Zero\u2019s piece on weird food items made me think of a story from the past. We were living in a subdivision out the back gate of NAS Pensacola in the late 70\u2019s where many of our neighbors were naval and marine aviators. I was the southeast regional military sales manager for a pharmaceutical company and had invited one our military broker reps to an \u201cAtta girl\u201d dinner. Since we were going to a seafood restaurant nearby, she and her date, a retired Air Force O-6, came to the house for pre-dinner drinks.
\nAs she came in the door she mentioned that she couldn\u2019t have much to drink on her empty stomach as she hadn\u2019t stopped work for lunch, the very work ethic that had earned her the Atta girl dinner. I told them we\u2019d just have a quick one in the kitchen and be on our way. A few minutes later, as we were standing in the kitchen with our quick drinks and learning something about the colonel, I saw the lady reach out and grab a handful of snacks from a black-lacquered oriental saucer sitting far back on the countertop. Except it wasn\u2019t snacks but those little, multi-colored pellets of moist cat food that come in foil packets. My wife had hastily picked it off the kitchen floor just before our guests entered the room and shoved it back where she thought it was out of sight.<\/p>\n
I gotta tell you I would have given anything for a video of what followed. Before I could say \u201cNo!\u201d the lady had tossed the stuff in her mouth and chewed perhaps three times before her eyes went wide, her cheeks ballooned and she ran for the sink where she finally managed to gag and rinse it all out. Once she got over it she joined in the laughter and we laughed about it all through dinner that evening. After seeing her response I have never ever been tempted to taste-test anything we feed our cats.
\nThe story has an interesting sequel: over dinner the colonel revealed that as a very young pilot he had been flying one of the B-17 bombers being ferried from the mainland to Hickam Field on the morning of December 7th, 1941. Short of fuel, they\u2019d had to land while the field was under attack. Realizing I was hearing living history, I asked him if he would be so gracious as to retell his story to some of my aviator neighbors and he agreed. <\/p>\n
As soon as we got back to the house I called some of them and soon had a full living room of strangely quiet and respectful young officers listening intently and occasionally asking polite questions. The colonel had flown bombers on a series of hairy missions throughout WWII in both the European and Pacific theaters and had one great war story after another. Even a marine major, who\u2019d flown Phantoms in Vietnam, and who had a reputation as a real hotdog, was respectful and attentive. The colonel kept that usually loud and boisterous bunch mesmerized until well into the wee hours by which time they had, in typical aviator fashion, consumed all my booze. But this time they did it much more quietly than usual. In fact, even though we lived there several more years, I never saw them so well-behaved ever again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"