Read Tabasco's Hilarious (But On-Point) Cookbook For Troops In Vietnam

My husband is ROFLHAO at that comment. According to him, ham and mothers were no one's favorite, including the rats in the bunkers. But a stable shelf life of a couple of millenniums. He also wasn't fond of balut that was served with Panther Piss...but food is food. He liked getting Jiffy Pop, which was popped with a thumbnail of C4. Guess some things never change.

Loved C4 for cooking! The government heat tabs were just like CS gas unless used outside (rain or shine) and the user was upwind. We used to order demolition bags with C4 sticks just for cooking. Some guys used to strip C4 for cooking out of claymore mines, but that was another story. C4 was stable, odorless, smokeless and burned with high heat - a marble-size chunk could boil a canteen cup of water in about 20-30 seconds. My "stove" was a small C-rat can with the sides opened and pushed in. There were books of matches in every box of C-rats, so lighting up the C4 in my stove was never hard (unless it was typhoon conditions, or similar). I never had balut (i.e., "Donald Duck on the half-shell") in Vietnam - I first ran into it in the Philippines, but I did have Tiger Piss (beer), since our 2-can-a-day beer ration didn't often materialize. Foodstuffs I hated over there were nuok mam (fish sauce created by leaving fish guts in a jar in the sun - the older and more pungent, the better, according to those who liked it.) and the Vietnamese form of chitterlings (saw them being made once).