Chow hall food on the recycle.

On a typical night you can always get hamburgers (vegetarian only), hotdogs, onion rings, French fries and grilled cheese (they make really good grilled cheese here). Your typical style American high in fat caloric intake. There is usually a choice of two main dishes. They have about 14 different main dishes they choose to serve here. Mix and match two main dishes with the staple of rice or mashed potatoes, and there are usually two veggie choices.

I am not sure who eats wax beans or why? They look like sickly string beans (green beans to some). Canned corn and cauliflower are staples in the vegetable mix-up. When you run out of enough of one kind to serve the base, you then serve mixed veggies.

Anyone else remember the swan pizzas? I do, and they have them in Iraq. It must be one heck of a delivery fee, but the pizzas are always available for chow. You can also get various types of sandwiches or a meager salad. For a combat zone the chow hall here is actually very well stocked.

Marine Hording

I am sure it comes from our training of having to do without, but what possesses Marines to horde ‎perfectly good items from the chow hall? I really don't know what causes this. I do know that you ‎can get 8 cans of soda in your cargo pockets (not mine per se, but a friend). I also have ‎witnessed 15 cans of "Rip-It" coming out of the chow hall by another Marine. Rip-Its are about ‎the same size as the baby soda cans you can get at Wal-Mart back home. Today I was guilty of ‎this action as well. We needed coffee creamer back at the shop, so I walked out with 12 packets ‎of creamer. 12 packets! That is a weeks worth of dairy creamer for me! Near-beer (or NA beer), ‎is another hot commodity. Non-alcoholic beer seems to go very quickly. Somehow our small ‎section of 7 Marines now has horded close to 18 cans of this stuff. It’s not even that good! I ‎imagine its going to be a tough transition when you go to a place that has "grab your own" sodas ‎with the meal not to just stuff 4 in your pockets and try to walk out when we all get home.‎

Pass the A1

The other day we were sitting in the chow hall wondering, "Where is the steak sauce?" Sure we all came to war, but Wednesday night is surf and turf night and here we are eating steak and shrimp in the desert. Of course we were only joking about not having steak sauce on the table. One has to wonder though. I can't say its terribly fun here, I still havn't made it to the MWR center yet or the base movie theater. One good thing about my section's job is the simple fact that all of a sudden someone will go "Wow its 17:00 already" and its then you realize you've worked all day and really havn't noticed the time.

-W