M14 Forum

porsche2nr

Chilli Mac is the best MRE out there. In fact I believe its Menu NO.1. It has macaroni noodles and "beef" in a chili or tomato sauce. Heat it up, mix in the packet of cheese and tabasco. It's awesome. I hate the wheat snack bread, but with Chili mac I trade my crackers for the bread because I want to mop up everything in the packet. Its that good.

SOCOM42

the menu's are planned one year in advance by civilian nutritionist

RandyB45

According to my daughter, the cooks on her FOB in Astan are Russians. Apparently they cook like they build tanks: Simple and brutal.

I remember the first time I had hot chow in the field. I was a private and the guy in front of me asked the server, a cook (?!), what something was.

The cook smacked him upside the head with the ladle. When he asked me what I wanted I said "I'll have some of that, please." First time I ever saw a 1SG laugh. I still don't know what it was, but I ate every bit of it.

As I grew up in the Army, I was careful to keep an eye on the chow and the cooks. Real morale booster when it's good. Mutinous when it isn't.

Seventh Fleet

I wasn't in the Army instead I joined the Navy right out of high school in 1962 and believe me, we hated our Navy cooks too.

The chow was halfway edible back here in the world because we could get real milk and fresh bread and we could buy real food in town. But on the ship when we were in the Nam it was a far different story.

For one thing, the milk was canned sterilised milk and came in #10 cans and it was worse than nasty. The cooks would bake our bread in the ships galley and it was rubbery and full of holes and tasted funky. Our eggs were powdered and had a lovely greenish tint to them. The mess cooks in the serving line would cut the eggs up in squares and flop one of them down on your tray and they tasted like rubbery crap. We had chipped beef on toast and that was the best thing we had to eat and it was great. We also had a concoction of hamburger meat, tomatoes, onions, etc over toast that we called shit on a shingle and it was nasty too.

We had a drink, much like cool aide that we called bug juice and once we departed Pearl Harbour for the Tonkin Gulf, once the milk and bread ran out that we'd picked up in Pearl, I'd drink bug juice for the next ten months until our tour of duty was over.

Once when we went into port at Subic Bay to rearm, I went over to the Navy Exchange on the Naval Base and bought a large lockable aluminium steamer trunk, that I kept locked up back in the emergency radio room. I kept that trunk, that I still own by the way, filled up with beanie weenies, sardines, Vienna sausages, cookies, crackers and other goodies. Since the emergency radio room was my battle station I had the key to it and no one else could get at my goodies.

When they'd announce chow over the 1MC, I'd go check the chow line and if the food didn't look edible .... I'd go dig into my stash of goodies and eat it rather than the crap the rest of the crew was having to choke down. I also bought several bottles of Louisiana hot sauce and everytime I'd go through the chow line I'd have a bottle of that hot sauce in my back pocket to put on the slop they served us as chow. To this day, I still put hot sauce on everything I eat.

7th

Rifleman7.62NATO

Best chow I EVER had in service was at the squid mess hall, oops, excuse me "Dining facility" at the Little Creek, VA, base when us Old Guard legs got to go to amphibious warfare school.