I'd Rather Not
We had a meeting with a chicken farmer who was wealthy by
local standards. Our retarded
fucking lieutenant thought that because he was rich he would talk to us about
“terrorists.” Birdbrain never
understood the difference between a terrorist, an insurgent or a militant. We sat on the floor in the farmer’s “living
room” and he gestured at us to eat the breakfast that was prepared on the dirt-covered
floor.
“He want you to eat food,” our interpreter, or terp,
informed us.
“I’m good, man,” I said.
“But now you’re rude. You must eat.”
“You know what’s rude? Dysentery. I will not eat this shit.”
Spread
out on the floor was sour cream and a sad attempt at over easy eggs. The sour cream was made from a goat and
it looked more like sausage gravy.
The eggs were undercooked and a bit on the watery side. To wash all that down we could have
chi, or tea, with more sugar than chi or warm river water with random floaters…
mmmmmm… NEGATIVE.
“Sergeant Vance, we shouldn’t be rude,” Birdbrain said.
“Oh, well then you won’t mind going first, LT,” I glared
back.
Birdbrain
had one bite and it was all over.
Not so rude now, is it? If
the local food doesn’t look right, it’s a safe bet not to eat it. Common sense goes a long ways. It goes a lot longer than “not being
rude.” That’s just how Birdbrain
was wired. Any local could invite
him into their house and he’d go right in without any backup. Never mind that it might have a torture
chamber, machetes and a video camera broadcasting your beheading worldwide on
Al-Jazeera. We argued many times
over how to do things safely and after he had enough of me advising him on how
foolish he was and proceeded to ignore me, people got hurt. In situations like eating bad food, I
enjoyed telling Birdbrain to do what ever the hell he wanted because he got
burned every time.
“Alright Mitch, how many MRE’s can you take down in a 24
hour period?” I asked.
“A whole case,” he replied.
“Bullshit.”
“Aight, game on.”
An
MRE, or Meal Ready to Eat, is a specially packaged meal that will last a long,
long time while still in the plastic.
That alone should raise some eyebrows. It was great if you were starving or just bored out of your
mind trying to stay awake during mission.
We typically rat-fucked them.
No, that’s not a sexual reference.
That term just means that we opened an MRE and took the food we needed
for a certain time frame.
MRE’s
weren’t only used to quench our hunger.
Certain things inside those packages were remedies for issues you may have
with few medical supplies available during missions. For instance, if you were pissing out of your ass and
desperately needed something to back up your bowels so you didn’t wipe yourself
to death, you would grab the cheese packets. The cheese in an MRE could back you up for days at a
time. Great success! Or at least until you had stomach pain from
being backed up. At that point you
would grab the gum packet or dry chocolate shake. All you had to do was add the right amount of water to the
shake and pow, instant ex lax.
Mitch
took the MRE challenge and if anyone could eat 12 MRE’s in a single day without
crapping, it would be him. He was
a legit body builder always aiming to be 270 pounds of brute force and become
the next Mr. Olympia. In order to
gain copious amounts of weight he would need to eat a lot of calories to keep
up with his workout regimen. A case
of MRE’s designed to give maximum calories would be great, right? The problem with eating 12 MRE’s from
the same case is the lack of food selection. Mitch had to eat everything in every meal. That included the always-dreaded “Southwest
Breakfast Omelet.” A stench
filled the area as soon as the packet was opened and it looked like
regurgitated Play-Doe with green and red chunks placed sporadically that were
allegedly “peppers.” Good luck,
buddy!
“Times up. How many?
“Eleven.”
“So close!”
“Yo, I just couldn’t do it, man.”
“How’s the stomach?”
“I need to get to a toilet.”
Although
we were working out of a COP, we still encountered a lot of characters that
weren’t in combat arms. We didn’t
always mesh well with these types.
Of course they are nice to have around when you need someone with a
specialized job in order to fix things. Night vision
techs would fix our NODS while listening to heavy metal or screamo for hours on
end while inside a small metal conex, or container. Mechanics worked their asses off fixing our Strykers in
extreme heat and would roll out with us to fix something, putting their lives
on the line. Then there were the
cooks. Is it nice to have
cooks? Yes. Is completely great to have cooks? No.
The
cooks on COP Cobra asked that we send soldiers to help them out between our
missions. We did so even though
our guys didn’t have much time off in the first place. After listening to some of my soldiers
gripe about how the cooks are making them do all the work, which included heavy
lifting and cleaning some nasty equipment, we investigated. Sure as shit, there were our soldiers
doing all the work while the higher-ranking cooks were sitting back, getting
fat. That ended our ‘Helping of
the Crooks’ mission. Then they
retaliated.
On
certain days, the cooks would claim they were being over worked and set out
MRE’s or Jimmy Dean packages.
After being on a mission that lasted several days and coming back to
more crap-tastic chow, we gave them the coup de grau.
“Time for a raid gentlemen,” I suggested.
“Sergeant Vance, I know where they keep all the good shit,”
Glenn said.
“Like what?”
“Like those Gatorade shakes that they’ve been stingy with,”
Courtney added.
We filled our bellies with ice-cold chocolate milk shakes in
a can courtesy of Gatorade that night.
That coupled with cigarettes and shit-eating grins was enough to make us
think we just had a good day. It
was the small things like that, that allowed us to make it another day without
going crazy.
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