I never ate anything this good when I was a Soldier!
MRE 2019
- Thread starter 1978 NYB
- Start date
commando1
Old Man with a Hat
Stocking the bunker, big guy?
I remember C-Rats, Green eggs and ham was especially disgusting.
Dave
Dave
Believe me C-rats were a lot better than T-rats or MRE's.
They also provided some humor. We had one idiot who decided he needed warm Lima beans and put his can on the exhaust manifold of Jeep which had been left running because they were monitoring the radio.. He did not vent it first so the can blew up and got Lima beans all over the engine compartment. PLT SGT had seen it too many times before and put the guy to work with a tooth brush cleaning up the mess he made. A lot of the C-Rats we got in '71 still had Lucky Strike Greens in them, so they were probably Korean War Vintage.
Dave
Stocking the bunker, big guy?
No, one of former comrades sent it to me.
Soldiers use to complain about C-rations ( I thought they were pretty good) then we had T-Rations and 1st Gen MRE's which were truly horrible. Spaghetti or beans with FN cinnamon. Who TF puts cinnamon in spaghetti or beans????
MRE's evolved in to decent meals during the last decade or so I've been told. I haven't eaten any MRE's since my return from Iraq. I have had many opportunities to eat them while working at the Army Test Center after I retired from the Army...but I declined. I can still buy MRE's at the Commissary on post.
Yeah, I remember the cigarettes in C's.
No smokes in MRE's. The Surgeon General determined smoking was bad for soldiers by then.
Or older. Lucky's changed to the white-silver package WITH THE SAME RED BULLS EYE right at the beginning of WWII. So sang the song, "LUCKY GREENS ARE HERE NO MORE 'CUZ LUCKY GREENS HAVE GONE TO WAR". My 1st pac of smokes in '56 were Lucky Greenz and that shocked me. I thought Uncle Sam would have surely run out of them by then, but now you tell me Dave that our Uncle waz still pushin' them on the Troupes in '71 Little bit of our Uncle over spending for the war effort don'tcha think? American Tobacco (I thinkit waz back then)must have had train loadz of reams on green paper already printed up to last into the '70s SHISH Thatz 30 frickin' yearz worth of paper up in smoke. lol
Jer, smokes were still in C-rats through the mid 1970's and maybe to the late 1970's. The smokes stopped about the last year we were getting C-Rats. I believe they were just reboxed and the smokes were removed because of the Surgeon General.
The military supply system being what it is, if no one ordered the stuff destroyed, it will probably sit in a storage warehouse some place forever. The canned rations were pretty much good forever as long as they were properly stored. I would bet dollars to donuts that all those government doomsday bunkers that were built after the second world war probably still have the stuff in them as well because the government probably has lost track of it by now., just like there are warehouses full of WW2 weapons parts etc.
Dave
The C-ration that we ate is really a MCI (Meal, Combat, Individual). Everyone still called them C-rations. They were issued from 1958-1980.
Meal, Combat, Individual ration - Wikipedia
Meal, Combat, Individual ration - Wikipedia
My fave waz "BEANY-WHEENYS" That waz the best of all of the C-RATZ in the cold war yearz. Az for the smokes? One of My Uncles had stock in R.J. Reynolds in the '50s when Salem's first came out. I was ah Boot at the time makin' $78 per month and sending $50 of that home 'cuz Mom needed it more then I did. My Uncle tried the Salem's and didn't like them so guess who waz gifted the two complementary cartons that R.J. Reynolds had sent him? That waz in July of 1956. My quit date waz 11/11/11 and the price of a carton of Salem's had jumped from $2.00 ah carton to I think about $28.00 ah carton and I had to drive 125 miles one way into Indiana to buy 'um 'cuz taxes in Michigan were added another $15.00 per carton in 2011, lol
70bigblockdodge
Old Man with a Hat
I remember, ~1985 a carton of C store cigarettes (tax free) when you got underway off the coast of San Diego was $4.20 or .42 cents a pack, those were the good old days when you could kill yourself for cheap. I think my wife is paying double that for a pack of smokes now.
Thank God I quit in '01. Look at the money I saved.
Thank God I quit in '01. Look at the money I saved.
When I deployed I had 2 duffel bags. All my gear in one and the other filled with cartons of Winston's. No PX on the battlefield. Had no idea then if we were ever going to the rear (alive) with the REMF's and the PX to resupply smokes. I was smoking 3-4 packs a day then.
I quit smoking in 1992. Hypnosis. Cost me $34.95 and I was in a banquet hall with literally a 1000 other people for 3 hours. This doctor looked like a child molester but he had a 98% success rate with this hypnosis. It worked. I never smoked another cigarette. I was a weekend social drinker. I never had a problem with alcohol. I quit drinking alcohol a month later.
BTW, cigarettes were $2.00 a carton in the commissary overseas all the way to 1992. I redeployed to Aberdeen Proving Ground in March 1992 and cigarettes were going way up in price. The Surgeon General wanted to make it tougher for soldiers to smoke so jacking up the price was the answer. I dont even know if the commissary sells cigarettes anymore. I'll have to ask next time I'm there.
I quit smoking in 1992. Hypnosis. Cost me $34.95 and I was in a banquet hall with literally a 1000 other people for 3 hours. This doctor looked like a child molester but he had a 98% success rate with this hypnosis. It worked. I never smoked another cigarette. I was a weekend social drinker. I never had a problem with alcohol. I quit drinking alcohol a month later.
BTW, cigarettes were $2.00 a carton in the commissary overseas all the way to 1992. I redeployed to Aberdeen Proving Ground in March 1992 and cigarettes were going way up in price. The Surgeon General wanted to make it tougher for soldiers to smoke so jacking up the price was the answer. I dont even know if the commissary sells cigarettes anymore. I'll have to ask next time I'm there.
My favorite C stuff was Turkey or the Chicken boned. And of course the pound cake and the John Wayne bars.
They do still offer them in the Commissary and BX, but there's a new'er' mandate that stipulates they can't sell them for more than 5% under the local market price, (or so I was told by the BX manager), so they don't move many anymore.
I just had a flashback!
Dehydrated Beef Patty also known as a "track pad". They weren't all that bad. LOL.
A track pad is the black rubber pad that bolts on to a tank tread. Track pads are used so the tank doesn't tear up roads or wear the track out prematurely. Plus metal on pavement generates sparks which can be seen for miles.....not good on the battlefield.
Dehydrated Beef Patty also known as a "track pad". They weren't all that bad. LOL.
A track pad is the black rubber pad that bolts on to a tank tread. Track pads are used so the tank doesn't tear up roads or wear the track out prematurely. Plus metal on pavement generates sparks which can be seen for miles.....not good on the battlefield.
The MRE's in this video are numerous improved generations past the original MRE's from 1981.
I sure would like to see and taste those M&M's. Chocolate melts at about 70° and it was 120° to 130° in the desert. I know the Army Research Lab was working on chocolate for years but it has to taste like ****!!! LOL
I sure would like to see and taste those M&M's. Chocolate melts at about 70° and it was 120° to 130° in the desert. I know the Army Research Lab was working on chocolate for years but it has to taste like ****!!! LOL
Nice, there is a way to heat the MRE. Back in the day we heated C's on top of engines or burning a little chunk of C4. Nice that they have different type of powdered drinks. Back in the day it was coffee and I believe tea. No one drank tea.
Where TF did they get scissors?
Where TF did they get scissors?
One of the common ***** points about the MRE's during the Iraq wars was that they took a lot of water to prepare. Probably not an issue in a base camp but a potentially big deal on LRRPs or other situations where one has to carry whatever water one is going to need. In a desert enviornment with uncertain resupply, troops need to keep whatever water they have for drinking and water is heavy. Your typical combat load is about 65lbs-80lbs, not a whole lot of wiggle room for extra water. When the extra water was figured in, the weight load was about the same as canned rations, main advantage to MRE's was they were less bulky.
Dave
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