IYKYK

Those brown bag lunches take me back 43 years to when I first had that nightmarish dietary experience! PTSD is an understatement, but if you had "T" rations for 2 or 3 days, you'd beg for that pork patty! Those early MRE's were absolutely horrible!

I brought some home on leave back in 1988 and my Dad said "Those are pretty good" and that he wouldn't mind eating them. I told him to get the full experience he should not sit at the kitchen table, but rather go roll around in the mud, take no showers, and sleep on the ground for a couple weeks while choking them down. The magic of the little brown bag may wear off. There was nothing you could do to that dehydrated meat patty to make it taste good to me. They were like eating styrofoam. Kept a man fed, that is their purpose and they are adequate.

Being a Nam vet everything we had came in those little OD colored cans. If I remember right the pork slices weren't bad. That and the peanut butter. The little packets of instant coffee was almost drinkable.

Thanks for your service Skippy!

Have to agree with Skippy C -Rats over MRE'S any and everytime

How is dehydrated meat "ready to eat?"

It was C-rations and MCI's for me. I remember being bivouacked during training and wanting coffee.

There either weren't any heating tablets or we weren't supposed to use them so I tried heating the water with a lighter. The coffee was crunchy but it was coffee.

the chicken a la king wasn't too bad if you could get it hot

Take the corned beef hash MRE, crush up the crackers and mix, then dump in the Tobasco sauce. That was one of my favorites. The oatmeal cookie bar thingy was a joke.

I lived mostly on the cigarettes ,coffee and the chocolate bar.I remember flipping top 2 inchs of grease off the spaghetti most of the time we ate our c rations cold, might have been an airborne thing lol.

I preferred that one.

Oh, man! That’s an old one! I think they went from those to the dark brown and then the tan bags.

I don’t know why, but I loved the omelette with ham. No one else did so I was always in luck. I ate MREs out on the Syrian border for 2 months while looking for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. We had T-rations here and there and they made you feel like you were eating a gourmet meal.

But…….

MRE bombs.

IYKYK.

The omelette one was definitely one where there was no middle ground. You either loved them or hated them. I was in the latter category.

Most of the C rations and theMRE's were pretty good. The worst were the B ration, green, dehydrated eggs. Them thangs were flat out gross. We called them possum eggs.

Rickey

For bonus points use pee instead of water.

The smell of a canvas tent in the hot sun.
Driving down US Hwy 67 and 55 heading south. All the cut banks are a red quartzy dirt.

My favorite C rations were the ham and eggs chopped. I recall the little four packs of cigarettes. There were Pall Mall, Viceroy, and others.

Dad recalled those in Vietnam. He didn’t smoke but he saved them for barter purposes.