Steve Blair wrote:

Likewise, soldiers will always complain about the food. It's in the contract somewhere....
Oh, but they don't always complain -- there is probably more about what they thought was good, valuable, what made a difference at just the right point. Paul Boesch opened his memoir of fighting in the Huertgen Forest with a description of an artillery barrage so intense that the author felt “as if Satan himself urged the gunners on,” and then recalled the following: “From a dirty pocket I pulled a package of Charms, the fruit-flavored candy drops that came with some of our rations. Very slowly and deliberately I unwrapped one and popped it into my mouth – it tasted good.”

I've spent a lot of time thinking about those three little words, "it tasted good." Perhaps more than a normal person ought to, but that is the nature of the dissertation. But if you imagine that war itself is an assault on the senses, then it doesn't seem quite so strange to contemplate the meaning of a positive sensory experience amidst all that.

Jill