Consolidate Mess line, or German prisoners marching out of Stalingrad?
In almost every way, I liked the draft Army and the Cold War
Army better than the 21st Century Army, but that is not true of
food. More specifically, that is not
true of the way the food was served at Fort Carson, Colorado, in 1975-76: The
Consolidated Mess!
In the consolidated mess, up to 4,000 soldiers were expected
to eat lunch and return to their duty—which meant eating lunch in two minutes
or just skipping lunch altogether. The
cost cutting wizard who decided to subject an entire brigade to the rotten
routine for food delivery should spend a thousand years in Purgatory in a metal
pan on steam table—stuck and burned on the bottom, cold and squishy on
top.
My father was a company commander in World War II. The mess sergeant worked for him and cooked
the food for his men. That mess sergeant
worked for his commander, not for a faceless Army bureaucracy. One odd thing about the consolidated mess
operation is that we all came to appreciate our own mess sergeant and the
battalion mess. When we went to the
field, our mess sergeant fed us. It was the same when moved en masse to West
Germany for Brigade 76. The food in the
field was from a battalion kitchen with our mess sergeant making and delivering
our food.
But the best food I ever ate in the military was in Iraq. So
I have to give the modern Army that. MREs are ten times better than C-rations
and the food on Camp Adder was the best I ever had in the Army.
