Food

With little time to get over the shock of discovering an unknown country, most of our men are sent directly to the front lines. Once there, the first trouble many of them face is not what one might expect...For the first five or six months, we ate a lot of British food. That was no good. But when we got some American rations. That was great! You got a little package and that was a day’s ration in the thing, there’s things like weiners and beans, lima beans, stew. There was chicken and a pack of cigarettes in the rations. At night, we had a beer. There was ice cream and steak. It came out of a tin, but it didn't matter. It was good. Got to be boring after the first week. If you had to eat out of a tin in the winter time, you put a dent in the tin with your riffle butt or whatever you had, threw it on the fire, and when the dent came out you knew it was safe enough to eat. Always eating rations caused problems, because we often had stomach pains, diarrhea . . . I ate British rations from the beginning of World War 2. And now, in 51 or '52, it was all coming back to us in rations. It wasn't too fresh, y'know. Meat that's been in a tin for 15 years doesn't taste very good. The infantry brought their kitchen up with them, they ate fresh rations. In the armored corps we got one hot meal a day and we had to go down and pick it up from the infantry. And he didn’t like us, because every time they missed us they’d hit his kitchen (chuckles). One time, we were in a place where we didn't have rations. For some reason or another, they just hadn't got to us, so we ate chestnuts. A tangerine orange… over there, they grew like apples grow here… everywhere. That's how it was. We ate a lot of them! The rats made a good meal for Koreans. Rats ate well in Korea. Oh, yes! When they caught a rat (there were some nice long ones), they'd skin it—it was nice red meat—and they ate it. It was quite a treat for them when they caught a rat.