Ah, the MRE. That portable, “tasty” meal eaten by US troops in the field, or when one’s unit doesn’t have anything else with which to feed people. As someone who has been in the military, I’ve eaten my share of them. They seem really cool at first, but that coolness factor wears off after about your second or third MRE. That’s when they start tasting the same.
A few years ago, my Air National Guard unit went to South Dakota for a two-week training exercise with the Army. During that time we had three meals a day: one hot meal and two MREs. Because we were in the Air Force and not the Army, we weren’t too keen on playing Army games and pretending we were at war. So we would leave our compound and go to McDonald’s or something similar for one of those meals. This resulted in a large collection of MREs for myself. After sitting in my basement at room temperature for the last three years, a good friend of mine really wanted to try one. So, I decided to document his experience for you all to see.
Continue reading ‘A guide to eating a “delicious” MRE’
[digg=http://www.digg.com/political_opinion/Why_I_fled_George_Bush_s_war_2]
Joshua Key, 28, was a poor, uneducated Oklahoma country boy who saw the U.S. army and its promised benefits — from free health care to career training — as the ticket to a better life. In 2002, not yet 24 but already married and the father of two , Key enlisted. He says his recruiting officer promised he’d never be deployed abroad, but a year later he was in Iraq. Only 24 hours after arriving, as Key recounts in The Deserter’s Tale (Anansi), he experienced his first doubts about what he and his fellow soldiers were doing there.
I was scared out of my wits that first day in Ramadi. Our own air force had just finished bombing these people, but as soon as we got out of our vehicles we began patrolling their streets, on foot. With nearly 100 lb. of weaponry, equipment and clothing on my back, I was about as mobile as a cow. It was just my platoon, 20 guys, walking single file through streets full of Iraqis. I could not stop thinking that anywhere, at any time, some half-starved sniper on a roof could have taken me out in no time flat. Iraqi kids surrounded me in swarms, hands out, asking for water and food. I kept hearing the last words [my wife] Brandi said to me before I flew out: “Don’t you let those terrorists near you, Josh. Even if they are kids. Get them before they get you.”
I was awakened at 3 a.m. that first night and told to get my ass up quickly because in one hour we were going to raid a house full of terrorists. Capt. Conde and some sergeants showed me and my squad mates a satellite photo of a house and a drawing of the layout of the inside. Our assignment was to blow off the door, burst into the house, raid it fast and raid it good — looking for contraband, caches of weapons, signs of terrorists or terrorist activity, then rounding up the men and getting out damn fast. The longer we stayed in any one location, the longer somebody would have to put us in the sights of a rocket-propelled grenade or lob mortars at us.
Read the rest here.
