{"id":54455,"date":"2014-08-09T10:00:45","date_gmt":"2014-08-09T14:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=54455"},"modified":"2015-02-08T08:35:08","modified_gmt":"2015-02-08T13:35:08","slug":"eat-em-gdamn-it-theyre-better-that-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=54455","title":{"rendered":"\u201cEat \u2018Em, G**damn It \u2013 They\u2019re Better That Way\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

People talk about Army cooks all the time. But truth be told, it\u2019s a fairly rough job \u2013 and an essential one.<\/p>\n

Yes, the conditions are fairly easy compared to some specialties.\u00a0 But based on what I’ve observed as a non-cook over the years, the hours are damned long, the work doesn’t seem to be that much fun, and it’s pretty thankless.<\/p>\n

And having a decent chow hall can be make-or-break for a unit, morale-wise. The old saying, \u201cAn Army marches on its stomach,\u201d is in the final analysis true. If the troops don\u2019t eat, pretty soon they won\u2019t be marching \u2013 or fighting.<\/p>\n

Still, as a group cooks tend to be . . . well, let\u2019s just say that many of them seem a bit \u201cASVAB-challenged\u201d. And some of them seem to be flat-out freaking crazy as well. I remember one unit mess sergeant telling me that he went out for a night of partying once, got into his car with a couple of ladies and a buddy or two, gave someone else the keys, and passed out in the back seat after talking about going somewhere in New York – then woke up some hours later somewhere on US15 in Pennsylvania, headed north.<\/p>\n

He had to be at work later that day. Somehow they made it back in time. I didn\u2019t ask how fast they drove to get there. (smile)<\/p>\n

We also had a cook come to the unit one day on his off-duty time, point a pistol at the CQ (or maybe it was the CQ runner), and \u201cdry fire\u201d said pistol. That guy ended up PCSing to the crossbar hotel for a couple of years.<\/p>\n

Still, the most outrageous cook story I ever heard or saw wasn\u2019t either of those – or even this story<\/a>. Rather, it was one related to me by another mess sergeant around the time of the two incidents above.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer:\u00a0 I wasn’t there to see what follows personally, so the story could be bogus.\u00a0 Dunno.<\/p>\n

But it’s still IMO worth telling.\u00a0 And since Jonn lets me post stuff here, well, you’re stuck with hearing it.\u00a0 (smile)<\/p>\n

. . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

Seems the second mess sergeant I spoke of above had run a mess hall in Germany before coming back to CONUS. His mess hall in Germany had supported one of the GOs there.<\/p>\n

At the time, the GO was senior enough to be authorized a personal cook; the guy was tapped to provide that cook from his mess hall. So he detailed one of his cooks \u2013 who was indeed a damn good cook \u2013 to be that General\u2019s personal cook.<\/p>\n

The General in question was reportedly a very decent fellow. But like everyone else he did have his idiosyncrasies. One of this General\u2019s quirks was that he only ate fried or poached eggs.<\/p>\n

The first day, the new cook made breakfast for the General. He took it to the General, and served the General\u2019s his breakfast \u2013 a nice, big American-style breakfast, well presented on the plate, complete with a big serving of hot, fresh cooked eggs.<\/p>\n

Scrambled eggs.<\/p>\n

The General frowned. He turned to the cook and said, \u201cI guess nobody told you.I only like my eggs fried, or poached.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cook answered back. His alleged reply is the title of this article.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, the guy was no longer cooking for the General.<\/p>\n

It also seems that the guy wasn’t merely “ate up with the dumb@ss”, or trying to get out of the assignment (or the Army).\u00a0 As the story was told to me, the cook was sent for mental evaluation after the incident \u2013 after all, he’d have to be freaking crazy to talk to a GO that way, right?<\/p>\n

Well, it turned out the shrinks found the guy really did have mental issues that he’d been hiding (or that his buddies had helped him hide).\u00a0 The guy was sent back to CONUS posthaste. I think he was discharged from the Army not long afterwards.<\/p>\n

Still, I\u2019d have loved to have been a fly on the wall when that cook told the General that scrambled eggs were better. The look on the GO\u2019s face on hearing that had to have been priceless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People talk about Army cooks all the time. But truth be told, it\u2019s a fairly rough … \u201cEat \u2018Em, G**damn It \u2013 They\u2019re Better That Way\u201d<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,170],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blather","category-who-knows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}