Andy Rooney
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com -- THERE are things about your life it seems as though you ought to remember but cannot. I spent four years in the Army but don't recall much about Army food. This comes to me now because when I see pictures of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, I wonder what they have to eat.
In almost a year with the 17th Field Artillery Battalion before I was reassigned to the Army newspaper, The Stars and Stripes, I must have eaten close to 1,000 meals and I don't remember a single one of them. It's probably because the food was forgettable.
I remember being seated at the end of a table in a mess hall one day when other soldiers were in line with their trays, waiting to get to the steam table where the food was laid out. No matter what they were serving, they always gave you either coffee, tea or cocoa for a hot drink. You filled your pint-sized canteen cup with whatever it was that day. One of the men standing in line looked down into the cup of the soldier sitting next to me and asked, "What do they have today -- coffee, tea or cocoa?"
My friend looked down into his cup, which was almost empty, then looked up at the questioner and said, "I don't know. They didn't say."
And that's the way the food was, too. One dish tasted pretty much like another.
After I was shipped to England and transferred to the newspaper, I no longer ate Army food on a regular basis. I got what was known as "per diem." It amounted to about $30 a week and with that I paid for my rent in a London apartment and food. I often ate in an Indian or Chinese restaurant because I preferred what they served to British food. An average meal cost me the equivalent of about $1.35.
Because I regularly visited the air bases outside London to report on what the 8th Air Force had bombed that day, I often saved money by eating in the mess hall at each base. As a correspondent, I ate in the officers' mess even though I was a sergeant. The food was much better than in the enlisted men's mess hall.
After the D-Day Invasion, I ate the food provided by the First Army press camp. It was like the food in the officers' mess. However, we had one creative mess sergeant who often swapped Army staples like sugar, flour, bacon and, of course, cigarettes, with local farmers in Normandy, for fresh eggs, milk, cream and vegetables.
When I was up front with soldiers fighting the war, I ate what they ate. The food they got depended on how intense the fighting was. If things were relatively quiet, the company mess sergeant could set up a mobile kitchen and do some basic cooking in huge pots over propane stoves with what was the best Army field ration, called the ten-in-one. It was a heavy carton of food about 20-inches-by-12-inches-by-6 inches. I forget whether it was meant to feed 10 men for one day, or one man for 10 days but it had good stuff in it.
If an infantry division was at the front, with the enemy behind hedgerows 100 yards across an open field, they ate K-rations. Each heavily-waxed container was about the size of a Crackerjack box, if I remember correctly, and contained a small can of hash, tuna fish or a portion of some dense, cooked egg mixture. There were a couple of graham biscuits, several envelopes of sugar, powdered coffee or lemonade and a fruit bar. The packages differed. Sometimes they had cheese, a chocolate bar that wouldn't melt, bouillon cubes, matches, four cigarettes and toilet paper. They always contained chewing gum because the K-ration was packaged by Wrigley.
Every time I think about Army food, I think about the CBS cafeteria here where I work. It makes Army food seem like gourmet fare.
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