Nam era "C" rat's

Since I started the thread, I'll veer off a tad what with all the shipboard Navy chow talk..I served on a LSD ship, Med cruise for almost 6 months..This was before 'Nam..When they would run out of fresh milk and eggs...
Sterilized milk and powdered eggs...But it usually only lasted a few day's until resupplies..
Good training for C rats..
Woops, shouldn't mention rats while speaking of a ship..
 
This is especially true......

BigBill said:
Like Bill Crosby said we were thankful to have what we had.
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Difficulty with supply in a real, wartime situations often dictated rationing, often times severe to the point of starvation.

Did anybody here ever have eat "K" rations. After WWII it was shown that "K" rations were inadequate for solders under heavy field conditions but were rated, "Better than nothing." They were stopped after WWII but I wonder if some didn't find their way to Korea.
 
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11B Lifer said:
-A reserve Captain with us as a liaison started talking about what we were preparing to do-when there was an explosion in the fire- and he was hit right in the rear end-When he stopped yelping we examined his injury-Looking around by the area I found the cause- he had put a can of jam in the fire-it blew giving him a case of sticky buns-
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You mean HOT, sticky buns.:D
 
ibewbull said:
I never had lobster before I got board the USS Lawrence in 1973. There were things I didn't like, Mystery Meat, and chitlins, powdered eggs, powdered milk.
I enlisted at 143 pounds and was discharged at about 190 #
Breakfast on a good day you could order up what you wanted. On a bad day powdered greenish looking eggs scrambled. The steaks never had justice done to them.
Well not until some were spirited to local park and grilled by R Division IC/EM/HT . I didn't hump supplies for free so I taxed it :)
The sea rats and battle rats happened maybe 5 times.
Not to worry I had 20 pounds of Provolone Cheese in the
A/C duct in the IC room and a jar of cherry peppers.
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In 1975 they once served lobster salad at midrats (!) on the Forestfire. I also learned to appreciate GOOD Italian cheese (Bel Paese? Don't remember for sure.) on the same cruise, when someone in the photo lab cumshawed a wheel or half a wheel. Once I took maybe half a pound or more on liberty for lunch. All I had to buy was bread.

I wasn't too crazy about powdered milk. In fact, I just didn't drink it. Also wasn't too crazy about bug juice. But on the carriers, I never saw powdered eggs, often had SOS, sometimes fore****s on toast. Only had chitlins once or twice, though they were OK. About the same for rabbit. But on the carriers and air stations, there were almost always two entrees, so if you didn't like one, the other was almost surely OK. I almost always had both. But either I was pretty active, or they didn't use as much fat as some cooks, because my weight stayed under control. Not always the same elsewhere.
 
Our unit was on detached duty, we didn't have a chow hall. so someone from the unit had to fly to Saigon to buy our rations. Every thing was in a green can. We got to eat dehydrated potato's, eggs, milk. canned stew, canned ham that tasted like spam, canned chicken. But we had plenty of C- Rations. The stuff that didn't get eaten got tossed into a box. I liked the pecan roll, peanut butter and crackers, jelly and white bread in the can, and the pound cake. The Ham and Lima beans got tossed in the box along with eggs and ham. When we got cut off from the world during Tet in 68 the box got empty pretty quick. We ate C-rat for 3 weeks during Tet.
 
I went in a National Guard Jan. 1951. At camp in the field we got K Rations from WW2, Dog bisquits, some sort of hard cracker, cheese, jam, a 4 pack of Chesterfields. TP, matches & a very hard chocolate bar that would crack a molar & some gum. I didn't smoke so gave the cigs away. Later, we got C rations. It's good to look back but wouldn't want to do it again.
 
Brian41 said:
On a stateside training deployment once we stayed in the field in 12 man tents and ate C-rats. See not all AF jobs are air conditioned offices.
After a couple weeks of them I saw a can of Dinty More stew auctioned off for ten dollars which was a good sum of money then. Wish I'd had the foresight to pack a few cans and make some money.
By that time (mid 70s) they'd started taking the cigarettes out of the C-rat cartons. If you ran out of them you did without or hope you had a generous buddy.
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I enlisted in 1980 and went through Security Police school in '81. At Camp Bullis, TX, we lived in plywood hootches and ate C rations. If you had the day shift, you could get a hot meal at night in the chow hall; if you worked nights, you could get breakfast; everything else was C-rats. If you were smart, you made a bee line for the PX and bought all the cans of Dinty Moore you could get your hands on. We carried standard 30 round mag pouches, and you could strip out a C-rat box and put all of the stuff you wanted to carry into one pouch. It also allowed you to keep the cigarettes which were still in most of the packages. If you opened the box in the field, the instructors would "confiscate" them.
 
Yeah the poke out your eye was "eye opening"..
Maybe a better description from me of the"utensil", may be in order..
The wooden piece was made of something similar to balsa wood..About the size of a popsicle stick, except shorter in length, maybe 2 inches or so, probably a tad shorter..
Chew one end until it was somewhat fuzzy, creating a toothbrush of sorts..
The kicker was, no written instructions, what is thing for?
They did taste good..:)
 
Well you guys will love this...

....a "new" product out, a can opener to go on your keychain. It's really a stylized P51 (not the airplane).

There are a lot of keychain can openers, but what struck me what the small size of this one and the folding part, it really is a modern P51.

I saw it in a magazine, and the "inventor" was touted... I had to chuckle.
 
I liked the Lima beans and ham, one time I opened a can and before my
eyes was the queen mother of all Lima beans. It was so big I had to pry
it out. Some joker at cannery had to force it into can. I recall date on Cs
1944, same date as most of our 40mm ammo. XXIV Corps ( pronounced
Core ) for our political leaders !
 
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