User:Skip670

I'm brand new and really lost! I have no idea who will read this, and I don't know how to add personal experience to a page, or even if I should. I guess I'll find out.

I was looking up "C-Rations" with which I have some 4 years of experience in Vietnam from '64 to '67. We called them "C-rats" or "C's", but I believe they were really named "Meal, Combat, Individual," although they did have a big "C" in black on the outside of some of the cases. Some of ours were packed in 1956 and some in 1960. The 56's were better. The entries for MCI make a point of how much the ham and lima beans were loathed by the troops. What isn't said is that they were incredibly salty, and if you didn't heat them really well, everything was covered with congealed grease. The rule was, you got a case of 12, and you ate [or traded] all of them before getting another case. HLB's were untradable. Since we rarely had the ability to heat them well or at all, we just choked them down, grease, salt, and all. And it wasn't just us troops.

On one mission, we were on a hill top with some communications equipment on the coast. Our hill was really a big sand dune. At one point, a puppy showed up, maybe 5 or 6 weeks old. We have no idea where he came from or how he found us on top of all that sand. My guys named him "Radar" because he had a radar-like ability to hear a P-38 opening a can of C's. We of course tried to feed him the HLB which after one bite, he would never eat. Many of the other entree's were actually not bad, even if cold. I particularly remember the beef stew and the chicken with noodles. The scrambled egg, bacon, and potato was marginally OK.

The can of crackers had a smaller can of "spread" in it. Sometimes P'nut butter, sometimes some sort of cheese stuff. The ingredients of the cheese stuff were printed on the can which was the only can that wasn't painted OD. The #1 ingredient was "plastic cream." Thanks to Google, we now know that plastic cream comes from milk with about 85% fat. In the mid-60's, we had no idea what we were eating.

Wikipedia told me you want photos. I have a photo of Radar and of that sand dune, but I don't know how to submit it for review.

--Skip670 (talk) 00:10, 16 June 2010 (UTC)