Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for June 05, 2012

Mel should have been expecting it.

A profound question followed by a stupid question.

Dangerous ground to be treading on.

Saved by inanity!

Hey, the food is great.

“Hassled” is over 40 years of history in the military. (but a broad term, no pun intended.)

Orion: from yesterday, that’s the nose of “Birth Control”, our armed Chinook, and the chin bubble is a grenade launcher. The rocket pods and 20 mm are mounted further back.

Conflicted = School Principal asked her not to go there and tread lightly on touchy subjects. With what happen in her past will she skip the answer for the easy one or try to answer the kid?

Love the silhouette of silence in the third panel. Sort of the lull before the storm .

I’m tempted to tell her to go for it, but it never does end well. Tell ’em about the food, Mel.

Mel will respond guardedly for the good of the service, hopefully without lying.

As for the second question:

“Oh, the biscuits in the army they say are mighty fine. But one rolled off the table and killed a friend of mine!”

I loved the food when I was in the military. I was stationed at one place where the mess hall received awards for its excellent food. I even ate there one Thanksgiving, and they did a really fantastic job. Maybe I’m not such a great person to ask though. I liked MREs, too.

@ defunctdoormat – I just watched a program last night, I believe on the History Channel, about military mess. Looked pretty darned good to me! Some of the cooks they interviewed actually have been to cooking schools and have degrees. Then they showed how you heat your MRE’s. Pretty ingenious. Those didn’t look half bad either. I’m sure guys from the military pre-MRE would agree. From what I’ve seen about K-Rations they didn’t look all that appetizing.

Uh oh is right

everyone gets tired of the same restaurant, so 9 months of the same mess hall get get mighty old.

The food at my tech-school in Millington was lousy. I had never seen a transparent pork chop until then. We went off base for really good Tennessee cooking a lot.

As for the way I was treated in the Navy as a female………..let’s just say I had to get a really slick back or fall apart. I chose the former.

I don’t think either of the questions is stupid. Unless you are supposed to think that of course you are hassled by the military if you are female. Females being hassled in the military is happening far more often than should be. Also, for those who are brave enough to come forward, it definitely does not seem to end well. At the very least, we shouldn’t be accepting it as a matter of course. Or sweeping it under the rug. Or allowing those who come forward to be victimized over again. It may be that we are hearing more about the hassles of females due to the fact that women are less afraid to come forward than they were in olden days. Technology may help them to document their hassles more than in olden days as well.

Trapped for four years in close quarters with some of the most primitive-minded, combative, uneducated men of our society… what could go wrong?

The comments here are fodder for a below-par Mary Worth strip.

GO FOR IT!

“Let me start by answering your last question first (and hoping you’ll forget what your first question was or that I run out of time).”

what the expression “wait for it” really means. I hope she tells the truth. about the rape, not the food.

Actually liked the “green eggs and ham” in the C-rations, and every new box, everybody gave them all to me. As to “mess hall”, a buddy and I ate regularly “on the economy” instead of in the mess hall, which they told us was “dangerous”. All the guys eating in the Mess hall got dysentery on a regular basis, WE never did!!

I don’t know what will happen in GT’s universe, but in real life Mel’s a lifer – she’ll toe the line. For the hassle part, she’ll at best (worst?) probably give a shrug response, “No more than anywhere else” – which is probably the truthful answer anyway. (Is anyone going to maintain there aren’t any civilian managers who put the moves, or worst, on female underlings?)`As for the food, judging from my own experiences it helps to like potatoes a lot, but Uncle Sam feeds his nephews, and increasingly his nieces, very well.

“An army marches on its stomach”, as Napoleon once said.

I think the point of the second question is partly comic relief because of the intensity of the first question, esp. for Mel, and partly comic relief because that is how teenagers think, skipping from one thing to another. Plus to her both questions have equal importance, since she isn’t experienced enough, probably, to rate the questions in importance.

I think the best answer to what the food is like in the military is: “It depends on the cook.” As for field rations, there are actually people who develop a taste for those and collect them.