Appendix B: Stuff…? It’s what’s for dinner

The old guy never sent back his swordfish.

Each time I visited the table, he had more bad things to say, but he refused my offers to bring a new piece. I brought about a gallon of tartar, a bottle of malt vinegar, butter, even some mustard, but he never settled down until, of my own volition, I brought over our cache of hot sauces—seven different bottles from five different brands using four different chilies. He jumped on the Tabasco, and before my very eyes, the fish disappeared.

He shut up, and I understood.

“You were in the military?” I asked as he and the wife debated dessert versus departure. He didn’t have that hard-line look that so many Vietnam era vets wear like a badge—the cropped hair, piercing stare, and mannerisms that suggest they’re still in.

“Yeah,” he said. “How did you know?”

****
Hot sauce.

For the first time in my life, I was craving hot sauce. I wasn’t choking but I really wanted to be; a good Heimlich maneuver would have really settled my stomach

I was eating food Uncle Sam gave me, food I wanted to give back. It was my first MRE—Meal, Ready to Eat. Wrapped in a dark brown pouch that had chaffed my right thigh all day, it made a complete meal. Protein, starch, fruit, crackers, even peanut butter, preserved and made portable in a pouch that fit the pocket of my camouflage trousers.

Menu 2: Ham and Chicken Loaf: a jagged dash across the salted slab marked the border between processed meats, one side pinkish, the other grey. The juices had merged thanks to salt content, imparting identical flavors with differing textures. I fought the gag reflex the moment I smelled it.

Another pouch held “bean component”: graying pintos floating in tomato sauce, like watered-down Spaghetti-Os with stale beans subbing for pasta. They almost crunched. Dehydrated peaches smelled edible, but after 10 minutes soaking in water, they never completely softened.

Every MRE felt this way.

In addition, Accessory Packet C provided all the necessities: salt (in case my arteries weren’t hardening at a sufficient pace), candy (a reward after forcing lunch down), coffee, creamer, and sugar (to help revive the diner after nearly passing out), Chiclets gum (to get the taste out), matches (in case I wanted to light myself on fire before I ate another), and toilet paper (which needed to be collected because MREs, I would eventually learn, rallied during digestion and came out as a group, even though they had entered individually and at timely intervals).

I learned a couple of weeks into basic training that most of the jokes made of the MRE acronym are more accurate than the real name. Meal, Ready to Eat morphed through the years into Meals Refused by Everyone, Meals Rejected by Ethiopians, Meals Rumored as Edible, and—based on the way they seem to resist digestion—Meals Refusing to Exit.

Until that first smell, I had been excited at the prospect. Unfortunately, the military doesn’t look at food the way civilized peoples do. Sustenance falls right in with guns and bullets on the priority list, and if Uncle Sam has to cut corners somewhere, most Joes prefer the skimping be done on food. The Army doesn’t worry about pleasing Joe with it. They figure as long as he thinks he might die soon, he’ll love whatever is offered, no matter how bad it is.

And bad it is.

But Joe is resourceful. If he can find something to improve on dinner, he’d use it. Improvements ranged from rituals to condiments. A Sergeant named Pantaloguos used to use the same spoon for every meal. When he finished, he would simply lick it clean and return it to his breast pocket. Bacteria, he said, “adds flavor.” And if he got sick, it meant he was back at the billets before everyone else. One of the guys bought an MRE cookbook that had everything from cheeseburgers and chili to peach cobbler and pudding.

Spices helped. Cpl. Mike Stone carried tins of curry and mustard powder, but I carried everything else. Through years of trial and error, I found that variety in spice made life more livable.

My position was a regular stop for our first sergeant, lots of Joes and some of the officers because I was keeper of the spice rack. In a beat up tanker’s bag that I’d liberated, I carried salt and pepper, celery salt, Tabasco, Frank’s, Pete’s, Taco Bell hot taco sauce, horseradish sauce, steak sauce, and a few other flavors that I can’t remember. At each meal, I would fool my taste buds into thinking something horrible wasn’t about to happen, mostly, through spices.

Based on the law of declining standards, some meals turned out surprisingly good, using only the contents of the pouch. A meal featuring the bean component and a freeze dried beef patty made chili that, especially if it could be warmed, would almost be worthy of eating in the real world. Other Joes would turn the same meal into a cheeseburger on crackers.

Whenever possible, we’d heat our MREs. In the days before the flameless heater, we’d go to any extent for a hot meal on a cold day. Boxes were burned if the situation allowed. Pouches would be stuffed in pockets, inside T-shirts, in the trouser waistline. In non-tactical operations, a solid fuel tablet called a heat tab would boil water and, in the process, heat an entrée.

But that leftover boiled water—that was the one thing the Army got right. My squad used to gather on cold mornings and make a mocha that was thick enough to stand a plastic spoon in. We’d put everything in there: Chiclets, caramels, creamer, coffee, sugar, three, four, or five packets of cocoa. We’d hold it to warm our hands, take a sip and pass it on. When we’d been shivering for two hours and could look forward to another 14 hours of the same, a hot cup and a few sips of cocoa feels like a little brush with heaven.

That same cocoa and creamer could be combined with peanut butter for pudding. The creamer, along with reconstituted peaches, jelly (optional), sugar, and crackers, made a peach cobbler that, considering I don’t like peach cobbler, was as good as any I’ve had since I got out.

Many entrees were beyond help, and the only salvation for them was hot sauce. My mouth would burn so badly that I’d plow through the meal in seconds just so I could drink water and cool my palate. The Omelet with Ham entrée was one of these. Usually a solid mass of egg and chunks of ham sitting in egg-scented water, it had the texture of a stale curd. To force it down, I’d add just about every spice in the rack, along with crackers and the sawdust-textured Oatmeal Cookie Bar before mixing it with the included potatoes au gratin. Even then, eating was a matter of need rather than desire. Everyone had a meal they saved for last, usually in hopes that they’d skip a meal at some point and not need it, or that re-supply would arrive in time to continue putting it off. The omelet was mine.

But for most of the guys, hot sauce provided the sole salvation. I was willing to carry extra weight to hide the built-in shelf-stable flavor. Not everyone was, so those little bottles of Tabasco that came in the accessory packet worked wonders.

By the time I was done, I bequeathed the spice rack and my extensive knowledge of how to make an MRE diet livable to one of the guys in my squad. I could’ve written my own cookbook at that point. And it gave me a lifelong appreciation for hot sauce.

And to this day, I believe I can spot a former soldier, based simply on his or her application and preference of hot sauces. A civilian adds hot sauce like they like the sauce, either directly on the meal or on the side, and in a manner that suggests they want some spice. A former, Joe, jarhead, squid, Air Force hippie, or coastie will add it like they mean it, like they’re trying to hide something, even when they like the food. If they’re using hot sauce, they are putting it on with vigor, as though they need it.

If a civilian uses his hot sauce with the reserve of a connoisseur tasting cognac, then a Vet uses it like a drunk getting his first taste of rot gut in weeks.

****
“How’d you know?” he asked again, reviving me from what may have been a bad dream.

“Hot sauce,” I said. “You didn’t add a flavor to your fish; you gave it a new one. Civilians don’t do that. Civilians will send it back first.”

As it turned out, the Master Chief had retired after 30-plus years in the Coast Guard. We stood for awhile, comparing taste bud horror stories until the impatience of both his wife and my bar manager pulled us apart.

As they made for the door, he came to the bar and offered his hand, thanking me for having worn green. I shook it. As he smiled, he said: “Remember, son, for those who have fought for it, filet mignon has a flavor the protected will never know.”

It took us both about a minute to stop laughing when I held up an unopened bottle of Tabasco. “In honor of your years of service and dedication to these United States, Master Chief your-name-here, I am honored to present you and your taste buds with this token of thanks from a grateful nation.”

He laughed, took the bottle, and left with another shake of my hand.

He wasn’t supposed to take the bottle. I had to replace it.