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ATE MY FIRST MRE

7K views 46 replies 26 participants last post by  [486] 
#1 ·
Wow. Not bad. Better than my old ladies cooking. Grilled chicken or whatever the hell it was. Sure beat C rats hand down.
I am sure after a few weeks of eating them you could get sick of them real quick.
But I was impressed with the taste and quality of the whole package.
We used to carry a case of C rats which was not lite.
If nothing else these have got to be easier to carry for our young troops.
Took me a damn hour to figure out how to cook the damn thing.
Even my cat liked the chicken. Come to think of it it did taste a little bit like cat.
 
#2 ·
yea some aint to bad. i like the candy, the wheat bread with cheese,peanutbutter, and or jam. and oh the dairy shakes are kick ass to. but when you get a case of them to fit into your pack before you go on a 10-20k hump out to the field, and have the extra weight until you eat them. they get heavy. quick. only thing is once you eat em for a while you do get sick of them, they start to taste the same eating them 3 meals a day especially breakfast, sucks. and then they plug ya up.
 
#6 ·
nope ive had a OORAH/hooah bar. one side said one thing the other side side said the other. im sure the coast guard bars and OORAH bars are the same. like a bad "power bar":sick:
 
#4 ·
Ah you young spoiled young bucks. :geezer: Ever eat a LRRP ration. Huh.
Spoiled young whipper snappers. Ask Dinged how they taste. :nanabang::wave:
 
#5 ·
I tasted something my uncle called 'c or k rats' (don't remember which) when I was a little kid. It was nasty! He was 82nd back in the day, he called them 'left overs'. He used to take us kids back into a rock quarry to watch him blow stuff up. Home made. I don't think he'd get away with that in todays political enviroment. He was a great man.
 
#10 ·
I can't possibly relate to all the stories you guys have, as I never spent any time in the service. However, for a little more than a year now, my best friends from school have been Marines. They have been telling me more stories, and more tidbits of useful information than I can ever remember. Among those bits of knowledge they have given me, is how to REALLY have fun with an MRE.

The little MRE heaters and the tiny little bottle of tobasco and a 20oz water bottle can be made into what might be considered a pranksters MRE based tear gas grenade (just add water) There's not much to it, and it works.

Just thought I'd share that since we had fun with it.
 
#12 ·
A good bud who's been recalled into service in the sandbox, a heavy equipment mechanic, really has fun making MRE "bombs" and pisses off his co-workers on a regular basis. Things a bored serviceman will do :D
 
#18 ·
Chip. LMAO. I know what yer talking about. Yeah one night, one meal was good. But oh God I know what yer talking about brother.
Here is a picture of the menu from the "C" rats I took. Oh God talk about bad. Damn If the enemy didn't kill you the food would.
Kernelkrink was correct. Some of the early guys had to eat "K" rations from WWII. Now there collector items. LOL.
 

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#19 ·
I've got Ten Cases of the 2008 Menus in stockpile. Should the Meltdown of Western Civilization come tomorrow I'm good for 120 days ;) Guessing that I could survive off of one a day.
 
#22 ·
When you are ALL OUT, this stuff comes in handy.

I may shoot the tree squirrels here till they run out with the Marlin .22CAL. After we clean them all out, who knows?

If you have a freeze dried something you can throw into a boiling pot of water and eat, More power to you!

Better collect a few things here folks. It is coming for sure!

Be ready for it.
 
#23 ·
They are not kidding about the constipation. We used to think it was the cheese spread or peanut butter that plugged you up. Can't say for sure, but we used to avoid eating those spreads back in the 80's. I've noticed that the menu's have gotten more diverse since then, but it used to take me 3 days or so before I could down MRE's any time I was deployed in the 80's.
 
#24 ·
It's the massive amount of sodium in them that plugs you up, which ain't a bad think if you're covering a checkpoint of any sort.

Anywhere in the range of the equivalent of 8-12 canteens of water keeps the works going though, the poop will just be a bit darker than normal.
 
#25 ·
One thing many folks may not be aware of is that rations are designed for one of two things. First, if you can eat low residue food, there's less to crap out, and thus less crap. This makes living in the field easier. However, low residue food is usually bland as hell (ask me how I know!) and the long inactivity of the bowel can be downright dangerous health-wise (again, I found this one out the hard way). So they go for second - very high in fiber and non-digestible residue, which means the crap is very compacted and solid. This reduces significantly the amount of sanitary cleanup required. And of course, less traces of human occupation in an area. Clean-breakers don't take a lot of ass-wipe... Of course, if you've got hemorrhoids, delivering an anal brick is going to be totally un-fun.

I'm guessing that for long-range covert missions, the rations would fall back to the low-residue. One can eat a sufficient caloric intake and only have to crap after several days.
 
#34 ·
do I *really* want to go while Ivan/Achmed/Ling-ling is scoping me out?
If you rent the movie "Some Kind of Hero" you'll see what develops when that situation occurs... it's a darned good movie, and not at all what you'd expect from the guy who made it.


Seriously, modern military rations are a freakin' marvel. They're nutritious, can be eaten without further cooking, and can be stored for years or decades with almost no regard for environmental conditions. They're portable individual units; platoons aren't tied to cookwagons or required to "forage". (military term for stealing from civilians) What they taste like is way down on the list of requirements for military rations.

The concept of "packaged long term meal" is quite recent; an enterprising wine bottler sold the idea to Napoleon, who was having some nasty logistic problems. The bottler had lost most of his previous customers, and wanted to sell bottles to *somebody*... they started by packaging soup and canned meat in wine bottles, and it all evolved from there.

I recently read a biography of Alexander the Great. After he conquered Persia and marched off east, he had very few losses in military contact; his horde outnumbered the cities they encountered by as much as 100 to 1. But only about fraction of the original group who left came back; most of the rest starved, even spread out so far communications between units were difficult. The areas they were conquering were already populated to the maximum the agriculture of the day could support. Things got so bad he started sending big chunks of his horde back to Persia, but their back trail was a wasteland. Only a few returned to Persia; nobody knows how many starved vs. how many turned in some other direction and never came back.

Until practical food storage developed, armies marched when food was available. Now we just air-drop MREs as needed, and go anywhere, any time.
 
#30 ·
Dare I ask what that "brown stuff" is on the left ??



SwampBilly
That's the Accessory Pack that comes with salt, pepper, sugar, instant coffee, non-dairy creamer, 2 pieces of candy-coated chewing gum, a packet of toilet paper, a 4-pack of commercial-grade cigarettes, and a book of 20 cardboard moisture-proof matches.
 
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