food stories...

i love easy cheese. now before all of your purists get on your soap box and tell me how gross it is, let me ask how many mre's you've eaten recently? or dining facility take out? let me tell you WHY i love easy cheese. it can make ANY mre taste better. mainly because if you put enough of it on, it over powers the taste. you can keep it on your shelf without a need for refrigeration (can we see why this is important?) it can be mailed to you, and memories of a buddy. we were living side by side in a tent in afghanistan. it was awesome, because as much as i loved easy cheese, he loved it more. so i only bought one or two cans the whole deployment. we stood in line for an hour or longer to get into the px. we bought our cans of easy cheese. we went home, broke open an mre for lunch. *splooooooooooooooooooooooosh*. i put easy cheese on my entree. *sploooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooosh* he put easy cheese on his. the next day i came in and i repeated the process. he shook his can, went to top his entree off, and it just popped and fizzed. he was out. so being the good buddy i am, i said he could use some of mine if he got me a new can. do we see where this is going? everyday i got a new can from him. one day he didn't get me a new one, and i bitched. we use "jackass" as a term of endearment. i came in the next day and there was a new can on my bed, with "love, jackass" written on it in permanent ink.

i love lucky charms. in basic training we had to form a line and go through the chow hall. you went through the line, got your plate, sat down and were supposed to eat without talking. of course you learned to whisper and barely move your lips, all the while looking for drill sergeants out of the corner of your eye. when the last person through the line was done eating, everyone was done. i had no problems with this at lunch or dinner, i can scarf down food with the best of them (one of the HARDEST parts about re-integrating, believe it or not. slowing down and eating with manners), but for some reason at breakfast i was ALWAYS getting yelled at to hurry up. wtf? then one day at breakfast one of the guys sitting across the table said "dude, what the HELL are you doing? stop screwing around!" turns out it'd been habit for 20 years to seperate the oat bits from the marshmallow bits in my lucky charms... i always ate the oats first, saving the best for last. mystery solved!

i've been through a couple different survival training thingies. in most of them you have the choice between killing a bunny or a chicken with your bare hands, to learn how to and to learn how to skin and prepare it. it's interesting for a couple reasons. one of the things that is scary about it is the number of people who will protest that type of training. not realizing how really vital it is for soldiers. there is a good chance that we might need to know how to survive on our own for days, and if we do, one of the things we're going to have to do is find food. and it's not just the elite anymore. the next jessica lynch might escape her captors and need to know this stuff. but some feel it's cruel to animals. and it is, but that's kinda the nature of things. and if it keeps one of my guys alive? i'm all about cruelty to animals. anyways, in one of the classes, some of the kids decided they weren't going to kill the animals for ethical reasons. "no problems" the instructors said, "but you can't leave them out here in the woods, that's equally cruel. if you're not going to kill them, you have to carry them back." so they strapped the chickens to the top of their rucks, and after a couple hours of the chickens pecking them in the back of the neck, they were MORE than happy to kill'em. at another class, i cleared it with the instructor not to do the chicken/rabbit thing. i'd already done it before, and he knew it, so he let me slide pass, i was just an assistant instructor for that portion of the training. we had a person of questionable mental stability with us that trip. he decided to kill the bunny. but he was also fascinated with the head/skin. and proceeded to provide us with puppet shows for the rest of the trip. dinner and a movie! several other bad things happened, but i'll not mention those here. what was funny though, was later he was requesting a security clearance and the investigators came to talk to me. one of the questions was something along the lines of "has he ever acted in any type of manner that would make you question his mental stability? cruelty to animals? child or spouse abuse?"