The Nourishment of War

by Elaine Howell

We make rations here. Officially, they’re known as Meal, Combat, Individual rations, but soldiers call them C-rats. Our meals are made to survive—dropped from an airplane, slogged through blizzards and sandstorms. And now jungles, swamps, and quagmires.

I pack our meals and the accessories—Chicklets, cigarettes, toilet paper—into cardboard cases at the end of the assembly line. Everything is in metal cans or foil pouches. A soldier squatting in a foxhole on a fireless winter night wouldn’t be able to see any difference between a pint of paint thinner and a boned chicken entree.

Each day of the week has a specific odor. Today, Thursday, stinks of tomato sauce. We’re concentrating on spaghetti. I try to imagine I am having a romantic dinner at Girasole, where Frank used to take me before Jim was born. But there’s no garlic in the factory, only the wet, hopeless scent of tomatoes exhaling under the crusher. So, instead of a candlelit Frank, I see Esther Cook crouching beside me in a white apron, wild hairs poking out of her chin like tiny periscopes. Around us, stainless steel machines vibrate and hiss.


Last week, Jim called and told me the news: He’s being deployed to Vietnam. He’s coming up to say a quick goodbye. It was that word, quick, that got me. It was like a stab.

It’s horrible to say, but I almost don’t want him to come. How can I say goodbye? On television I see kids in O.D. Green, hugging families and jumping on long, flat ships that look like tracts of earth breaking off and floating away. For too many of them, I will have packed their last meals.


I’ve worked here almost 15 years. It’s only a half mile from my house, and it was the best-paying job I could get when my husband was killed at Pork Chop Hill, of all places. With a young son, he shouldn’t have been in Korea, he should have been an up-and-coming contractor building homes people at last had enough money to buy. But he hadn’t had a chance to fight the Germans or the Japs, and he felt he had to do his part. He got to the fighting just in time.

The factory itself looks like a huge, tipped-over tin can, sinking slowly into the ground. When I started, we made snacks and beverages. Now we make “soldier sustenance.” Nourishment for the Twentieth-Century Warrior is what they call it.

One day, I hope, there will be no soldiers to feed. The fluorescent lights will die. I will no longer be able to see my face distorted in the cooker’s convex belly.

I will visit Jim and my grandchildren, read books, and study my American Sycamores. Frank planted them when we moved in; now they compete with the sky, holding huge red hands over us in autumn, weaving a thick web of bones in winter....

Elaine Howell lives Los Angeles. This is her first time in print. E-mail: ehowell@ucla.edu