Forum: Air Force Life

How about a fun thread? I will start it off by telling about the funnest thing I ever saw in the Air Force...I am sure more stories will follow.

The time is 1982, the place is Rygge Air Base in Norway. It was our first big deployment out of Shaw AFB, the 19th TFS in a month-long deployment. We made it out there okay, but there were some logistical issues that took a while to get ironed out. One of them was lunch.

When we got to Rygge, we stayed in the dorms and ate in the chow hall. We had no idea that we were supposed to make sandwiches for lunch out of the huge spread that they laid out for breakfast, so we kind of roughed it out for the first week or so until they spun up for a real lunch. In the meantime, the squadron coughed up some new-fangled rations called MREs, Meals Ready to Eat. We experimented quite a bit with those, and some of the guys actually preferred them to the food in the Norwegian chow hall.

Most of the experimentation involved heating them up (these were the days before the heating tabs). As those of you who have eaten them may recall, all of the goodies were packed in thick vinyl envelopes with a foil lining, and the whole package could be boiled if necessary, or hot water added and stirred to a dehydrated chunk of pork, etc. We tried numerous ways to heat them up, my personal favorite being laying them on top of the engine of the launch truck and driving around for about fifteen minutes. Perfect! All of the Tab-Vs had a little room in them with a phone, a bunk or two, and a wall-mounted heater. These heaters were also great for preparing your MRE entrees, and lots of the crew chiefs did just that, since they had to hang out in the shelters anyway with their jets.

As a young two-striper, I was meat to be dropped off at the shelter for fire guard duty, and on this day I was to stand fire guard for a "hot-cock". The pilot arrived, did his walkaround, and climbed into the cockpit to fire up the jet. Just before he was to start, the crew chief (whose name escapes me now) ran quickly into the little sleeping area and came back out with one of those little brown MRE pouches with goodies inside (Chicken a la King was the most sought out, while the pork pattie was tied for most disgusting with the hot dogs floating around in a bag of grease) and a pair of safety wire pliers. As I watched, he clamped the safety wire pliers tight onto the top edge of the MRE pouch, and when the pilot went to START 1 and the JFS doors opened, he jammed the pliers and MRE bag into the JFS exhaust. This was quick heating at its best!

The bag itself flapped violently back and forth in the JFS exhaust, and popped out of the safety wire pliers. Undaunted, the crew chief grabbed the slightly warm pouch, folded over the top a couple of times to make the gripping area thicker, and clamped the safety wire pliers shut. Once again, he jammed the pouch into the JFS exhaust. This time, though the pouch once again flapped violently back and forth, it stayed clamped within the pliers, and after a few seconds he was able to position the pouch and pliers so that they didn't flap around so much.

I was standing by the fire bottle, entertained by this show and awestruck by the brilliance of this crew chief, who I decided had found the best and fastest way to heat an MRE ever.

Now the JFS began to chug a little and the high-pitched whine got a little higher as it reached full operating speed. The MRE pouch now began what appeared to be a high-speed vibration in the JFS exhaust, and I knew that the contents, whatever they were, would surely be cooked to perfection in the next few seconds. But as the pouch and its contents became hotter, the internal pressure also rose, until, after a momentary two- or three-fold increase in size, the pouch exploded spectacularly, spewing its contents all over the left side of the shelter! I could now see that the MRE pouch had contained everyone's favorite, none other than a large serving of baked beans with tomato sauce!

I could not physically stand by the fire bottle any longer, as I was laughing so hard that tears came to my eyes. The crew chief was momentarily overcome by the sight of that tiny pouch swelling to the size of a bed pillow in the fractions of a second before it exploded. The pilot, of course, was oblivious to the whole show, as all of it had occurred under the left wing toward the rear of the aircraft. The crew chief was able to compose himself long enough to continue the hot cock, and when the pilot shut down the aircraft, he put the ladder up and assisted the pilot in climbing down.

Those of you who have watched a pilot climb out of the F-16 know that the first thing they do is bend over to unhitch the parachute harness at the crotch, and they are more or less forced to focus their attention on the ground in front of them, although some talented pilots can unhitch the harness while simultaneously looking up and talking to you at the same time.

This pilot, however, stopped in the middle of unhitching his parachute harness and surveyed the area under the left wing. He paused briefly, and finished unhitching his harness, after which he looked back at the crew chief and said, "Hey Chief, what are all these beans doing all over the place?"

I couldn't stop laughing about it for days.

Best Regards,

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Nice joe, thanks for sharing. Ive got one from over 20 yrs ago at my recruit course to enter the Aust Army reserves...One of the daily tasks was to polish your boots until you can see your reflection in them. Word got around that if we put shoe polish on the boot and set it on fire it melts and works better, well we all were doing it, mainly cause it was fun. Of course there is always someone who has to be different, he was a fair skinned red head no tan at all, just white and red. He decided to light the shoe polish in the tin container it came in instead of putting it on his boot, so here is this guy walking around the platoon showing everyone how smart he is. When the polish was all molten and ready to go the guy blew hard over the top of the tin to extinguish the flame but, as liquid fires do, it appeared to go out but flamed up when he finished blowing, by this time his face was directly over the tin, the flame got him and black polish went all over his face. All you could see was a black face and white eyes no eyebrows! Of course the whole platoon was on the floor laughing...until we realised in place of his eyebrows he now had some rapidy developing blisters so it was a trip in the meat wagon to the hospital for him....now every time I see a rerun of MASH where one of them ends up with a black face I just gotta laugh.

Forum: Air Force Life

Funniest Thing I Ever Saw....