Today the topic of eating the same food for multiple days in a row came up and it reminded me of something that happened when I was in the Navy so I thought I would share it with you.

During my second 6-month deployment, the ship I was on was stationed in the Northern Red Sea conducting interdiction operations. Basically, we were tasked with stopping any and all cargo ships heading to or coming from the Persian Gulf. We would stop the ship, send over an inspection team, make sure they weren't carrying any contraband to or from Iraq. This was to enforce the U.N. resolutions that were in place at the time (mid 90's).

While at sea, Navy ships conduct what is called underway replenishment (unrep) to take on fuel food and stores. On average, ships conduct an unrep about every other week or so. What happens is the ship needing stuff pulls along side of a supply ship and matches course and speed. Then they fire lines across from one ship to another and stretch cables between the two ships. When that is all in place, fuel lines and cargo can be winched across to refuel and transfer stuff between the ships. Helicopters are also frequently used to transfer cargo from one ship to another. When cargo was brought onboard, it came in what was called a 'tri-wall'. A tri-wall was the size of a cube made out of standard sized pallets, so it was pretty big. Keep the mental image of the size of this handy as it will be useful later and key to the story.

So there we are turning circles in the Red Sea, inspecting ships and generally speading goodwill and democracy, blah, blah, blah. All of the other ships in our group went to perform their unreps, but because our inspection team got tied up with a lippy russian sea captain who tried to tell us that the UN had no authority... this was an act of piracy... blah, blah, blah, we missed our turn at unrep. The supply ship had already hauled ass and wouldn't be able to get back around to us for another two weeks.

Now normally, this wouldn't be that big of a deal if it had just been fuel we needed since we hardly ever went past half a tank (so to speak) before topping off. It was a big deal however, because we needed food. We had dry stores, but we had little to no meat and no fruits or vegetables.

So our supply officer starts calling the other ships in our group asking if they had any stuff they could spare, and through this we were able to get some fruits and vegetables, but no meat.

Finally, in desperation, the Captain calls one of the aircraft carriers (it was either the America or the Roosevelt) and they say "Yeah, we have some meat for ya." The captain says "Great, send it over."

A few hours later, we get a big ass helicopter from the aircraft carrier with three tri-walls of meat.

We unload the tri-walls to find that those fuckers sent us nothing but goddamn hotdogs.

Not to seem ungrateful or anything, but for the next two weeks we had hotdogs for damn near every meal. If the navy recipe called for chicken, they substituted hotdogs. If it called for beef, we got hotdogs. Sausage and Eggs for breakfast? Nope, hotdogs and eggs.

After that, I did not eat another hotdog for almost two years. In fact, to this day the smell of hotdog water almost brings the bile.