HOT "POWDER"?!?!?! WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?

My unit in the marines Beta tested the very first MREs in the field -- and we fucking HATED them!  But one of the things we told the test observers (other than that they tasted like dogshit) was that they desperately needed to have Tabasco sauce included in them.  And it was.

Prior to that we all carried bottles of the stuff in our packs for our C Ration meals and, eventually, when MRE 2.0 were introduced they included tiny, single-use plastic bottles of tabasco in each MRE pack.

Normally I would find it hard to believe that they decided to substitute "hot powder" for real tabasco sauce but....it is the gummint sooooo.......

Anyways, a story related to military meals involved your author and one Corporal Joe Gordon.  Joe was in my unit in Spain and was stuck on what was known as "legal hold" for pulling some unlawful, likely highly depraved shit off base that got him criminally charged by Spanish authorities and under the SoFA (Status of Forces Agreement) prevented him from being able to rotate back to the World until his case was resolved.

Legal holds could last years....or even a decade or more, and Joe had been stuck in Spain on an initial two-year tour for almost five years.  We actually had a sergeant there, Sergeant Noriega, who had been on Spanish Legal Hold since the Tet Offensive -- and this was 1980!

Long story short; our unit had gotten a huge fucking resupply of C Rations from a Marine Amphibious Unit that had passed through on its way to the Eastern Med and they had dropped off a couple hundred cases for us consisting of 12 individual meals per case and Joe and I, being big fans of C Rations, decided we needed to scrounge some for our own uses.

They were under lock and key in the supply shed on the far side of our parking lot and were under guard. But Joe and I knew how things worked and how to get the guard away from the shed and so, late one dark night we lured the guard away, picked the lock to the shed, and over the course of ten minutes we fleeced off with fifty cases of C Rats.  Which we divvied up 25 cases apiece and took to our respective off-base apartments.

My dog Alpha, whom I had just recently rescued as a 10 week old pup, was pretty much raised for the next two years on stolen C Rat meals when we were off base at our apartment -- and when we were on duty on base she ate ham and cheese omelets and freshly baked crullers from the chow hall.

FYI, I took Alpha back to the World with me when I rotated home and she lived with my family in Princeton, New Jersey.  Where she lived to be almost 17 years old.

Alpha at about age 15 at home in Princeton