The Importance of Hot Sauce & Sugar
On this particular morning SFC DeHart stopped by the outpost in the morning to check on the progress of the new operations bunker we were builing.
The standard menu for breakfast was normally some form of C-Ration meal washed down with coffee or water. SFC DeHart was lucky, this morning the menu consisted of canned bacon sandwich's and coffee. Even back then I couldn't tell you how old the canned bacon was by the time it made it to our plates. We suspect based on the condition of the C-Rat (Cooked-Rats) case that it was Korean War vintage.
The C-Rat bacon came in a can the size of a 12 oz can of beer and the bacon pieces were immersed in some type of thick gelled liquid that looked like crank case grease and smelled like canned dog food. The label said it was already precooked, and if eaten right from the can it had a brown and greenish tint to it, was as chewy as a rubber band, and tasted as bad as it smelled. No one could stomach it unless we cooked off the gel and fried it hard over an open fire. You didn't need butter or oil to fry it, it had enough of it's own grease. At time that came in handy to fuel the wood fire. |
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For those that didn't like bacon the option was canned hamburgers, or a breakfast C-Ration meal. The hamburgers (for lack of a better name) had the same thick gel, same smell, as the bacon and they also had to be burned in a pan to get them down. By the time they were fried hard they were the size of meat balls. Sometimes we had local village eggs to cook. They were the size of golf balls and pale and anemic looking, but did taste much better than the canned egg powder you mixed with water or the precooked C-Rat canned scrambled eggs.
Your beverage was a cup of hot instant coffee, canned milk which tasted like liquid chalk, or a cold soda, Coke or Royal Crown Cola were plentiful.
If we had bread from the mess hall it was always toasted over the fire and burnt real good. We toasted it because it didn't last more than two days in the humidity. It tended to mold up real quick. When you burnt it over the flames the mold was destroyed and rendered harmless. Toasted or un-toasted, it had no real taste to speak of. The bread from the village was great. They baked it locally or it came in from Vietnamese bakeries in Bien Hoa every day. It was the thick crusted long thin roll type of French Bread. The first time I tried it I noticed it was filled with sesame seeds, or what I first thought were sesame seeds. Upon a closer inspection I realized they were actually weevils that invaded the flower before the baking process. They were dead from the baking process and since it tasted so good no one cared.
Lunch was pick a C-Ration meal from the case and eat it cold.
Our dinner menu was about the same only we cooked the C-Rats real good when we had the time for a fire. If local vegetables from the village were available a C-Rat stew was always better that eating them plain. The local vegetables were also small and anemic looking but they tasted good. For seasoning you always covered the C Rats in "Hot Sauce" or sprinkled sugar on them.
Everything at dinner was washed down with soda or beer, warm or cold, depending of the availability of ice in the village that day. My father once to me that when he served in the Philippine's with the Navy during WWII they didn't have any ice on the island so they left the bottles of beer in buckets of gasoline and that chilled them. Just for the hell of it I tried it once and found that it worked. They were not real cold but slightly chilled. The problem was no matter how much you rinsed the cans you couldn't get past the smell of the gasoline, so warm beer was the order of the day when ice was unavailable.
From The Journal of CPL Thomas T. Watson, B Company, 720th MP Battalion, 89th MP Group, 18th MP Brigade, Long Binh, Vietnam, March 1968 to March 1969.