S.O.S.

Today is the Anniversary of something. It took me a while to figure it out but 67 years ago today, April 10th, I had the worst breakfast any human being has ever endured. First let me tell you that I was inducted into the United States Army at the old Armory in Detroit, Michigan and after taking one step forward and pledging my life to the defense of our country they put us on a bus and drove us to Fort Custer at Battle Creek, Michigan just about 112 miles West. They got us bedded down and woke us up before dawn and marched us over to the mess hall. What a mess. This was an old, old Army camp and it had been reopened to handle troops during the Korean Police Action. (That was what they called it then. It never was called a “war”) This old facility had these old coal stoves. Big iron things. And that morning they offered us the choice of having pork gravy on biscuits or else just starving. Evidently they had burnt up this old batch of what we called SOS that had been badly handled by the coal fire and had a sickly black color. It was also ice cold. As we walked down the food line a private slopped it onto our metal trays. It was absolutely inedible. I just looked up “inedible”: uneatable · indigestible · inconsumable · unpalatable · unwholesome · unsavory · stale · not fit to eat · rotten · bad · putrid ·and rancid. Well, it was all of those and worse. Most of us ate everything on our trays except that mess, drank our coffee and headed to the garbage cans to clean our tray but there was an old sergeant standing by the cans who informed us that in the Army you ate everything on your trays. Well that day we learned who it was we would be fighting against in the coming two years. It was the United States Army. So in honor of this anniversary I took my sweetheart over to Bo Jangles and we enjoyed hot and unburned Biscuits and Sausage Gravy.