MRE heaters????

[abunaitoo]

I have never had the heater in an MRE work.
Is there some kind of secret to it????
Does the heater have a shelf life to it????

[Love Life]

Put water in it to the fill line.

[JSnover]

I never had one not work. Get a buddy to do a demo, you probably just made a simple mistake.

[richhodg66]

I found you had to use more water than the fill line for them to work best and crush the cardboard insert inside it a little to make the chemical reaction start.

[Cornbread]

Are you in the military?

There really isn't any other good reason to eat MREs. MRE == Meals Rejected by Ethiopians.

I spent 8 years in the Marines as a grunt and I couldn't tell you how they work :) We always stripped MREs down to only what we ate in them and maybe a tabasco or two. The bush monster got everything else. The weight makes a difference when you are humping everywhere on foot. So I never used the heaters, even during cold weather training in Iceland we still stripped them out.

[labradigger1]

Some types use a saline

[Love Life]

I always kept my heater. The weight is minimal and I sho' do like a hot meal. The cold weather MRE (dehydrated and dry goods) are used in extreme cold.

[pretzelxx]

I rarely used the heater for food, always to warm up the shaving water when it's 15 degrees and windy out.

[380AUTO]

Funny thing is I had an mre for breakfast this morning, really all you do is full to the line and lean it up against a rock with the pad facing down and usually it gets pretty hot.

[trails4u]

I'm with cornbread.........WHY???????????? As a wildland firefighter having seen my share of MREs on the side of the mountain, I'd tell you, I gotta be awfully hungry...

[abunaitoo]

From time to time, others give them to me.
Some of them are not that bad.
I had one that the package was falling apart. Didn't want to waste it, so, again, I tried to get the heater to work.
Added water to the line, leaned it on it's side so the pad would get all wet, nothing.
The pad was kind of crumbling apart, so I don't think breaking it up would help.
It didn't even get warm.
took the fod out and microed it.
Pork chop, chunked and formed, in Jamaican style sauce with noodles.
It was "not to good"
The cheese spread with jalapenos, and vegetable cracker was good.
I'm thinking it was just to old.
I thought these meals lasted for a long, long time.

[nagantguy]

Never had one not work and yes I'd have to be real hungry to eat one now that I don't have to.

[MaryB]

MRE's do have a shelf life, past that date what little taste they had gets worse.... why on earth would you eat one unless it was an emergency setting? Even then I go for my Mountain House freeze dried first.

[Love Life]

I despise MRE's, but I always have 1 or 2 in my pack when bumming around the mountains. It's a bunch of calories in a self contained and easy to carry package.

[MOcaster]

Has anyone else noticed that the heater has a picture of it laying against a rock and the rock says, "Rock or something"? I think it is hilarious.
103903

[Love Life]

2 bottles of MRE tabasco sauce+enough water to be a little high on the fill line.

Mix water and tabasco in beverage bag, dump in MRE heater, toss in friend's tent.

[pretzelxx]

2 bottles of MRE tabasco sauce+enough water to be a little high on the fill line.

Mix water and tabasco in beverage bag, dump in MRE heater, toss in friend's tent.

That is the worst thing to do. We did it to a guy in a shelter and locked him in. 5 heaters, 10 minutes. It was his birthday!

[Love Life]

That is the worst thing to do. We did it to a guy in a shelter and locked him in. 5 heaters, 10 minutes. It was his birthday!

Builds character. Probably hazing in today's soft handed environment, but builds character.

[M-Tecs]

Eating MRE’s is bad enough but the after effects are far worse. Feed a couple hundred solders MRE’s for a month and provide them with nothing other than hand dug latrines you have a criminal assault on the olfactory senses. I never want to see, smell or taste another MRE in my life.

[Rick Hodges]

I guess I am just an old man....MRE's look damn good to me. Try an old "C" Eggs and Lima beans....cold. UGH!!!! Eat "C"'s and no need for a slit trench....they bind you up so bad you are lucky if you can go once a month....like passing concrete blocks.....
Heaters????? How about a pinch of C-4 off the back of a Claymore? That works every time.

[Smoke4320]

some of the newest MREs are actually pretty good.. The pork rib, The maple sausage, The buffalo chicken (looks real bad tastes pretty good), Spicy penne pasta.. But thankfully I don't have to eat them every day..
The newest of the new, and I was told this was a test, are actually a whole day in 1 bag.. 2 mains (think of Hot pockets) Love the stuffed french toast , 2 ranger bars, chocolate bar, 2 crackers and cheese, several different drink mixes ect

[trooperdan]

My old 1st SGT said after a couple of weeks eating MRE's he could clean his butt with a feather duster!

[montana_charlie]

Try an old "C" Eggs and Lima beans....cold. UGH!!!! Eat "C"'s and no need for a slit trench....they bind you up so bad you are lucky if you can go once a month....like passing concrete blocks.....
Heaters?????
That series of rations (during the Vietnam era) was actually labeled MCI rations ... Meal, Combat, Individual. They were called C's because the food inside was the same as the C-Ration ... just a change in packaging.

There was 'Ham and Eggs, Chopped' and there was 'Ham and Lima Beans'. But there was no "C-ration" with eggs and lima beans.
The peanut butter was known to help reduce diarrhea, or it could be burned to heat water for coffee.

In some MCI packs the "bread" can was the large B3 size.
It was just the right length to clip to the left side of the M-60 machine gun. This provided a rounded surface to help guide the ammo belt into the receiver.

CM

[square butte]

Ate a pile of those Ham and Eggs in the C's. John Wayne chocolate bars that could substitute for a hockey puck. Teeth breakers. Must have had a melting temp of about 400 degrees. But I was always glad to get em.

[gew98]

I liked the old C rats..they just did not have enough to fill you . When the dark brown bag MRE's came out they were sort of OK. The chicken A La king was marginally pallateble. The hot dogs were not...but the bean component in them was awesome. So was the maple nut and choclate chip nut cakes !. I loved the dehydrated pork & beef patties. Meatballs & BBQ sauce.. edible. pork w/rice in BBQ sauce... No way jose !. Tuna with noodles...I would not feed that to my worst enemy. When they devolved into a nasty variety of ethnic menus I stopped eating them period and till this day won't touch them.

[gew98]

Oh and to stay on topic.. I remember when the first MRE heaters came out they were awesome to play with using 20 oz and 2 liter soda bottles.... good bang for the buck ! . Once the powers that be realized MRE bombs made training too much fun they screwed them up and they don't produce the gas they once did.

[missionary5155]

Greetings
I am with Rick H. on this. I opened those cans for 3 yeras plus. That Lima Beans was the most nasty awful... There was another that upon opening the can all you could see was the ugliest fat grease ever imagined.
Mike in Peru

[Dale in Louisiana]

I guess I am just an old man....MRE's look damn good to me. Try an old "C" Eggs and Lima beans....cold. UGH!!!! Eat "C"'s and no need for a slit trench....they bind you up so bad you are lucky if you can go once a month....like passing concrete blocks.....
Heaters????? How about a pinch of C-4 off the back of a Claymore? That works every time.

You and me both. I got MRE's when I joined the Louisiana National Guard after nine years of active service.

Being a tanker, the weight of C's never posed a problem, and I dearly LOVED the eggs as well as the Ham 'n' Motherf***ers. I always had a bottle of Tabasco somewhere on the tank, and we had these neat little single-burner stoves, so if we had five minutes, we had hot meals.

Follow-on: There were so many useful things you could do with empty C-ration cans, and there's the added bonus of dropping a sealed can of C-ration peanut butter into the fire barrel in the winter when nobody was watching.

dale in Louisiana

[freebullet]

Never found myself wishing I had an mre yet.

[Larry Gibson]

I've eaten lots of MRE's over the years and they did improve quite a bit. Never had one fail to work it the cartoon directions (posted earlier) were simply followed. Since I started out as a kid eating some surplus k- rations and then ate my share of C rats in the SE Asian war games and many years in other places before the MRE's came out. Neither were all that bad with a little preparation and addition of some other ingredients. Straight out of the package the main meals were just fuel for mission success. Now the PB, jams, deserts and other snacks are all good.......as a charter member of the War Zone D Cocoa Club if I told you the recipe' I'd have to kill you.........but alas, the C rat cocoa, sugar, cream substitute and jams are no longer available......a pity that is.............

The heaters worked well and made for heating water for shaving and washing face, pits, crotch and a** with, especially on the North Slope or in Korea in the winter. After heating the meal I would wrap the heater in my GI scarf and put it down the front of my shirt to warm up the chest. I collected all the thrown away heaters and still have a lot of them. They still come in handy during a cold elk hunt.......but I haven't eaten any Cs or MRE's since I retired..........except on a couple elk hunts........

Larry Gibson

[fastfire]

That series of rations (during the Vietnam era) was actually labeled MCI rations ... Meal, Combat, Individual. They were called C's because the food inside was the same as the C-Ration ... just a change in packaging.

There was 'Ham and Eggs, Chopped' and there was 'Ham and Lima Beans'. But there was no "C-ration" with eggs and lima beans.
The peanut butter was known to help reduce diarrhea, or it could be burned to heat water for coffee.

In some MCI packs the "bread" can was the large B3 size.
It was just the right length to clip to the left side of the M-60 machine gun. This provided a rounded surface to help guide the ammo belt into the receiver.

CM

Don't forget the stale cigarettes.

[MaryB]

Lima beans... I would starve first. Had an ancient c rat on a bet, was still edible and didn't kill me. Don't remember what it was, one of those beer drinking bets.

[Cornbread]

I've eaten the regular MREs and the cold weather ones. Of the two the cold weather were better because they had more candy in them :) ....but since that was only for cold weather training we didn't get them very often as I mostly deployed to the Middle East and Africa. The regular MREs we used to trade to the Beja for flatbread they made. We would put tabasco and such on the flatbread and sometimes other stuff too like PB & J from the MREs we didn't trade them and we would eat that. I had one SSGT that when we were on patrol would always look for Beja camps and make sure we swung by them so we could trade rather than have to eat those nasty MREs. Not sure the command would have looked kindly on us trading that way with the locals if we made it blatant so it was always something we did when the officers weren't with us.

[WILCO]

I never had one not work.

Same here. Always enjoyed them when I picked some up.

[Boz330]

I guess I am just an old man....MRE's look damn good to me. Try an old "C" Eggs and Lima beans....cold. UGH!!!! Eat "C"'s and no need for a slit trench....they bind you up so bad you are lucky if you can go once a month....like passing concrete blocks.....
Heaters????? How about a pinch of C-4 off the back of a Claymore? That works every time.


The MREs that I have tasted were head and shoulders above C-rations. I had some 1946 rations while in Basic, the same age as me and pretty tasteless.
The best by far was the LRPs which were freeze dried and except for the Chili Con Carny everything I had was really good. They were great for all day hunts and why the military didn't stay with them is baffling. Of course I found many things that the military did baffling.

Bob

[Smoke4320]

Should have noted the newest MRES (one that are a whole day in 1 pack) are called First Strike Rations