Buck Matthews

Dogpatch Days

Recollections of a Non-Combatant in the Combat Zone

The Necessities

Mess Pass for Airman Buck Matthews.

When I take my daily dose of medications that keep me walking upright after nearly eight decades, I still find it hard to let the water run until it’s cold.

In this age of conservation, that’s admirable – but it’s really more than Mother Earth that makes me turn off the tap.

I still see the hairy knuckles of the cook pouring my ration of water into my aluminum mess cup, and being grateful to get that – even though it wasn’t cold and it was hardly fit to drink.

In the Korean dry season of 1952, water was tough to come by and what you could get was so full of chemicals that it tasted like bad pineapple juice.

But water wasn’t what I craved and it wasn’t water that drew me into certain establishments on a regular basis when I came home.

It was ice cream.

I give the Air Force credit for doing what it could to make life tolerable for us ten thousand miles from home. But in the early fifties, modern science had not yet come up with a way to create potable milk from powder or edible ice cream from powdered milk. Both had the essence of Milk of Magnesia – but we ingested them gratefully.

They were still better than the water.

© Copyright 2008 Buck Matthews. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes without permission in writing from the author. Used with permission by BelleAire Press as a tribute to those American servicemen and women who served during the Korean War.