soc.history.war.world-war-ii

On Mar 31, 2:02 pm, Cubdriver
wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:46:50 -0400, hanco...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

> There was a five-pack of cigarettes in every C ration box. These same
> cigarettes (the Luckies sometimes had a green box, dating them to 1943
> or earlier) showed up in Vietnam in 1964. I started smoking again in
> Vietnam because the butts were there for the taking.

In Vietnam we had heat tablets and little three-legged stands which
came with our what we called C-Rations, although they were actually
MCIs (Meal, Combat, Individual). They put out more stinking fumes than
heat. I bet they would have been lethal in confined spaces. A few
times we begged chunks of C4 from sappers; a chunk the size of a
finger tip would boil a can of soup in about 10 seconds flat.

Stationery wasn't readily available, so we used MCI boxes both as
stationery and postcards. Since we were in a combat zone, we didn't
have to use stamps, but just wrote "Free" where a stamp would be, a
time-honored privilege of soldiers throughout most of the world's
armies in the 20th Century. However, the Australians and Kiwis in
Vietnam had to use postage stamps; some of the Aussie stamps were
specially treated to avoid damage from humidity.

In the book The Guns of Normandy there's a description of a powder
used to make tea-with-milk. You needed boiling hot water to mix it,
but when it cooled sufficiently to drink, it formed a tough, leather-
like scum on top that made it almost impossible to drink.

I recall that the chicken stew we had in Vietnam was really good and
that the peanut butter was an inedible near solid -- perhaps the food
really did date from the Second World War, which was commonly
rumoured. We never had Spam that I recall. Our Battalion Surgeon,
Claude DeShazo, recalls with anger that he once opened a can of "Beef
Stew" to find nothing but a single chunk of beef fat.

I've always have been a non-smoker, and gave my cigarettes away in
Vietnam. After a while, though, they started looking like one option
to help me cope with a situtation which, early in 1966, was looking
worse and getting worse by the day. Fortunately, I was shot and
evacuated!

Bob Ingraham