I can send you all the photo's you want !! I can probly send you the pic of each meal . I can give you all the pics you want. If you were close enough to me I could prb give you a case!!

SGT.Busche
US.ARMY , INF

That's a deal buddy. If you want to transmit the photos by electronicthat would be fine. I really appreciate it, as this helps me to halp others, while of course helping me again. Everybody wins! I have a pretty good professional print system(1 million Belgian Francs!!) One million of anything is expensive! Anyways when you are ready fire them through you can contact me by mail it's listed in the members file.

Cheers Jack,

Chow time guys!!

OK give me a couple of days and i will get the photo's and send them to you .

SGT.Busche
US.ARMY , INF

Yummmmmmmmm!

Now you guys did it!! I’m hungry.

The first MRE’s made me wish for C-Rats again. I have often wondered how toxic the green paint on the cans is and how much we ate when it flaked off and fell in your can as you opened the can. Ahhhhh the P-38, the coveted steel ones after they switched to aluminum.

Do you old timers remember the MRE scare in 1987? One lot came off the line with bad seal on the main entrée. The Army freaked out and had ALL the lots tested. I was the NCOIC of the Veterinary Division at the 10th Med Lab in Landstuhl then. All units sent in samples of every lot they had. We took over the old rec center and opened 1,000s and 1,000s and 1,000s of MRE’s. All we kept was the entrée, everything else had to be destroyed. Had a assembly line to open the pack without damaging the seal on the edges (gut the bag like a fish), wash and dry the inside of the bag, add florescent dye and examine under a black light. We had drying racks that looked like sideways cloths line racks all over. The building reeked of MRE’s.

Even got to spend nine months in Bolivia eating nothing but B’s for breakfast and MRE’s for lunch and dinner. Then a two week turn around and off to Saudi for Tray Packs, Lunch Buckets and more MRE’s.


Dave


P.S. Very old cans of C-Rations do explode. Mostly the ones with tomato products. Beware the bulging cans. And the dehydrated beef and pork patties were best eaten dry. LOL

Remember the 60 Minutes (or was it Dateline or 20/20?) piece on the companies that packaged the MREs? I remember them talking about opening large cans of applesauce with a big rusty can opener that let slivers of metal fall into the can. They then dragged a large magnet through the vats of applesauce trying to get slivers out. I stopped eating the applesauce after watching that show.

I was in Alaska with the 6th ID (Light) during the "MRE Scare" of the mid-80s. We trained a lot with the Alaska National Guard, aka Eskimo Scouts. They were extremely suspicious of MREs to begin with and the 60 Minutes piece only increased their fears. We sent them pallet after pallet of MREs, but you couldn't find one to save your life in one of their camps. Somewhere buried under the tundra are enough MREs to feed a Third World country for a year.

The natives just brought food from home. I have to say the sundried salmon was OK, but I couldn't stand the seal blubber -- not to mention the semi-digested lichen and moss retrieved from a caribou's stomach...

FYI, the Eskimo Scouts have a special exception to the uniform regs that allow them to mix-n-match issue clothing with native garb. I'll never forget the first time I saw a guy wearing knee-high polar bear fur boots with his OG field uniform. Very cool looking.

Back to the C-Rat vs. MRE debate: No one ever broke a bone on an MRE. I think I still have dents in my thigh bones from carrying C-Rat cans in my BDU trouser pockets. My theory is that no military ration really tastes any better than another -- sometimes just eating something different makes it taste a little better. I always kinda liked the fruit-flavored styrofoam. Eat a couple of them, drink half a canteen of water, fill your belly right up.