Who's hungry for an MRE?
The British C-130 has just landed at the Maimana "airport". Maimana is in East Jesus, Afghanistan - good luck finding it. It's just big enough to have a gravel landing strip instead of merely a dirt runway. My buddy and I are loading up, very ready to get the hell out of Dodge after being stuck there living out of our 3-day packs for a little over three weeks.
As we're getting manifested, the loadmaster - a British Sergeant - hits me up.
Loadmaster (LM): Hey Captain <PERSON>, our flight crew has been pretty busy this morning and didn't get a chance to grab any rations. Any chance we could get some MRE's from you lot before we take off?
<Thinking to myself: MRE's? Really? Surely she can't be serious - nobody wants MRE's, yet she's asking for them specifically?>
Me: Uhm, are you sure you want MRE's? The cooks can make you something fresh pretty quickly . . .
<PERSON>: Thanks, but the MRE's will travel better. There's four of us on board, can you hook us up with four MRE's?
Me: No problem. <I step down the ramp a little bit and point to a building just off the landing strip> MRE's are in that building right over there. I'll be right back, don't leave without me!
I take off to the supply shack where I find towering stacks of MRE boxes - we've been avoiding them like the plague. I reach into an open box and ratfuck four of the better ones, then catch myself. 342
<4 MRE's? I can do better than that\> I grab four full unopened boxes instead and hotfoot it back to the plane.
Loadmaster is double-checking a Land Rover as I come back up the ramp. I drop the boxes next to her and head over to buckle into my sling seat. The engines are already wound up and we should be off the ground pretty quickly.
Just before we start to taxi back to the far end of the runway to take off, the loadmaster walks around the Land Rover and taps me on the knee, indicating I'm to follow her. She leads me up to the flight deck and points me at the refueling seat in the back of the cockpit area.
<PERSON>: Sit there. After we take off, you can stand up and get a good view from the bubble. Once we get to Bamiyan, you need to sit down again for landing. Same thing again when we leave there for Kabul. Thanks for the MRE's!
Afghanistan looks a lot better from the air, and watching it unroll beneath me from the vantage point of a refueling bubble was spectacular. All for the price of a few MRE's we didn't want anyway.
If only MRE's worked as well for seat upgrades on Delta, American, and United . . . 119