266 - Ready to Eat

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 "Apple jelly. Apple fucking jelly, Thompson," you complain to your battle buddy, Greg Thompson. "They're doing this on purpose, I swear."

"This part of your MRE conspiracy theory, Gutierrez?" he asks you.

"It ain't a conspiracy theory, Thompson, it's conspiracy fact," you explain. "Why apple jelly? There's a half a dozen other kinds of jelly people think of before this shitty apple crap. So why is this junk on the menu? It's because they want us to think about all the food that's better back home."

"And why would they do that, Gut?" Thompson asks while raising his hands in an exaggerated shrug. "They know this job is already miserable enough. Why intentionally make it worse? Face it, they picked that because it's easier to preserve or some shit."

"Nah, man. They want us to feel just a little bit bad when we eat. They want it to be worse over here. So we associate the bad food with this fucking desert country. Desert equals bad food equals bad place. They want us to hate it here so that we don't feel as bad when we gun people down, and they want us to think about good stuff, like strawberry jelly, when we think about home so that we believe we're fighting for the better country."

"You're ridiculous, Gut. Also, for the record, strawberry jelly is nasty."

"Always knew you were a communist, Thompson."

Thompson almost chokes on his Buffalo chicken laughing. "One war at a time, Gut. One war at a time."