What is Tobasco Sauce worth?

We knocked out some battle drills in one of the training area today, it was good to get out of the FOB for a while. We pretty much covered the drills we did last week, just added a few more details to them and added two drills: What to do if a vehicle is completely disabled and can’t be towed away and how to move with the Iraqi’s when we are moving together.

We spent about 5 hours in the training area, this was our last opportunity to do that sort of stuff, the big wargame starts up at noon today, so all of the gates will be locked up and the enemy will be prowling about.

We were training in an area that was a lot like Western NC, the Smokey Mountains specifically. The same sort of trees, the same sort of terrain, some nice hills, just a pleasant area, I felt very comfortable there. I am attaching a few pictures to the blog, they are shots of my vehicle, the seat that I have to cram myself into and some of the guys on the team.

We had a little MRE picnic out in the woods, I found out exactly how much a small bottle of Tobasco sauce was worth.

MRE History lesson: Starting in the '90s the Army started to put about an ounce of Tobasco sauce in each MRE, it truly made an improvement to the overall MRE. As the MREs evolved, someone started leaving the Tobasco out of certain versions. The Tuna version (which is the king of lunch time MREs: A packet of tuna, a packet of mayonnaise, two flour tortillas, some spices, pretzels, chocolate chip cookies AND a bag of peanut M&Ms, way to civilized for Army food) does not have Tobasco sauce in it. I have no idea what they were thinking, but it proved to be a boon to me.

Superman makes it a point to always grab a Tuna MRE for his lunch, yesterday as we were having the picnic, he really wanted some Tobasco sauce for his Tuna. As noted above, there is none in the MRE, but, MY MRE had Tobasco sauce. I am not a Tobasco sauce fan, but I am a fan of bargaining. He started the bidding by offering me his moist towelette for my Tobasco, I counter offered with his bag of peanut M&Ms. Round one ended with no trade made, he queried the rest of the team, they turned him down. Round two started off with me offering my Tobasco for 4 Peanut M&Ms and the moist towelette, he countered with 4 Peanut M&Ms. I settled and celebrated my victory. 1 ounce of Tobasco sauce is worth 4 Peanut M&Ms in the MRE auction society.