. MRE-heated meals were endured cause you had no choice; whether in the dirt or in a vehicle. I’m just thankful they were not the “potted meat” style C-rats the old timers had to eat

C-rats weren't all that bad, as long as you has someone who liked to trade. My favorite desert was sponge cake covered in fruit cocktail (and the syrup) Free cigarettes too.

Cigarettes in C-rats would be very appealing. Now the MRE’s only have chewing gum. What a way to boost morale

This^^^ . We transitioned from C's to MRE's about midway through my tour, 82-83 maybe? Those first gen MRE's were different, for certain. Never did figure out what we were supposed to do with those dehydrated, 'styrofoam'' strawberries and peaches...soak in a canteen cup full of water, and they turned into a gooey mush that was just nasty, and don't even try to eat them dry, lol.
This thread makes me want to dig out a 'beef with spiced sauce' C ,a 'chocolate choke roll' and a canteen cup of 'beverage, coffee, dehydrated' , heated up over a can of burning peanut butter (with a squirt of bug juice to get it lit) and re-live the days of my youth!

Only a few weeks experience with C Rats in late 1969. They weren't as bad as I expected, having heard horror stories about them. I liked getting the ones with cigarettes in them because as a non smoker they made good trading material with all the smokers for their desserts. When were MRE's introduced? It was quite a while ago but I recall with amusement hearing that our guys were calling them; " Meals Refused by Ethiopians ".

Spent almost my entire Navy time at Cubi Pt. NAS. The food was was flat-out good...well-prepared. At that time, the Navy had a running, service-wide annual competition for best mess in several categories. They consistently won.

Once in a while we had to go do stuff with the Air Force or, while flying around, have to put down on an AF base for some reason or another...long enough for air crew to get a meal. Seems like all we ever gout on AF bases was some variation of macaroni, hamburger and tomato.

Other than one or two weird offerings, we had the best food in the Navy.. First month I was on the sub I gained about 20 pound.. Hadda quit eating..

Best AF chow I remember was our flight kitchen in SEA which was for aircrews flying night missions ..Our CAS night watch airborne patrol burned mass quantities of fuel,ammo and flares during engagements so it was nothing for us to return home for a quick turn around to rearm and top tanks...While our crew chief was handling those duties it was off to the kitchen for the rest of us..Eggs,pancakes,sometimes waffles,bacon,sauage or SOS if you dared however your choice also of hamburgers, hotdogs & even roast beef should supper be to your liking...yeah we had it rough didn't we ! LOL

being AF, i only had C rats in basic. the mre's were just coming out. never ate one as a GI. the C's were hit or miss. most seemed to be spam-like and had dates from the late 50's on and this was 81. in the 70's my brother was in ANG and he got a schit ton of C's and gave them to my dad for emergency grub. we took a bunch on a fishing trip to quebec. one particular trip back into the bush to a small lake we only took those things and flour, oil, etc for frying fish, figuring we were going to clean up like we always had there. we didn't catch crap and ate those friggen things for several days.

I wrote about food a lot in my books. Vietnam in '71 still had MCIs (what most mistakenly called C rats) and the first dehydrated LRRP meals. But as a pilot, we ate in mess halls mostly. In the General's Mess with the 173rd ABn, there were waiters and checkered tablecloths, but mediocre food. When I got to Ban Me Thuot, the mess hall was all ranks and all nationalities. They occasionally served dog or water buffalo, and twice a week we had monkey noodle soup (which is really good.) We were warned not to eat the veggies because the farmers used human excrement as fertilizer. When you are getting shot at almost every day, a few germs don't seem all that dangerous in comparison. We ate the veggies. The worst things were powdered milk and powdered eggs.

Trivia item: Do you know why every US Army base has a staff veterinarian? It's not a holdover from cavalry days. It's because the Army believes that only a veterinarian can properly judge if meat is edible. The one at BMT made sure that we were served the meat closest to being spoiled, saving the good stuff until it too was almost ready to be thrown out. Needless to say, he was not well liked.

MREs came out in 1983 and continue to evolve, with new meal items every year. Beef stew and Chili have been among the meals since the beginning, and probably always will be. There are vegetarian options now, and because they contain fewer preservatives, they are actually better tasting than the meat ones, all of which have that "MRE taste" of polysyllabic chemicals. There's even one with a tiny square of pizza now. It's not good pizza, but it's the one everybody has been clamoring for since '83. The one thing they cannot seem to get right is shelf-stable bread. Their crackers and tortillas are a lot better than the "snack" bread.

I gained weight in Vietnam, mostly because I refused to run for exercise. All I did was fly, eat, drink, and sleep.

Used to keep one on my key ring (no idea why)
Had a couple P-51 as well

I wonder how many even know what it is now, or how it got its name.

I've sometimes wondered if many centuries in the future archeologists will be intrigued at finding countless C-ration cans marked 'Ham & Lima Beans' scattered around former U.S. Military encampment sites and puzzle and speculate as to why ...

^^^ This.

FWIW, I'm guessing rem141r is an Air Force vet . . . .

Thanks for the reply's men ,and thank you all for your service.

My worst memory of army food was iced tea. We'd come in from the field and the cooks would make up a 5 gal pot of tea. Then the damned idiots would dump a bag of sugar in it. I know you southerners like to sit around sipping sweet tea, but when you're hot and tired, all that sugar is pure crap, besides eating up your teeth. Give me plain tea any day. The least they could do would be to put the sugar in a bowl next to the pot instead of polluting the whole thing.

Oh hell ya!
One of the bennies of pulling alert was the chow. There was a chow hall at the mole hole that served food for the alert crews. We knew which day we'd have a klaxton, we were served steaks for either lunch or dinner. During my EC days if we had an early morning takeoff we'd hit the main chow hall after a quick walk-around of the alert bird, made to order omelets and toast. I never got into the SOS. Even our inflight box lunches were decent with beef tips being a favorite. MREs were for grunts... 🤣

Mid-rats sticky buns, fantastic. After 2 weeks ay sea, powdered eggs and WW2 canned bacon, not so much.

There was big city kids that had never eaten as well in tier lives.

No complaints. Varied from pretty decent cafeteria fare, to edible- if-not-good. Deployed, it wasn’t the quality, but logistic’s ability to get it trucked or dropped at all, that was the occasional issue. Always had water, though. Had bigger fish to fry than cry about food.

Best food (outside of catered), was simple fare way back at san Antonio for officer basic. Sweaty omelets, ah yes. Fat azz 3-4 egg omelets done however you like while a couple BIG MOMMAS dripped sweat onto same griddle. Damm they were good! Evidently, that’s the secret?

I was in the Army, I don't remember 1 good meal ever, even when i was hungry, I ate what they gave us, here in the states or in S.E. Asia. the food SUCKED!! Rio7

Chili mac three times a week.
Green eggs in a green metal can.
MRE's until constipation.

Army cooks: "Death from within!"

While some meals did suck, mostly I remember them as being pretty decent. The only thing I recall in basic training was being constantly hungry; there just was not enough food for me. I enjoyed KP duty because I got more to eat. I finally started sneaking off when ever I could to buy a cheeseburger or two. Once we were out of basic and not getting as much exercise, the meals were suddenly more than adequate. I found the meals at Ft Belvoir Va.to be particularly good. This was in 1969.
In Germany, the food at the mess hall was usually pretty decent in the first two weeks of the month but in short supply for end of the month so a lot of hot dogs were served. Coffee was weak and salty. Some said this was because the coffee was being sold leaving us short.
All in all, I think our food was better than that which was served when my daughter joined up thirty years later. GD

Late '60s, Ft. Lewis, WA, 525th Replacement Company, best mess hall chow I ever ate, day in day out, breakfast, lunch and supper. Multiple meat, veggie, desert, bread choices, good portion sizes, all cooked just right. Troops assigned to the 525th were the envy of all. Meal cards to the 525th were highly coveted and offers of cash, trade goods and undesirable duty assignments for temporary use of a meal card to eat there were common.

My favorite.

Jalapeño cheese made most mres good.

Burger/slider day on the ship was good.

You can say that again, once of the best meals of the day.

🤣
Oh [bleep], sneaking in to the mess after a hard day of drinking!

Sandwiches were delicious.

So we’re the eggs......

I was in the Army during the last years of the MCIs and never saw MRIs.

My favorite meals were chopped ham and eggs, spaghetti and meatballs, and boned turkey. Few others liked the ham and eggs, so there were always extras. I always tried to keep a bottle of Frank's Red Hot and an Esbit stove in my field box to make the food better tasting. I have a small scar on my chest from carrying a p-38 on my dog tag chain when the blade stabbed me in the pec.

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.

I first encountered a grit in jump school, Ft. Benning, Ga.. 1966. Saw some Okra but was not tempted.



mike r

In 1971 Central Highlands , the best part of C's was mixing the Pound Cake with the peaches.

Yep - on a main patrol we had to literally 'eat our way outta the room'... One one patrol I ate an entire case of canned pineapple that was stored in the after torp room.. I still love it..

I learned to like greens. all I can find now are seasoned.

Bingo and AMEN!

Napoleon said, "An army travails on it's belly".

So you've never had stewed tomatoes and okra over grits I take it? Lol

Yeah, it's a delicacy down here. I remember all the northern boys faces the first time they'd try grits and okra at Benning. Stewed okra, picked okra, friend okra ... we ate a lot of okra.

I think the mess halls used to get a lot of produce the public wasn't eating .... baby heads was another one. I really developed a taste for baby heads with butter and Worcestershire ... still love'm to this day.








































You know .... baby heads.

Always wondered where they come up with so many Lima beans

ol me to .......ives aid it on here many time ..c rats ...it was like 81 or so ..i got beef and boulders...so i was told a beef stew with the round white taters ... the cow an taters was in the can 4 years b4 i was born... eek...weird as hellll

This dude Swofford ( a cool little jarhead) and I busted ice on "the Worm Pit" (RIP) one morning in a tie. We got to "volunteer". We volunteered for mess dumpster duty where the dudes would hand you their trays and you would scrape the scraps into the dumpster and stack the trays. We gorged ourselves on breakfast leftovers!

Did you ever put one of the shoe polish size cans of peanut butter inti a burning Yukon stove so that it would blow up and out the stove pipe, taking the soot out with it? Nothing like getting splattered with molten peanut butter.

Can't say I ever put anything "inside" of a Yuk Yuk ... lots of things on top; the few times we used Yuk Yuks. Winter Warfare School up in Alaska and then once or twice during winter warfare training deep up in the Italian alps.

We would use empty coffee cans to cook rabbit stew on top of the Yuk Yuks with melted snow and CRats salt.

When I was stationed in England in the late 1970s, every quarter they served C Rats to us in the chow hall to rotate the stock.

I still have a John Wayne (can opener) from back then. Loved the three cigarettes in each package. They were so dry one pull burned them almost to the end and you had a nicotine buzz for a while.

We thought the dark brown MREs were inspired by God…

Through the years, the MRE meals have gotten better. We keep a few cases around for hunting and to give to the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, who still seem to devour them with glee.

I spent many a freezing morning in a blind eating a MRE for breakfast using the chemical heater waiting for a moose or deer or ‘bou to come by.

^^^^^ I don't know when MRE's came out (early to mid 80's?) We had LRRP's along with C-rats , late 70's. The long range patrol packet had a main meal , dried, that one would add water to and heat up. I never heated up my chow , but as a 60 gunner, I really liked not having to carry around 5 days worth of cans in my ruck! ( We usually got a re-supply after that....)

The first MREs came out in 1981.

https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/ready-to-eat-30-years-of-the-mre/

I’m all about mountain house (the company that made LRRPs) or backcountry meals for backpacking. Freeze dried meals have gotten much better over the years.

MRE’s have come a long ways when I joined to the day I retired. I remember the ham slice, 5 fingers of death (hot dogs) they were like Vienna sausages.the lb cake in those old mre’s were the best. The new ones as of 2019 when I ate them last had pizza, fajitas etc
https://www.mreinfo.com/mres/mre-menus/mre-menus-2019/

During and after the invasion of Iraq 2003. Our rations were case of mre’s and case 6 pack or 8 pack of water (big bottles) per soldier, I don’t know what the thinking was on it. We had so many mre’s we had them stacked to the roof in a room we had had to be 200 cases 🤪.

Calls what you want but the west coast boy never heard of grits until I got to ft sill Oklahoma. Ph uck I thought it was cream of wheat. Drill sergeant private you out sugar on your grits?? Me what are grits? Drill sergeant walks off shaking his head. To this day I don’t ph uck with grits they are disgusting. I give a ph uck how people say to eat them. Far as okra pretty sure Army chit canned them back in 59 lol. Because I never seen them served in a army chow hall. Now korea they do serve kimchi which is pretty much okra lol..

The UGR’s when went go to the field are a gift from god! Steaks, fried chicken etc..

UGRs?

Local company makes bulk of MREs for U.S. Military.

AmeriQual’s History

Evansville Company Scores Military Contract Boost

Not a movie but NetFlix has a series called “Medal of Honor.”

It’s good.

C ration spaghetti, could eat it cold, most of the rest was hard to eat cold, unless you had been a couple days without food.so hungry once even c rat eggs tasted good. Seen more than one fight for the pineapple chunks in the c rats.

The genius who put Tabasco in every MRE should retire to heaven when his time comes. Makes even the worst meal passable.

In Vietnam, everyone I ever knew or even saw had a little bottle of Tabasco. Made the C's much more palatable. Ripped off from the mess halls or sent over by the folks back home.

I bought some for quick hunting meals, the kids thought they were great and kept them in snacks all day. One thing I noticed, was just about every tabasco leaked onto the TP. I always thought that was pretty cruel.

They been around for awhile 2001 in think. They came Texas Pete oh man, now they come with franks hot sauce no thanks.
https://www.dla.mil/TroopSupport/Subsistence/Operational-rations/ugra/

No more tobasco bottles in the mre’s

I've used the MRE heater meals quite a lot up here. Not bad and some are very tasty.

When I was drafted into the army in 1965, my first meal was breakfast in the Fort Polk reception center mess hall. I was trying to keep an open mind about food expectations, but it was still a shock.

They had us standing in line breathing greasy smelling air about 3:30 am, and they were calling us four at a time through the door. The chef pointed his spatula at each of us and politely asked, gentlemen how would you like your eggs this morning? He was smiling while he patiently took our orders, then he took a mixing bowl full of eggs and poured it onto a grill that must have been about 500 degrees. The yokes were moving around as he whacked'em with the spatula, flipped and scraped them up.
They were scorched browned crispy on the outside while raw with runny whites on the inside.

That was my first impression, of course it was a little better quality after I was in a regular unit in Germany, but not by very much as the cooks prepared their own meals in small quantities and didn't eat
eat what we did.

The only military food that was really that I tasted was in a NATO base in Bremerhaven, Germany that had soldiers, sailors, and airmen from the U.S. and all of the other NATO countries, and a Canadian army mess hall in France was very good with a buffet lunch serving several entrees.

y
you like pbj beer, which should tell you something.

They were serving leftovers from that meal well over a decade later for us there !

Midrats is where it was at.

I liked c-rations but mre's would bound me up for a week, I think that is what they were suppose to do. I never complained on any meal and alwys got enough.

Submarines, occasionally served us meat that you couldn’t tell the species of. We called it “mystery meat” as it was a mystery where it came from. Deployed on a fast attack in ‘78 or ‘79 and got the word we would likely be extended substantially due to international events. Cooks started digging deep into the corners to see how much food we had onboard and found a couple cans of bacon in OD green cans that was WW 2 vintage or nearly so. Powdered eggs after being under way long enough to run out of fresh stores. Not delicious. Used the “bug juice”, Kool Aid like stuff, to clean the burned on carbon off the flat top grill. Made it like shiny and new. Never drank much of that.

yep, big old omelettes, hash browns, sos, bacon, french toast. perfect drunk food.

Seems to me that if you want your soldiers to be happy and effective you have to feed them as well as you can.

FWIW in my experience in our Army here, when you were in barracks you generally got fed really well. Usually a selection of meal options and dessert, and vast quantities of it which you'd burn through with all the exercise. The only real limiting factor was time: you'd line up, load up, wolf it down and be out.

In the field there were different options. Where possible they'd get us "hot boxes", which were meals brought out hot in an insulated container - about like a really heavy duty cooler. Often this was fairly stodgy stuff, like maybe bacon and baked beans ladled out into your dixies, with bread to go with it, but it was always appreciated. Maybe an urn of tea or coffee too, or if it was hot some "goffers" - soft drinks - or tinnies (beer). There were even times when it had been cold and wet and horrible when they brought out flagons of port, which the diggers appreciated, but that wasn't part of the official ration.

Otherwise the main staple in the field was the 24-hour ration pack. There were 5 of 6 varieties, with different main and small meal tins, but the other content was more or less the same. You'd have a big tin of something like stew or luncheon meat, as smaller one, again with luncheon meat or pork & beans or something, some instant rice or instant mashed potatoo, a little tin of fruit, some hardtack ("biscuits survival" aka "biscuits inedible"), a little tin of cheese, tubes of butter and jam, tea and coffee,sugar, a cereal block, some drink base (like "Tang"), a block of chocolate, some hard lollies and a few other bits and pieces like curry or chili powder, crap wrap and elastic bands. It also came with a FRED - field ration eating device - which is a combination tin opener and spoon, and a really handy bit of gear. We'd often go through a rat pack and chuck out stuff we didn't want to carry, because you'd really struggle to eat everything in one.

We'd also sometimes get "patrol rats", which are freeze-dried and much lighter than the 24-hour rat pack. They were not bad either.

Best Army chow hall I ever ate at was the little DFAC out at Camp Mckall NC. The rest were pretty much forgettable, none were great and none were horrible.

Beef Stew was my favorite MRE in 1986 when I first enlisted and nothing had changed my mind on that when I retired in 2013. I was disappointed when the Corned Beef Hash disappeared though.

Nairobi trail patties 😊

“One eyed Jack”. A cheeseburger with an fried egg on top. Mighty fine after sitting in the “alert bird” on the flight deck for a couple of hours.

Pizza rolls
Smiley face fries
Peaches/w cottage cheese

Choice of milk

Thursdays

1st lunch 10:40

Vietnam Jan '67 - Feb '68. Air-mobile 105 Howitzer battery in 9th Division, 2nd of the 4th Artillery.

Whenever we were in our base camp, an outpost in Rach Kien, near the Mekong river SW of Saigon, we had eggs to order most mornings. The cooks were top notch and we really looked forward to breakfast. Ate a lot of C-rations and we often had C-4 plastic explosive to burn to warm them up. I didn't mind them much. And we would regularly trade with each other in order to avoid those meals we hated most (you never knew what the luck of the draw would bring you when the C-rats were handed out). And when we had time off from fire missions we sometimes could buy prepared food from the locals, usually a treat.

When away on a mission beyond the practical range of our base camp's 105's (usually with just 2 of our battery's 6 guns) our commander always tried to fly a warm meal in to us every day. These warm meals were generally cherished over the C-rats.

Balad AIrbase, 4th of July 2007 (?)

Slow boiled NY strip reheated in brine (well done). Served with Alaskan King crab which was also slow boiled and left in warm water for 3-5 days- you could bend them in a hoop without breaking the shell.

Leave it to Bangladeshi vegetarians to ruin a $100 meal for Americans.



I was at that base for almost 3 weeks. I mostly ate toast with peanut butter, since I could make it, and the hired help couldn't fug it up.

Ever read the side of the box Army sliders come in?

"Grade D meat, for prison and military use only"

Loved those things!