Deployed s'mores
Food isn’t something most people think about outside of “what should I have for dinner“. You pick your favorite restaurant, cook your favorite meal, get your favorite snacks. Most people don’t realize how important food is. Sure, it keeps your body moving. Eating the proper things makes you feel good and makes your body work and look it’s best! And eating the wrong things taste so good but too much can wear your body down.
But think beyond that. Have you ever thought how important food is for your mental well being too? Not a lot of people do until they become severely limited in what they have access to to eat.
My personal experience comes from three sources. Basic Training (boot camp), a natural disaster and a deployment. Being Communications in the Air Force, 90% of the time, puts me in a well established base where we have Dining Facilities and usually a few fast food restaurants too. I was stationed at Balad Air Base, just north of Baghdad. We had three or four D. Facs (prounonced Dee Facks) short for Dining Facilities. And I remember a Burger King, some sort of drink place, a Pizza Hut, and a Taco Bell. But add on the demands of a deployment and you don’t have much time to yourself. In my specific job out there I was one-deep. Meaning I was the ONLY one who could do my job. Now for smarts sake I taught the Shop Chief how to handle the mission part but he couldn’t do the whole job. So if there was a mission going on, I was at work. Not a big deal, made the time go by so much faster, but it did severely limit where I could eat. My options were: the D. Fac.
Now don’t get me wrong, the food was good! The Local Nationals (in this instance Iraqis) were the ones who actually did most of the cooking and serving. Great group of folks too! There was one I didn’t even need to tell what I wanted 🙂 he already knew my order. (it was tacos in case you were wondering…) What I found interesting is the food tasted different. The spaghetti tasted like it was the same recipe, but made with a different heart. There was just…something DIFFERENT about it. Not in a bad way but just different.
The reason I ordered tacos was two-fold. One, by the time lunch came around, my mission was in full-swing, or about to start in any minute. The D. Fac always had tacos, it was something easy I could ask my shop mates to grab for me. Two, for some reason my mom sent me Del Taco hot sauce in a care package. Probably the second-best thing that I was sent out there. (the first were Happy Birthday cookies from one of my dads 🙂 I have three dads, story for another day) Del Taco is my favorite fast food restaurant. It exists primarily on the west coast and I spent two years working there before I joined the military. I still love it! Unfortunately Texas (where I’m stationed) only got a Del Taco recently (and it’s a 3hr drive). Del Taco is one of the tastes of home for me. Those little hot sauce packets gave me a connection to home I so desperately needed. It’s amazing the comfort that food can provide.
When I first arrived we were limited in breakfast. They had the usual but the eggs were those powdered easy-to-ship, never goes bad, type of eggs. Sure they tasted like scrambled eggs…mostly. I can’t tell you how much of an uproar (in a good way) it caused when they started bringing in fresh eggs. We could have them any way we wanted! (at first..then they decided it was too risky to cook them any way other than over-hard and hard boiled lol) It was amazing!! Also when I first arrived they had these amazing cheese sticks you could get at lunch. Then suddenly they stopped having them 😦 We were all disappointed but that’s the way of deployments, you hardly ever get the food you want. But a few months later, there they were again! It was too funny, the word passed all the way down the line. I’m sure it started inside the D. Fac where someone spotted them, and then it filtered back to us waiting in line. EVERYONE was excited about their return!
I want to explain the photo for a moment. I call those “Deployment S’mores”, everything used to make it came out of care packages. You get inventive while you’re out there. The gram crackers came in a care package I got from the New Apostolic Church, the Peeps from my mom (she always sends me Peeps, I love ’em 😀 ) and the M&Ms from a care packages a guy in the shop got and put into the share box. We had to burn some of our classified material (classified shredders are in short supply, burning is an approved way to destroy classified when approved-for-classified shredders are not available) and I just HAD to make use of it! Thus was born the Deployment S’mores. You get inventive with MREs (Meal Ready to Eat) too. Luckily my experience with those is more limited. I had them for a week during Basic Training, and two weeks after Katrina.
During my six month long Tech School, every other Friday I would cook for me and my friends. We called it “Cat Food Friday!” (My nickname is Neko, Japanese for ‘cat’) we all pitched in a few dollars and we got a home-made meal and a great time together. We had access to the Chow Hall (state-side Dining Facilities, don’t ask me why they have different nicknames) a few fast food places on base, and off base ones limited by how far you could get in an amount of time (most of us didn’t have cars) but we all still craved that home-made taste. Lukily we had access to a morale center called the Levitow in the Triangle (the area where the students lived) where there was a kitchen and just about everything you needed to cook with!
Food isn’t just simply a substance to survive on. It’s amazing how important it is for morale and mental well being. You miss, with your whole heart, that food you’re so use to. That Burger King down the street, your dad’s spaghetti, your mom’s burritos, the way you make your tuna sandwiches. Enjoy the little things in life! It’s what gets us by all the tough times 🙂
Military Oxymoron 