Wine in My Chili

My battery was located near Ban Me Touit, and for a month or so, I was the Officer in Charge for the resupply. We sent rations, beer, colas and mail to them every day if the weather held out.  Somewhere along the way, one of my guys obtained a case of Freeze Dried Long Range Recon patrol rations.  No, I didn't really want to know where it came from, I simply wanted to try some.  It turned out that one of my favorite meals, chili, was the main component in the case.  

I managed to find that the Class VI store located in the Bungalow down town.  We all had ration cards that limited us to how much booze what we could buy.  On one of my trips down town, I stopped in and saw several cases of white wine.  The NCO running the store told me that somehow the supply system sent him about 25 cases of that wine and he had little or no demand.  He offered to let me have as much as I wanted without hitting a ration card.  I picked up a case of Hans Kristoff, Libfraumilch for a couple of dollars a bottle.  It was a decent wine for someone that had no wine to drink.  For some reason, red wine has sulfates in it and they would give me  headache.  The white wine didn't seem to do that.

One evening, I decided that instead of water, I would try to reconstitute the chili with white wine.  My experiment went well except for the fact that no matter how long I waited, the beans didn't seem to absorb the wine.  They remained crunchy and no amount of wine or time would fix them.  I tried to add a little water and that helped just enough to make them no longer like eating rocks.  

I had no idea that those crunchy pieces of beans would cause my intestinal tract to become an alternate energy source.  No matter what I did, those little protein pellets just morphed into methane gas.  There is just no way I was going to go over to the medics and see if they could find a solution.  I managed to ride around in my jeep and not get into any confined spaces with anyone.  The good news is that after about three days, the situation normalized and that ended chili experiment.

On one of my trips to Fort Sill a few years later, I went into one of the State owned liquor stores in Lawton.  Right there by the door was a display of Hans Kristoff Libfraumilch and I bought a bottle.  I took it back to my apartment and cooled it to a nice drinking temperature.  It was terrible.  I guess it is all in the location and distance from booze. 

MUD