The things you find in an old Conex!

For most people, “Jeep” is a brand name for a particular 4-wheel drive vehicle, but it was originally a catch-all term for a series of small, light utility trucks ranging from the early 1941 Ford GP (GP meaning “General Purpose” and probably where the term “jeep” came from, but that’s not certain) to the last “jeep” in service, the Ford M151 MUT, Multipurpose Utility Truck, which was being replaced by the High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) or “Humvee” in 1982, and final transition to the Humvee around 1987 or so.

Would it be possible to find an old Jeep manual in a Conex? In truth, it is doubtful, but it would be a valuable collector’s item if you could. I threw it in for fun.

More realistic is to find old boxes of forgotten MRE’s, or Meals, Ready to Eat. These started to replace the old canned rations in 1981, and the first MRE’s came in dark, almost chocolate-brown pouches with minimal writing or decoration on them. The light tan coloring came later, after the 1991 Gulf War, possibly because everything in the Army was getting a new coat of tan paint at the time but maybe also because the dark brown plastic absorbed a lot of heat.

In this comic, Alvarez is holding up two MREs that are puffed out– meaning something inside them has gone bad and is releasing gas, possibly for the last several years. Still, Jensens does what soldiers do, and dares him some money to do something really gross and/or stupid.

We have so much fun in the Army!