There's a certain feeling you get from ordering off the secret menu. Some are more well publicized than others (go to a certain burgerhaus and order a "4x4 animal style, extra onions"). If you've ever been the person to baptise someone into a secret menu, whether at a big chain or the place on the corner, you definitely know the feeling.
Do you know what it's like, though, to order off the illegal menu?
I was on a waking schedule referred to as Eternal Breakfast. Every meal I fucking ate was breakfast, for months.
The chow hall was open with a hot line 24/7/365. From the hours of 0530 to 1100 was served breakfast. From the hours of 1100-1600 was served lunch. From 1700 to 2200 was served dinner. Midnight chow was whatever was leftover, packed in a fridge, or, on the hot line, breakfast. Further, it was a sure bet the leftovers were gone by midnight.
If your mission schedule lined up right, you would pachinko through the windows and tumble off two breakfast meals a day, with the other being whatever was packed in the bird. The only variety available was whatever beat to shit fruit was out in buckets, or the omelette guy on the hot line. There were a dozen or more things you could have him throw in that omelette, and when you eat two of them a day, you learn to make the most of it. But still, it's a thin line to walk.
If you were clued in, you knew to specifically ask for a "real egg omelette". It was kind of a secret menu. The house standard was an ISO certified legally compliant omelette made with a splash of the 100% REAL EGG cartons that stacked up on the counter next to the griddle. SHELF STABLE, they said, in small letters near the UPC.
But if you asked for a real egg omelette, they would happily snatch up however many you asked for, crack them, and proceed as God intended humans to consume.
Air ops all happened on The Other Side of the Base from the tents, trailers, and morale functions. There was a bus service, but the bus, while prompt, was thin on the ground. Also, riding a public bus is gross. It's much better to get your hands on an authorized vehicle, such as a crew bus (little Daihatsu Hi Aces with four rows of bench seats not sized for Americans), because you are an airdale and therefore far above the idea of hoofing or taking a public bus.
There was a rule, though unwritten, iron just the same:
If you're driving an empty or even mostly empty crew bus, and you roll by a bus stop with people in it, you BETTER stop and ask if they're headed your way unless it's a legit emergency.
It was an unthinkable luxury to have crew busses and to have discretion over them. Losing them to the pitiful whining of the common classes would have been an unbearable blow.
Due to circumstances far beyond my control, I was one day waiting at a bus stop for a ride back to the ground side. Walking would have been faster, but even under the setting sun, shoe-melting mirages hovered along the microscopic dips in the long black ribbon that snaked off into the endless tan dust of the distance. A brief flash of hope in the form of headlights headed my way were dashed when I realized that it was a pickup truck, and not a lucky crew bus from some other squadron. Anyone driving a GOV like that was absolutely not going to stop - anyone driving a truck or a rare car was definitely some kind of highly privileged, or extremely busy person.
But to my surprise, the truck pulled over and the driver asked if I was going to chow. I nodded, and as I bent to open the truck door, I noticed a gleam on the driver's collars. An officer of some sort - I couldn't see in the dark exactly what - but he was driving himself around so probably a captain or maybe a major. Either way, I was happy for the lift, and following the proper courtesies, I removed my hat to match the gentleman's own bare head and buckled myself in.
After a few minutes, he said, without looking over, "You one of the tanker guys?"
"No sir," I answered.
"Airlift?"
"No sir," I answered.
He looked, then, but didn't say anything, at the patches on my bag.
A few minutes later, he said, "Well, they talk a lot about air power around here, but air power doesn't win wars."
Short of screaming "ALLLLLLLLLAHO AKBARRRRR" with a properly rolled "R", and reaching over to grab the wheel to attempt to kill us both with a 35 MPH collision with a curb, I then did the stupidest thing I possibly could have done. I answered candidly. I answered honestly, truthfully, and from a perspective he probably did not suspect. I said, "No sir, but it sure makes it easier."
There were no more words as I sat thinking about the twelve hours I had spent over a real nasty TIC, doing my best to help keep a bunch of jarheads alive as they dug into a hillock with their toenails and held off four times their number in shitheads. There was only sharp, conspicuous silence as we rolled down the tarmac, cleared the gate, and pulled into the chow hall lot, lit by the glare of arc sodium.
As I got out of the truck, reaching for my hat, I saw in the electric glow that he was a General. A Marine General. With a fucking grip of stars on his neck, not even just the one.
"Thank you for the ride, sir," I said, but he was already moving with a purpose towards the chow hall.
"Well shit," I thought. "At least everyone will laugh when they read the fucking court martial."
The guys who slaved the hot line in the chow hall were Malaysians for a while. The contracting company that the government paid to man and stock the chow halls would slurp up unskilled labor from anywhere in impoverished lands that had just recently had a massive natural disaster or civil war. They could hire desperate people, mostly brown Asians, for absolutely nothing. The arrangement was, from what I saw, how almost all of the unskilled labor is sourced in a large swathe of the Persian Gulf. There had been a bigass tsunami in Malaysia a little while previous, and there were a hundred or so of them that had been dragged out of their bamboo huts or whatever and put to work flipping burgers, sorting laundry, and generally bowing and scraping around the place to anything that didn't look Malaysian.
They were cheerful, bent over backwards to do anything at all you asked of them, and would even whistle a happy tune while they did it. I'm sure their marching orders were "The GI Is God", especially that close to the flagpole.
One morning I rolled up to the hot line and asked for a four egg real omelette, mushrooms and bacon, extra cheese. I recognized the guy with the spatula. I knew he would ask if I wanted crispy bacon, I would say no, he would throw a couple fresh pieces on and chop it coarse and floppy, and he would melt the cheese exactly right.
By this time in my life, this man had made me approximately 400 omelettes, and we had good chemistry. We were on the same shift and he made me omelettes twice a day, sometimes more.
Instead of the heavily accented "Creeeespy baikan, sir?" I knew was coming, the man shrieked, covered his head with one arm, and sobbed out "I'M SORRY SIR!" as he pointed feverishly with his non-covering hand to a sign pinned to the post almost directly in front of my face. I exaggerate here, but only to explain the contrast between what I expected, and what I got. A man not cheerful, but fearful of the wrath of what some douchebag in a flightsuit might do if told "no".
There was a single piece of paper with the words
REAL EGGS ARE
NOT TO BE USED
FOR OMELETTES
as big as they could get without having to turn the page landscape.
I knew complaining would be useless, so I smiled, nodded, and told him that was fine.
The bacon was floppy, and the cheese was melty, but it wasn't the same. I cursed Uncle Sam and his relentlessly ass-probing dick, and moved the morale peg down two notches.
There was a small rebellion against this rule, but after no amount of grumbling changed the signs, and indeed the improvised signs were replaced with permanent fixtures, the fate of omelette eaters was changed irrevocably.
Some weeks later, in the dead of night, with nobody around but a trusted few, I performed an unholy experiment.
My guy was behind the line, ready to get me with the omelette. He reflexively reached for the ladle in the bucket of freakishly homogenous yellow goo that they called 100% REAL EGG, but I hit him with a curve when I asked for four eggs over hard.
A little surprised, he dropped them right down and waited quietly. It was just me and him and the soft sizzle of eggs - the rest of the crew and a few stragglers were lost in the otherwise silent facility.
When the eggs were almost done, I asked him to change the order to a scramble, with cheese. Without missing a beat, he flipped a handful of orange cheese (the other choice was white cheese, and I never picked white cheese) down onto the four eggs as he cut them together. I waited a few minutes, and asked him to add some mushrooms and onions. By now, the egg was too solid to really scramble it in, so as he dumped it and made a half hearted motion with a spatch, I told him, "On top is fine. No problem."
He nodded, but scrunched his eyes just slightly at the eggs, and then at me.
I don't know now if he saw what was coming, or if he just disliked the idea of sending out such an ugly pile of eggs. But my last request surely solved the problem, because when he reached out for the final time to beat the mass of eggs into pieces and shovel it onto the plate, I waved him off and made a turn-it-over-with-a-spatula movement with my hand. He laughed and laughed as he folded it over itself twice and plopped it on the plate.
Both of us, if interrogated, could repeat the order to the letter and never say the words "real egg omelette".
As I watched the guy that I realized had to be the CENTCOM ground forces commander walk into the chow hall, I considered just bolting to my room. "Maybe he didn't see my name," I thought. "Does it even matter anyway?" I contemplated for just a moment longer, and decided, "Fuck it. You know what the man says - buy the ticket, take the ride."
The line was longer than I was used to, but then, it was a time I wasn't usually there - late breakfast, just before lunch popped out of the turrets and breakfast disappeared. I briefly considered just hanging around for lunch, but I could feel my body cannibalizing my organs for sustenance, and I desperately needed to sleep. So I snaked onwards to the hot line, and had plenty of time to consider my order, and glance around nervously looking for the General.
It was finally my turn. An unfamiliar face behind the spatula. This guy worked the busiest, hardest shift in the house - (actual) breakfast rush. The late push, when all the brass was in with high expectations and short schedules.
"Four eggs over hard, please," I said, and the man smiled and cracked them with a fancy flash.
"Nice trick," I said, waving my hands through a motion learned from a particular card trick. "Nice moves," I said, smiling and nodding. He smiled and nodded back, spinning an egg on the spatula. The flat top was full - no room to take the next order - so he spun this egg around on the spatula to delight the guys in eyeshot who were impatient to place their order while they waited on real estate and physics.
I walked him through the way I liked my over hard eggs, and when we got to the part about folding it over he lost it. I had a tray in front of me, which meant he should have put the food on a plate. But he reached under the counter for a white styro clamshell, and hid the contraband in it, out of sight, out of mind.
I gave him a wink as I lurched over to the nearest available seat.
Once, a little while after I got out of the military, I was sitting in a Waffle House by myself with the cook and the waitress.
I'd been eating for a little while, not in a hurry, and the waitress came over to peer into my mug.
"How long you been out?" she asked me.
"Oh shit, is it that obvious?"
"Well, it's the way you sit, with your arm around your plate," she said. "People who know can see it."
It wasn't until later that I realized she meant prison, not fighting for frontage on a chow hall bench. It still makes me laugh.
I was hunched over my eggs over hard, trying to eat, needing to piss, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. Not a nudge or a jostle from a passer-by - a very deliberate finger tap.
I turned my head and saw an Air Force Major with all kinds of shit all over his three color desert BDUs. Big, unfamiliar embroidered emblems on pockets and dangling from lanyards, but I recognized the badge of a Security Forces officer. USAF Security Forces are some combination of suckers who want out ASAP, and suckers who wish to God they were real grunts.
"You've got to be fucking kidding me," I thought. That General had grabbed some fucking Security Forces Major off his staff or something and turned him on me.
He was speaking, now, asking deliberate questions that slid away from me before I could understand them. I was exhausted, starving, and I was being interrogated about my breakfast prior to probably a long series of ass-chewings.
"Fuck," I mumbled, "I didn't know."
"Excuse me?" the Major said. I don't think he heard me anyway. It was loud in there, and I did mumble it. "I was asking you about your food."
I looked down at the omelette.
Great. On top of mouthing off to the fucking theater commander, they also caught me with illegal food. By the time this gets down to my commander, they're gonna be talking about taking stripes away.
Eons ticked while I pondered my fate. What was I gonna do? My only real option, it seemed, was "play dumb". I was, after all, still technically a junior enlisted. I would just have to play stone cold dumb and hope that when they handed me off to someone in my chain of command they would be so outraged, and I would have figured out what my side of the story was, that I might get away with an ass chewing and maybe just an Article 15. Yeah, probably some paperwork minimum, the general is gonna want to see blood to be sure the beating was sufficient.
As all of this crossed my mind, the major suddenly startled, and his eyes went wide with realization.
"Oh shit!" he said, reaching up with both hands and putting them palms out. He leaned in, lowering his voice. "Oh shit man, you're not in trouble. I just want to know how you got a real omelet! They won't fuckin give 'em to us, how did you do it?"
"Oh shit sir," I said, looking around, lowering my own voice, "I thought you were the Fun Patrol coming for me. Just ask for eggs over hard and have them put the shit on top. It's not perfect but it's better than slime."
"Genius!" the major whispered. "That's genius."
"Sir, please don't spread it around. They'll figure it out."
He gave me a sage nod and a double thumbs up as he turned for the line.
And nothing ever happened with the General. I wonder if he ever thinks about it? I wonder if I really got his goat, and he was amused by it - or if he was just too tired to bring the hammer down after 12 hours spent watching the TIC.