The video clip below shows a BBC reporter skeptically sampling US MREs. You can gauge for yourself the attitude he takes towards them.
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But one of the truly fascinating things about the Internet is how it can present a variety of reactions it presents to the same phenomena. In contrast to the BBC reporter is a Japanese man who has made the study of MREs from different countries his hobby. One might almost say that MREs are his obsession. This gentleman’s YouTube channel describes him as a civilian employee in a US military base who goes around buying MREs of different types on E-bay auctions. He has dozens of videos featuring rations from a wide variety of nations. There are rations from the UK, the JSDF, China, France, Australia, Russia, Canada. He has stuff from Chile, Korea, Italy, Spain, Germany and Switzerland. He’s even reviewed 20 year old East German rations, after which you understand just why the Warsaw Pact was so aggressive. In each video he opens up the package and exhibits the contents to the viewer. Sometimes (as in the case of the French rations) he actually tries to eat them.
I am not sure what one can learn from this fascinating parade of combat comestibles. But there is doubtless something. Perhaps some American graduate student in sociology or archaeology, desperate for a doctoral thesis subject, can follow the trail blazed by this tireless Japanese MRE enthusiast, and tell the world, in plain English, what the world of MREs tells us about a nation’s attitudes towards the tradeoffs between nutrition, taste and combat utility. Napoleon once said that an Army travels on its stomach. Maybe to some extent, it is characterized by its stomach.
French rations.
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I hope the food is better than the guy’s cinematic efforts. (The second video should have a dramamine warning.)
The BBC reporter must have spent most of his life in a cushy London job, dining at the ethnic restaurants that have sprung up as Commonwealth immigrants have exercised their Right of Abode… or Indefinite Leave To Remain. He doesn’t appear to have much enthusiasm for the MRExperience.
It is to be hoped the pleasures of London’s exotic dining offset somewhat the infelicities of Sharia shackles being fitted to the unbeliever’s ankles.
His next project will probably be space shuttle victuals.
Food is surprisingly heavy. If you have to carry cooking fuel, a sleeping bag, tent and clothes, ten days of food is about the most a person can tote. If all you want is to maximize is endurance, the energy/weight ratio is what you’ll care about the most. On the other hand, if you want some semblance of palatability then taste, variety and texture probably count for something.
MRE’s occupy one part, maybe the extreme part, of the energy/weight ratio spectrum. But it’s easy to see why the BBC reporter recoiled at the unbelievable durability of its packaging and the unconventional appearance of the food. It’s like nothing you see in nature. I may be imagining it, but I tend to think the different ration types reflect national tradeoffs between energy density, resource availability, food packaging technology and the requirements of morale. It’s amazing how “signature” some things are. The Tootsie Roll in the US MRE or the soy sauce pack in the Australian rations, for example.
since when has anyone in the world accepted the opinion of an Englander as to what constitutes good cuisine?– Regards, probus
probus: since when has anyone in the world accepted the opinion of an Englander as to what constitutes good cuisine?– Regards, probus
LOL. Here is an old joke on Heaven and Hell. There are many versions of this joke.
One version I have heard has :Heaven is an American house and a Japanese wife.
Hell is a Japanese house and an American wife.
http://www.msxnet.org/humour/heaven-and-hell
Fun post…another “signature” item in American MRE’s is the tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce, complete with a tiny label. Some MRE’s had a “cake” in them (more like a big cookie)…with chocolate and bits of fruit and nuts…they were really good, and high calorie no doubt. I don’t think there is any way, though, eggs can be packaged into MRE’s that would make them all all palatable (or even half-way pleasant to look at). Maybe that’s what the Tabasco sauce was for.
I wonder if there is something similar (national attitudes) to be seen in aircrew survival rations. I know American survival rations contain several cans of water and some tins of rice cakes and granola bars – kind of bland fare. IIRC, Australian aircrew survival rations, because the waters around Australia are so cold (????) and the need for large amounts of calories to counteract the cold, contain lots of chocolate.
I actually miss the old C-rations… in basic training (1981) we were given C-rations. I vividly remember the date “October 1957″ stamped on the bottom of the can of my all-time favorite… Turkey Loaf. There’s nothing that sez “Uncle Sam loves you” better than 24 year old turkey.
I have several weeks worth of MREs stashed away as part of my “earthquake kit,” and having sampled a few, would easily trade most of them for C-rations any day. But they do the trick. The key to culinary success is to make sure you get- and use- the warming pouches to heat them up.
I did part of the Appalachian trail back in ’87 and scratched up the gear for it on an impromptu basis. I loaded an Alice with as much instant oatmeal, dried fruit and salami and stuff as it would hold and hung everything else, sleeping bag, mat and whatnot, in stuff sacks strapped outside. For beverage I had instant coffee. There’s nothing like a lukewarm aluminum cup of instant oatmeal after walking six hours in the freezing rain, followed by a cup of black instant coffee, unless its crawling into your sleeping bag and just dropping off from exhaustion.
Comes a time when you dream of food. Any food. You get cumulatively hungry after a time on the road. One time I came into Lincoln, NH just as dark was falling and first thing I did was walk into a laundromat so I could clean out what I wore and wore. I think some Vietnam vet came in and saw the LC1 and said “I haven’t seen one of those in years”. Anyhow, I found an all night convenience store and bought about three pre-made sub sandwiches and a six pack of beer. I found a cheap motel and slept under a roof. Those 3 convenience store subs and the six pack tasted so good, I believe I poured the crumbs down my throat. Hunger is the best sauce.
Speaking of which, how widely it is overlooked that over the most of the terrain which Americans have had to fight on, how things like fruitcake, or crackers and peanut butter, or rehydrated hamsteak — stuff which is scoffed at, I suppose, by people who can eat better — actually represents an unimaginable luxury. There’s a website called http://www.greatdepressioncooking.com/Depression_Cooking/Welcome.html which has recipes from a time when people actually went hungry. Spam was a luxury in wartime Britain. It’s a luxury in many parts of the world even today.
Maybe I ate better than those three subs and that cheap beer, but nothing was ever as welcome. Here’s to the peaches and hard crackers. ‘Time held me green and dying, though I sang in my chains like the sea.’
MRE’s are quite good if you were ever exposed to the old C ration dog food can style.
Nothin’ and I mean nothin’ says “I love ya man” quite like a ageless fruit cake in a green can.
When backpacking, it’s not so much the food, as the water, and water content of the food. You just can’t carry too many days of water on your back, because water is heavy. Water to drink, cook with, or re-hydrate food if it is de-hydrated.
It’s interesting (and a little jarring) to read about how Civil War soldiers handled the ration issue when on the march.
Pooty would like to get a rid of nukes, but says: “You first!”
Comments 4 and 5:
During the Falklands War the British captured an Argentine and brought him aboard ship for interrogation. He refused to talk, leading one of the British reporters to remark “We’ll see how he feels about talking with six inches of cold British food in him.”
Just prior to Desert Storm the Wash Post got some of the top chefs in the DC area to sample some MREs and their comments were quite positive. One even said that with the proper seasoning he could see serving some of it in his restaurant.
I read where British PBY patrol bomber crews operating on anti-sub missions out of Africa and over the Indian Ocean were given canned food to eat on their 18 hour plus missions. But they would instead buy steaks and cook them during the flights. The canned food was tossed down in the bottom of the hull where it served as emergency rations in the event they got stranded somewhere. I suppose that when the load of food in the belly got too heavy for the aircraft to take off it was time to send it in for overhaul anyway.
A book I read on Allied aircrew escape and evasion in Europe revealed an obscession with food. When you think about it, that must have been a real problem. They remembered each rare decent meal with great pleasure.
As for C rations …. Anyone recall when C rations used to have a little package of cigarettes in them? Times have changed.
The French MRE are pretty tasty, compared to the American version – or so my daughter (the Marine) claimed. During one of the Bright Star exercises in Egypt, she says the French troops would hide when they saw my daughter and one of her buddies heading into their camp with a case of American MRE’s to trade.
Ahh, C-rations; ate them one whole summer: John Wayne crackers, ham and limas (nobody liked them), pound cake (good), cheese spread, and the can opener was the best device of all.
A friend of a friend tells me this story from an Iraqi from Gulf War I:
Gulf War I was mostly prosecuted via the Colin Powell doctrine of overwhelming force (back when we still had overwhelming force to do it with). Which meant continuous bombing for several weeks followed by mass infantry+tanks sweeping and swarming in. Not too exciting for our troops. In any case, one Special Forces man at the forefront had his birthday come up and so his mother pulled some strings with people on the base back home to get him a treat. She baked up the sort of chocolate cake that would keep, along with cookies, fresh milk, and all the paper plates and plastic forks one would need, and arranged with the military’s help to have it all wend it’s way to him on the military system. It wasn’t heavy and so with everyone’s happy conspiring it arrived on the special day.
So, as this man’s team was coming in to base and leading in/guarding a hearty crew of surrendered Iraqi soldiers and going to debrief, they were also each getting a paper plate with chocolate cake and milk and wishing the birthday boy many happy returns and thanking his mother for the effort.
One of the Iraqi soldiers who knew enough english and picked up what was happening and why the soldiers had cake forced himself to interject. He explained to the soliders in his halting english, “Until now, I didn’t understand the power of the United States… do you know that for the past two weeks, we have been eating boiled grass? Our city is forty miles away and they can’t get food to us without getting blown up by your planes. But if and American mother wants it for her son, she can send him a chocolate cake from around the world. From around the world!”
BBC:
“American MRE’s taste bad.”
“Obama should have fixed this long ago.”
“American Troops suck.”
“In fact, America sucks.”
“Move to the UK and get on the dole.”
…RWE, when I worked construction in the 60′s I met a fellow who had been in the army of occupation in Japan after WWII. When Korea started he was sent there in TF Smith. He told me they were given rations from WWII that had Lucky Strike greens in them and that the they were so dry you would light them and watch them burn like a fuse. He told me they smoked awful hot. He also told me that officers and non coms were ordered NOT to lead from the front as the troops would shoot them in the back and bug out. Another of lifes regrets that I didn’t ask him more about his experiences there.
Lewis and Clark took along their own version of MRE’s, called “portable soup”, on their trip across the continent. Portable soup was a dried soup of various beans and vegetables. So important did they consider this that they overspent their budget on it, eventually paying $289.50 for 193 pounds of the stuff (Stephen E. Ambrose – Undaunted Courage). At one point in northern Idaho they write about a camp in which all they had to eat was bear’s oil(grease)and soup. Our estimable British reporter would surely have wrinkled his nose at that fare.
Gordon
You must have worked forest fires. I remember one summer weekend when we were all waiting around the fire cache for a smokechaser call, we decided to rearrange the C-rations so we could fill our packs with food combinations we liked. Seemed like a good plan until the fire season went on and on and we all eventually subsisted just on the ham and lima beans, salty cheese and crackers and pound cake. I think we were all bound up tighter than Toby’s hatband for a month after that.
Wretchard, you make some very interesting observations WRT the various Nations rations. Watching that French ration video brought back a lot of memories. I was in Sector South in Croatia in 1994. The UN allotted fresh food for each sector and as the only non-Muslim battlegroup in our sector we got more than our share of Pork. We only got one fresh meal a day at most so I’ve eaten French, German, Canadian and US rations for extended periods. The US are the most practical by far with the Canadian IMPs coming a close second (way too much garbage, but Salmon? Yum). French rats had some pretty gross stuff and the German rats all seemed to be the same. It was all just fuel for the machine. Usually I just mixed as much of the ingredients like the salt pepper, crackers, soup mix and ate a mish-mash. I also usually carried a large jar of Curry power which helped. As a troop I remember hours of just standing around talking about what we were going to eat when we got back.
I remember one of the guys in my section telling me about his time in Srebernica in 92 or so. He said some of the locals were using the plastic wrapper the MREs came in as shoes…in the winter. Hard days. He also said the US aircrews were dropping pallets of MREs at first but later dropped individual MREs which got a little dangerous for he people on the ground.
I watched a few, including the Australian one out of parochial interest – seriously, an instruction sheet (0:08 – 0:09)? Does anyone know if this is standard practice around the world?
I can just imagine the horror of a Japanese man trying Vegemite too, and he only had a tiny smear of it, not the thick spread a lot of people here would have.
Loved the irony of soy sauce in an Aust ration being opened in Japan too! We’ve all come a long way since WWII…
I ate C-rations from WWII when I was a kid. My favorite was the thick wafer of cocoa which I ate whole, rather than try to put it in hot water. Spaghetti with meat sauce was a treat also.
My Aunt Dot used to cook up baloney fried in ketchup, a holdover from the Great Depression. My other Depression holdover favorite was the Hillbilly Special: Baloney and tomato on white bread with mayonnaise, and sweet ice tea.
At various times, I have had to live off of C-rats. Once, when I had to move for a new job and my wife had to stay behind to finish her semester in college; economy was key and I lived largely off of C-rats. It made me really appreciate MRE’s when they came along.
The early MRE’s were descended from the LRRP [Long Range Reconnaisance Patrol] rations where light weight and high calorie density were paramount. They gradually evolved. During the First Gulf War, my family ended up adopting 2 Marines and 2 Soldiers [and had partial share of an aircraft carrier through the school system]. Both the Marines and the Soldiers ended up being issued the early MRE’s which were both real bland and did not have the little bottles of Tabasco. I sent each one a quart of Louisiana hot sauce and bags of herbs and spices with instructions.
I do historical re-enacting as a hobby, and make and eat hard-tack. Yeah, food has improved. Given the operational parameters that the DoD has to work with, they actually do a pretty good job. Mind you, my wife and daughters have a different opinion [my son's Boy Scout troop gladly used them on a 75 mile hike] than I; but I would gladly have a few cases on hand for emergencies.
Subotai Bahadur
No.15 Luagha:
Interesting story about the cake in the combat zone.
What makes it even more interesting is that exact scenario is played out in the film “Battle of the Bulge” in which the German general shows his staff a fresh chocolate cake baked in Boston and sent by a mother to her son. He says that while the Germans are starving for fuel the Americans have so much they can fly cakes accross the atlantic.
My favorite story from Desert Storm is the Iraqi solidier who was captured in the desert and said, defiantly, “Aside from destroying our all supplies and blowing up all our equipment your air attacks didn’t do anything.” Gee, I wonder why we even bothered.
^15..Snake-eaters eating cake…what is the world coming to?
Re: 20. Andrew:
I read that at first the MREs were dropped in pallets over Yugoslavia but armed groups would get them and keep them. So they started breaking them up and tossing them out individually so that no one could grab them all. they called this approach dropping CBU’s or “Cluster Breakfast Units.”
I read where in WWII a C-47 landed on a remote island with a bad oil leak in one engine. There was no engine oil available on the island and rations there consisted only of rice, vegetable oil, and grape jelly. After a day ot two of that diet they decided they had to get outta there, filled the engine up with vegetable oil, took off and flew home. The vegetable oil stayed in the engine long enough to climb to cruising altitude where they could feather it.
Several years ago, Emeril Lagasse worked with the various services (through KBR) and created several MRE’s for our troops. So evolution is underway. Besides, does anyone know a single Marine or soldier that would give a BBC reporter an MRE that wasn’t at least on the verge of expiration anyway?
Interesting story about the cake in the combat zone.
My mother used some of her meat ration points during WWII to send Amish-made smoked sausages from the Lancaster farmers’ market to my dad during the Normandy campaign and after. His buddy’s (large) Italian family in the Scranton area sent homemade Italian sausages. My dad and Bumba were the most popular guys in their unit.
Gordon @ 14: That can opener is called a P-38. That is one handy device. I think you can still find them.
http://www.georgia-outfitters.com/page52.shtml#p51
There you go. Along with the heavier P-51 for mess hall cooks (I had forgotten about those).
The old C-rations with smokes. We were glad when we got Marlboros or Kools. The Camels were too dry and better used as a fuse.
well, in Afghanistan the french soldiers have the same “combat comestibles” as the Americans, the same organisation is supplying them for all the troops there I suppose.
Apparently it’s not very tasty !
In this video (a bit long) you’ll see the Pastor Isabelle bringing them “baguettes”,”saucissons”… etc, and they appreciate !
http://pasteur.isa.maurel.free.fr/
Otherwise, I have read that, in the first Irak war, some Americans attended the “légionnaires cantine” with pleasure too.
“A book I read on Allied aircrew escape and evasion in Europe revealed an obscession with food” RWE@12.
George Millar’s books “Horned Pigeon” and “Maquis” both contain long passages on food, recalling his experiences as a PoW in Italy, and as an SOE agent in occupied France. After being captured in North Africa, he was offered a drink by Rommel (about whom the story goes that his ideal war would give him German tanks, British crews, American supplies, and the Italians to fight against).
Food was a comic-tragic obsession in Britain, due to the rationing which would continue until 1954.
Years ago while serving in the United States Navy I had occasion to spend time aboard the HMS Albion, a Brith aircraft carrier participating in SEATO excercises in the Western Pacific. The food that those poor British seamen had to eat could only be described as horrible. Tough old mutton served with mealy potatoes. No wonder they spent a lot of time in their bunks drinking.
When the operation as reversed, the Brits could stay up to enjoy all four of the meals served aboard our vessel and buy additional snacks from the small stores. So when I see some Brit newsman turning his nose up at U.S. rations I get a good laugh out of it. I suppose he sees mutton as just another one of those good old English gourmet dishes.
The P-38 can opener has a mil spec number assigned to it now. Don’t recall what it is.
One time, back around 1982, a contractor gave me a quote for some rocket motor igniters, which were supplied in cans and so the original spec required a couple of those can openers be included in the box.
Those two mil spec P-38 style can openers were only going to cost us $3000.
Speaking of snake-eaters; Wretch, you may be interested in this Yon article about our SF in the Philippines:
Green Beret Loses Race and wins a Battle
Some great photos there
I served in the Army in the early ’60s. We ate quite a few C’s. I disagree about the ham and limas. They were some of my favorites. No one mentioned the beans and franks (excellent) and the canned meat. The meat was good when mixed with something else. All of the fruit was also good.
joe buzz@34
Yon’s reporting from the British Army tracking course was also, I thought, very interesting. I agree that he does have a good camera eye, I guess his background gives him a good sense of what needs to be in the picture.
Back in the U.S. Navy, late ’70′s, we had K-Rations dated 1944 during extended General Quarters drills. Big cardboard boxes with the K-Rats inside, that had been dipped in parrafin to seal. They had the P-38′s, 2 per box. Mad scramble to get (and keep) the P-38′s. Our game was to guess what we were eating without reading the labels. We had only about a 25% success rate with that. Supposedly the K’s were an improvement on the C’s. At least no one got sick from them. Remarkable, when you think about it.
Bill Mauldin accounts how German POW’s captured in Italy were regarding the food they were getting as a “war crime.”
The Geneva Conventions specify that your prisoners eat what you eat. The German POW’s could not believe what they were getting was the same as US Army combat soldiers.
Mauldin explains that there were two effects. One is that the combat soldiers were at the end of a long supply chain, and even mild levels of back echelon people taking “the good stuff” could leave the front-line soldiers in rags and eating swill.
The second is that the Germans had a conscious policy of reserving their best food for the front lines and saving the lower quality for the rear. When you think of it, the front-line soldiers are where you need the highest morale, and there were stories of rear echelon people volunteering for the front so the would not have to eat such bad food.
Bill Mauldin accounts how German POW’s captured in Italy were regarding the food they were getting as a “war crime.”
I wonder what the Russkis were giving their comrades captured on the eastern front.
We used to call the Brits Shiteaters. I was really surprised when the first time I went into a British mess for breakfast, they had a large deep pan of hot oil for frying eggs…and bread. Nothing like deep fried bread. Stewed tomatoes too, of course. Different strokes…
The same guy who told me about the MRE bombs told me one of the locals, and old lady in his words, led them to a pallet that was dropped. They came to the foot of a mountain and she didn’t hesitate and left him wheezing about halfway up.
Who else liked the John Wayne bars in the C’s?
Cold spaghetti and meatballs, the first inch of the can was orange grease.
Subotai, I used to do historical re-enacting as a hobby. Made some pretty good hard tack once. My pards pigged on it. What the sutlers sell is like Pop Tarts with no filling.
Greetings:
The best thing about the old C-rations was the culinary creative they called forth. A little cheese spread in the hot dogs and beans; some peaches on your pound cake, etc. And, of course, liberal doses of Mr. McIhenny’s hot sauce.
The LRRP rations were good and light but didn’t allow for as much creativity.
During my year (’69-’70) in Viet Nam at Da Nang, I ate quite a few MREs. It was all that was available when we were under alert. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t wonderful either. They were eaten cold.
That said, I bought a couple cases of MREs in the late ’90s for emergencies. It is amazing what 30 years did to improve them. And I had a Microwave to heat them, tho I did eat some cold…still good.
#42 Cannoneer #4
Never bought from the sutlers, alway make our own. Exposure to it tends to shock the K-12 students we sometimes do presentations for. A historical note. The last 1865 Civil War hardtack issued was given to troops of the AEF in 1918 in France. Which means that they actually shipped it across the Atlantic. If kept dry, the stuff lasts forever.
Subotai Bahadur
Instant mashed potatoes and canned corn, covered with fake butter, eaten in a frisbee. Hmmmmmmm.
Bathing in a perfect, clear, clean mountain stream, with a dead cow 100 feet up steam no one noticed.
I had a ‘friend’ once who put a paper towel in my Italian sub sandwich, I never noticed the paper towel. How is a paper towel soaked with oil different from sliced turkey? I don’t care about a generator, I did buy a Katadyn® Gravidyn. I need to vacuum seal more potato flakes though.
Does a frisbee need to be vacuum sealed?
RWE #33 said:
Those two mil spec P-38 style can openers were only going to cost us $3000.
—–
Don’t laugh yet. China thought they bought Hummer for 50 million. What they got was a dozen hammers.
I still carry a P-38 (the ORIGINAL one I kept from Basic Training!) on my key chain. It’s still sharp, still opens cans, and cuts just about anything else!
#46 “Bathing in a perfect, clear, clean mountain stream, with a dead cow 100 feet up steam no one noticed.”
Or as in my experience, drinking from a clear, clean mountain stream, only noticing the dead elk upstream five minutes later.
I still love Turkey loaf. Anyone wanna trade?
Ahhhh, good old C-rations. You gotta love ‘em. My favorites were ham and lima beans, green eggs and ham, spiced beef, and turkey loaf. All doctored up with genuine Louisiana Hot Sauce, and or Mrs Renfro’S Hot Chow Chow relish. Those two condiments would make any C-ration meal a delicacy. While in RVN my wife would send a month’s supply at a time. Once my men discovered the merits of Louisiana hot sauce and chow chow, I couldn’t keep enough of the stuff on hand to last a week. I would trade a dash of hot sauce or spoon of chow chow for a pack of C-ration cigarettes or for a can of peaches or fruit cocktail.
But nothing could help with digesting C-rations. I was constantly constipated. When my men, other NCOs, or officers accused me of being full of shit . . . I could hardly disagree.
I seem to recall that spaghetti came on line in “C’s” during my tour. It was decent with adds. The best I found was Beef spiced with sauce,throw in some Vietnamese green onions growing all over our A.O. and some hot sauce. It was flat out tasty. The beans and weenies invited culinary magic. Ham and eggs were inedible, but in the 25th Division we often got hot breakfast in mermite cans flown out from Cu Chi. We often got chicken fried steak also, although it was pegged as water buffalo.
The heat tabs for cooking C’s were pretty useless so we took claymores apart and cooked with C4. Once a claymore remnant in the trash burn set our night logger ammo dump on fire. Fortunately the Captain (lacking volunteers ) put it out.
I remember the tropical Hershey bars as being particularly nasty. Sundry Packs had better treats and smokes.
One day me and a friend while guarding the Phu Cuong bridge on the Saigon River hitch-hiked ,carrying 12 guage pumps to Lai Khe base camp for cheeseburgers. Oh to be young and foolish and bullet proof.
I just broke open one of my “earthquake disaster kits”….
Contents included in the .30 cal ammo can?
6 EA “Emergency Purified Drinking Water” exp. 08/10
1 EA MRE HEATER
1 EA Menu No. 23 “Chicken with Cavetelli” from the Wornick Company, McAllen, Texas. No expiration date.
Thankfully, where I live, the Coast Guard is more than happy to rid themselves of ammo cases… as long I paint over the details.
But I’d still trade it for a can of Turkey loaf. It was addictive.
Subotai, what period are you doing? I kinda build 18th century flintlock rifles…
Food & war –I tried everything for years and years to get dad to talk about what an FW-190 or ME-109 looked & felt like like boring in firing on his B-17 –but all he wanted to talk about was the different ways they cooked taters and cabbage in POW camp. And how blessed the Red Cross packages were when the Germans let ‘em in. The jam and sugar.
Al_Bat 36 ^ one of Yon’s partners a Navy Lieutenant Lara Bollinger was the photographer for that article.
#53 Grey Fox
My parent unit, such as it is [organizing reenactors is like herding cats] is Co. ‘I’, First US Dragoons [1830's-1860], wherein I am a private crewing a 12 lb. Mountain Howitzer. But I also do Civil War, either side as needed to help friends, and do presentations for schools. As a Yankee, I usually work with 4th US Artillery crewing a 3″ Ordnance Rifle. As a Reb I am a usually private in the 42nd VA. Infantry.
You are doing a bit earlier than I do, however I am the owner of an actual period Brown Bess [made in 1808 converted from flintlock to caplock in about 1860]. I got it from one of the officers I used to work with before I retired. He was SF reserve and went to Afghanistan right after 9/11. He found it in, of all places, an Al Quada arms cache and did the paperwork to bring it back for me. BEIC, Windus pattern according to the Royal Army Museum.
Subotai Bahadur
Soob old buddy, you’re my brother from another mother!
Served this piece at Fort Benning for an Officer Professional Development Class years ago. The gentleman who owns her has a truly impressive collection.
Saluted a Norwegian freighter at rock throwing-distance with FIVE pounds of FFg from this piece.
#57 & 58 Cannoneer #4
4th Artillery’s Ordnance Rifle is an 1863. It has an interesting history, the critical part of which is unknown. It was found in the 1970′s buried in a box filled with straw on a farm in South Carolina. Once the Union forces were in South Carolina, they did not, as far as we know, lose any pieces to the Confederates in combat. My guess is that someone stole the piece from a unit after the war passed them by, and hid it pending the “South rising again”. I have this mental picture of a very scared 2nd LT standing at full brace in front of a portly COL with muttonchops who is screaming at him, “LT, you lost a WHAT?”.
FIVE POUNDS of FFg!!? [expletives deleted because this is Wretchard's house.] My little 12 lb.-er fires 4 oz. for a demo, 6 oz. for a saluting charge, and 1 1/2 lbs firing a real round. I’d have loved to have been there.
However, being an artilleryman allowed me to become a musician with the Colorado Symphony a few times. Once I was First Chair, 12 lb. Mountain Howitzer [purely by chance position on the gun line]doing the 1812 Overture. We had more pieces than gunners, so we went down to a 2 man crew, and I had to hastily train a Topographical Engineer officer how to run the back end. As you can imagine, I watched his thumb rather carefully as I handled the screw, sponges, and rammer.
Subotai Bahadur
Re 20 and 26:
Back in 1993, we originally airdropped MREs in 1,000 lb CDS bundles dropped from about 17,000 feet but had accuracy problems due to lack of good ballistic wind data. Later on, when the Bosnian Muslims were cut off in certain urban enclaves like Mostar, we couldn’t use CDS bundles because the bundles would crash through roofs and possibly kill people. We started using a method called TRIADS, which scattered the individual MREs into the wind once leaving the aircraft, allowing them to fall harmlessly over the city.
Sarajevo was different. The airport there remained mostly open from 1992-95, and we flew in flour for the bakeries instead of MREs whenever the Serbs, who controlled all the high ground around the city, promised to stop taking shots at us for a while.
Mountain House freeze-dried #10 cans have served me and my extended family (Sister, nieces, etc.) through a number of hurricane seasons. My brother with his chronic infirmities used Mountain House to extend his pantry for a number of years before I returned from distant parts. A big can of spaghetti and noodles, for instance, stayed fresh with a snap-on lid after opening for months, even in the humid summer weather of mid-atlantic Chesapeake Bay.
I recommend storing tap water in used containers, and use a gravity-feed filter system. There are several brands similar to the British Berkefeld system. Yeah, if you store water in old soda bottles there will be leachates, but the charcoal adsorbs most of that. Generally, these systems have a reservoir above with about a 3-gallon capacity, with the water perfusing through 2 or 4 filters. You could increase efficiency if you designed a reservoir with a tall stack, increasing the pressure or “head” to force the water through the filters faster.
The best systems have torpedo-shaped filters of compressed diatomaceous earth around activated charcoal and even granules of [antibacterial] silver. Fill the top reservoir with water from a few jugs, and in a couple of hours you have really great clean water. The filters in time will accumulate a coating of nasty scume. They can be cleaned by scrubbing once every few months with those green abrasive scrubby pads. The filters have a threaded tube that extends below the reservoir, with a wingnut and O-ring to hold it fast.
Try looking up the 1993 cryptosporidiosis outbreak in the Milwaukee municipal water supply. Or the deliberate 1984 attacks of the Rajneeshee cult in Oregon, sprinkling Salmonella-laced fluids on restaurant salad bars, infecting at least 700 people. That same group was planning to put other pathogens in the public water supply, but were stopped before they accomplished that.
The British Berkefeld system has been around for about 100 years, and has been used in remote areas by missionaries, and distributed to disaster areas. You can use it to filter standing water from your back yard, or the ditch next to the field down the road. Filters out all bacteria, and a lot of nasty smells.
These can’t filter out viral pathogens, and a lot of poisons. So if you’re actually dipping from a creek that might be contaminated with sewage, you should still use chlorine, or purification tablets, or boiling. You can improvise an excellent filter for poisonous chemicals with a few pounds of activated charcoal, and several pounds of clean sand. You should be able to find these at hardware stores or online.
There are plans, some of them incredibly elaborate for multi-stage purification starting with physical screens for lumps and particles, distillation and off-gassing of volatiles, followed by filtering thru charcoal.
Good Grief.
Sounds like something for a survivalist compound, to me.
I just want a decent filter for when bacteria, hurricanes, tornados, or earthquakes screw up the municipal supply for weeks at a time.
If things really go to hell, trace pesticides in the rainfall will be the least of your worries!
C’s are just fine, especialy the limas/ham. Want a treat? Try K’s.