We Meant Well by Peter Van Buren Page B

roasted chicken and chicken enchiladas? Usually about a week. Cafeteria recycling was obvious as we went from chicken breasts to chicken nuggets to chicken salad until someone just finished the damn chicken.
    If you were at one of the more remote locations, there was a lower region of food hell. At places too small for a proper DFAC, the meals came in large foil trays, kind of a Stouffer’s frozen dinner for thirty. The Army called them T rations, of course shortened to “T rats.” One was labeled “main,” one “starch,” and one “vegetable,” and inside everything was parboiled to the point that, once it was reheated, you could play three-card monte with the trays and never know the difference. Even then the gods showed no mercy because typically one meal a day was not from a tray but from a bag. This was the bottom of the food ladder, the infamous MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, also known as Meals Rejected by Everyone or, less politically correct, Meals Rejected by Ethiopians. This was field food, stuffed into freeze-dried foil pouches. Supposedly with a nod toward the growing ethnic diversity of the military, the meals included “Chinese fried rice” and “Mexican tacos” alongside “traditional meatloaf in gravy” and “hearty beef stew,” but they all tasted alike, they were too salty, and the sachets were hard to tear open. There was usually a packet of instant coffee and I saw soldiers pour the crystals onto their tongues and let them dissolve in their mouths. You did get a treat inside each MRE bag, usually a slab of “pound cake” and some candy, plus a cute little bottle of hot sauce. MREs took the idea of food as a fuel to its limits, as a full bag contained some 3,000 calories, with a cold-weather version racking up more than double that. MREs do not promote healthy digestion, and many of the older soldiers complemented them with nuts or other fiber to avoid inglorious defeat at the hands of the enemy. Each MRE retained its optimism by including an amenity kit, with a tiny bit of “Paper, Toilet Type.”
    There was nothing more humbling than being completely sick to your stomach with only public latrines available. The unit where I lost my last shreds of dignity was a coed trailer with ten stalls and ten sinks flushing into a communal tank emptied by our Sri Lankan slave force twice daily, Gurkhas of the port-o-john. In between the flushes and heaves of my apocalypse, a soldier threw a package of Imodium over the stall door without a word being said. At various points in my life friends have shared beer, shared food, and shared a blanket, but I can’t think of a dearer gesture than the one made that day.

Basketball
    On evenings when I’d get tired of reading the self-congratulatory e-mails and press releases coming from the Embassy, I’d go out to watch the nightly basketball game. We had brought a backboard and regulation hoop all the way from the States, and the soldiers played as the air cooled off. The game was three-on-three. The soldiers played in a tight, disciplined way, not moving much but just enough, aikido-like, using the smallest of muscles in the slightest of ways to make the ball go where they wanted it.
    The youngest of the players was not yet nineteen. He’d been eleven years old when this war started, just a little older than the kids to whom Bush read My Pet Goat while New York burned. WMDs, 9/11, Colin Powell at the UN, Mission Accomplished, and torture at Abu Ghraib were events in history, like the tariffs and the Stamp Act he and the others probably tuned out in school. To them, we might as well have been standing at Sharpsburg or Gettysburg. The chances were good that this time last year at least one of the players was in high school, numbing his teachers with insistent pleas of “Why do we have to learn this? When are we ever going to use it in real life?”
    I doubt any of the soldiers