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How on Earth did the 101st Airborne get on without Lt. Col. Sonya Cable?

I see Lynn "Buck" Compton has died - he was a good age - 90.

For those who don't know who Buck Compton was - as a young man he was a Lt in the 101st Airborne during the second World War. As an aside, later on, he was the prosecutor who put Sirhan Sirhan behind bars for the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

As a young man he parachuted into Normandy on D-Day and into Holland as part of the ill fated Operation Market Garden. He also fought at Bastogne during the battle of the Bulge. His WW2 exploits are relatively well known, unlike those of thousands of others because they were documented in Stephen Ambrose's "Band of Brothers" which became a TV miniseries.

Be that as it may, the food in the Army of his time was notorious for being a bit rugged shall we say.

In these enlightened times building Soldiers takes special skills and the U.S. Army Soldier Fueling Initiative is under the command of one Lt. Col. Sonya Cable who wants to make sure that young soldiers eat their greens.

They have labeled all foods available in the mess as Red, Amber or Green depending on how bad they are. And the food is washed down with water from a hydration station which replaces soda machines in modern army messes.

They couldn't quite manage to take the red items off the menus, they tried but reality reared its ugly head.
"All the foods are labeled throughout the serving line so that our soldiers would be informed as to making choices related to their performance goals,” Cable said.

“I had some folks say to me, ‘Well, why on earth did you even include the red ones to begin with?’ Two reasons – one, we’ve got soldiers who have racehorse metabolisms that they needed every calorie I could get into them. And by taking off the ‘red’ we just found that we couldn’t get enough calories in them.”

The second reason for including “red” foods, Cable said, was “so they could learn what contributed positively and maybe what contributed negatively. Not to say that every food is bad, it’s just how they fit into your performance goals.”
Whatever they fed the boys back in the early 1940s, and I'm fairly sure it wasn't green salads, can't have done them too much harm, given the way they performed on the battlefield and the longevity of Buck Compton, Memory Eternal

Comments

  1. Just one more reason to keep women out of the military.

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  2. Back in '66, we thought there should have been warning labels on all our chow; nonetheless, how is any of this nonsense supposed to help us win wars? Or is that no longer the purpose of Obama's military? For some reason, I have trouble envisioning a bunch of mineral-water sipping 'soldier-athletes' under the command of LTC Sonya Cable (a fine name for a James Bond villainess), knowing the answer to the question, "What's the spirit of the bayonet?"

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  3. Ah yes..and "the quick and the dead, Sergeant!" :)

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  4. Back in the 70's, eating our rats that had date-expired in the sixties-we were told that if we couldn't deal with shit food, we just weren't hard enough and should just fuck off now...

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  5. Which is absolutely true. Not as though you can just pop downstairs to the 'fridge when you're on ops, is it?
    Anyway, it's amazing how the food improves in direct proportion to hunger...

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  6. I think we all need to relax about this a bit. The soldiers who fought in WWII did not have nutritionists looking over their backs, and they did (more than!) just fine. --- But, since we have more understanding of how to sustain physical health, why not apply that understanding? We don't want marines wasting time "counting calories" but surely we want them as healthy as possible? It's not ALL liberal woosyness

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  7. I think we all need to relax about this a bit. The soldiers who fought in WWII did not have nutritionists looking over their backs, and they did (more than!) just fine. --- But, since we have more understanding of how to sustain physical health, why not apply that understanding? We don't want marines wasting time "counting calories" but surely we want them as healthy as possible? It's not ALL liberal woosyness

    ReplyDelete

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