So, I have a new least favorite thing about the Army. No, it's not the long hours, the separation from those I love, the danger, the boredom, the PTSD, the attitudes, the ever present danger of rape, none of that.
No, my new least favorite thing about the Army is the “Chocolate Hooah Bar.”
“Chocolate What-Now Bar?” I hear you asking. For those you whose short hairs are not presently gotten by the Army, the word “hooah” might not be familiar. You see, this job requires you to constantly show a great deal of motivation for every plan and activity your boss comes up with, and given the generally low expectations for creativity in the Army, well, there's one word for “yes,” “I understand,” and “good.” Used by itself, “hooah” can be used to show general excitement or motivation. Used as an adjective it tends to mean bad-ass, but in a particularly Army way. Used as a verb it means to push forward in difficult situations.
Even with its manifold meanings, it is never proper to ask what someone means when they declare an object or activity “hooah.” The idea is, as far as I can tell, that if you can't see why something is hooah then you probably aren't hooah enough yourself.
A good way of increasing your hooah-ness is through large numbers of push-ups. True story.
Anyway, the Chocolate Hooah Bar. Whoever came up with this thing, I can only imagine that they were counting on their consumers not to consider what is hooah about this bar. This thing, this thing bugs me on a lot of levels. The only place I have ever found a Chocolate Hooah Bar is in an Army issue Meal Ready to Eat(MRE). MRE's are your standard field rations. They're actually not as terrible as they could be, so long as you don't mind the fact that they are processed to an almost unimaginable level. You kind of have to have their word that the chicken breast was once part of a real live bird or that the bread contains any plant produce that ever grew in real live soil. It's a little creepy, but you get used to it.
But not the Chocolate Hooah Bar. As I was saying, the only place I've ever found it is in an MRE, but the possibility that it will one day make it out onto the open market is a constant source of worry.
Let's talk about the packaging for a second. It looks like your standard component of an MRE, you know, basically an envelope of tough green plastic, except it has “Chocolate Hooah Bar” written in a large, disturbingly friendly font on the face of the package. Also, there is a picture of what appears to be a Hershey's chocolate bar on the front. Seeing that picture, some poor fool might be tricked into believing that within such a package might rest a delightful candy bar the eating of which would more or less be analogous to eating a Hershey bar. But that poor fool, that creature could not be more wrong.
See, Chocolate Hooah Bar itself bears no similarity to a Hershey bar. It in fact contains no actual chocolate. It is heavily, heavily processed “fig product(?)” with corn syrup, a cocktail of vitamins, and chocolate flavoring added.
It has no real shape. Well, that's not true. It's just a flat, brown, sticky Florida looking thing. It doesn't break easily. Like, you can bite it, and not nessicary pull any of it away from the rest. There are occasional crunchy bits. At first I took those to be seeds from the “fig produce,” but of further examination, well, I'm really not sure.
So, basically, this thing is a lie. It is not chocolate, it is just barely a bar, and friends, it is not hooah. I may not be the most masculine soldiers in this nations Army, but I've been here a while, and I can identify hooah. The Chocolate Hooah Bar is simply not.
I don't know why this thing is put into my MREs. I don't know why some food technician out there wants me to show enthusiasm for it. I don't know a lot of things about this world, but Dear Reader, I know we can do better than the Chocolate Hooah Bar.
Comments