They weren’t bad as long as you weren’t used to living on a farm and using fresh from under the hens. Cheese and spices cover a multitude of sins.
There was a cocoa mix in the rations that I liked even better than making it from scratch with whole milk and cocoa powder. I couldn’t drink powdered milk, like whole milk, but it would serve for cooking … not as good, but OK.
Spam is definitely better than the pemmican that were in Air Force survival rations. It may have been ‘nutritious’. but it tasted atrocious. I started carrying spice packets with me after survival school to cover the possibility of eating it.
]]>And that’s why Louisiana boys who volunteer for the Navy tend to get sent straight to the galley :).
]]>It had to take some great hand-eye coordination to flip a pancake or an egg in those conditions, although they were probably as short of eggs as we were on the Aleutians, so it was always ‘scrambled eggs’ reconstituted from the powdered version. Eggs and milk were always good trade items when you flew, if you could get them.
Now all of the jobs with direct civilian counterparts are done by contractors, so vets are at a real disadvantage when they get out.
Anybody who made it through the indignity of basic training is a vet, no matter what they did afterwards. You don’t really appreciate your civil rights until you lose them in the military.
]]>Yes, my father did appreciate the boring. It beat the heck out of cold and nasty, what would have happened if the Army had drafted him and sent him to Korea. WTF, I probably would have made the same decision in his place, if the Soviets had entered the war and a Soviet sub had sunk his ship at least he would have been clean (well, other than food stains!) and warm up until the moment it happened.
]]>For some reason there weren’t a lot of people looking for airborne qualified linguists when I got out, so I went with law enforcement to pay the bills while I got some real credentials in IT. I made a lot of people nervous for a long time.
I always appreciated food, even the less than 5-star they produced in most mess halls. There were times when hot food was in extremely short supply, and the individual rations were not something you wanted to subsist on for extended periods. I’m not particular to really spicy food, but there is a hell of lot more to preparing food than salt and pepper. Hell, I had to make my own peanut butter in Europe, and then I had to use olive oil instead of peanut oil.
There is nothing wrong with boring when things could turn nasty at any time.
]]>You’re right about the civilian skills. After he left the Navy, he and my mom met at a greasy spoon cafe. She was the waitress, and he was the short order cook. Ten months later, there I was.
His Navy service was apparently pretty unmemorable, I suppose it’s hard for the cook to be involved in anything interesting in the absence of a naval war. Luckily Stalin was busy putting down the rebellion in the Ukraine and not interested in starting a shooting war, aside from also being in the process of dying, meaning that the Soviets sent a few dozen Mig-15’s and “volunteer” pilots to see how they worked against American fighters (answer: way better than the Americans expected), but otherwise stayed out of it. Kept it boring for the guys at sea, lucky for me.
]]>He was definitely right about it getting cold in Korea, and it is a damp cold, so you feel it in your bones. If his destroyer had been part of the flotilla for one of the carriers used in Korea, he would have been nearly as cold as the guys on land.
If you don’t have pull, there are no safe jobs in the military, because they can decide you need to do ‘something new and exciting’. One of my parents’ oldest friends in the service was a cook/mess sergeant, but he spent December 1944 in the small town of Bastogne, and he learned what the infantry was all about. He transferred to the Air Force as soon as it was created because he wasn’t interested in repeating the experience.
I don’t know if it is true or not, but it has generally been accepted that the Navy has the best food of all the services. I just can’t imagine trying to cook in a moving ship, especially one as small as a destroyer. At least it is a civilian trade if you liked doing it.
]]>He joined the Navy because the alternative was being drafted into the Army and sent to Korea, and he heard Korea was cold, something that a Louisiana boy from the bayous wanted nothing to do with. He spent his Navy service nice and warm in the galley of a tin can as a cook. If the Soviets had entered the war his tin can would have ended up at the bottom of the sea so it wasn’t safety he was looking for, it was more a case of dislike of the cold. Somehow I doubt he would have been very happy with your Alaska duty :).
]]>I appreciate your thoughts, Jill, but don’t forget that working elections is just as important as carrying a rifle when it comes to protecting the country and promoting the ‘of, by, and for the people’ that Lincoln talked about.
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