Navy Tales

The Bug Juice Caper

Bug juice is the unofficial name for a kool aid like drink served in the Navy mess halls in the sixties, and may even be served today.

It is made using a concentrate that comes in a pint bottle, in various flavors. This stuff is so potent, that you mix it with something like five gallons of water, and it is still strong. In fact, someone discovered that you could use the concentrate right out of the bottle to strip paint off of metal surfaces! I wonder what this drink did to our insides?

This was served both aboard ship, and at bases all over. It was normally mixed up in the kitchen, and put in various containers for self service usually where you could go up and hold your glass, or cup under the spout and raise up this ball like thing (like many milk dispensers) to fill your glass. Some of the bases had large mess halls, that had very large dispensers.

As I said in another post, I joined the Navy to get electronics school, and luckilly I did get assigned to Aviation Electronics Technician school in Memphis Tennessee. This school was in several parts, and lasted about a year (so I have several more stories from there).

The base at Memphis had quite a few different training schools, and had a lot of barracks, and a very large mess hall that served hundreds of people at a time. The central area had many, many tables, and the serving lines were around the sides. And right in the middle of the many tables was the piece de resistance, the bug juice dispenser! This thing had a sqare base about six feet on a side, and about three feet high. Sitting on this, was a HUGE urn like thing that was about five or more feet around, and maybe six feet tall by itself! Around the bottom, there were several of the spout, and ball serving things on each side.

Now this thing held who knows how much bug juice, but with the big crowd, it had to be filled, or added to several times during a lunch period.

The rather strange way they filled it was by a specially made set of stairs that they pushed out from the back, and up against one side of the base, and urn, and a guy from the kitchen would bring out a large pot like a commercial cooking pot full of bug juice that they mixed up in the kitchen in the "flavor of the day", walk up the stairs, and dump it into the open top of the huge urn. I think this day it was grape, or cherry.

Since this was summer in Memphis, it was rather hot out, so some of the sailors were wearing the dungaree working uniform, but most were wearing the white Navy uniform. One sailor in whites was filling his glass on one side, and the guy filling the urn was on the opposite side, climbing up the stairs with his large pot and about five gallons of bug juice. Just as he started to pour, the stairs slid back several feet, causing him to lose his balance, and fall forward pouring four or five gallons of purple, or red bug juice OVER the urn, hitting the poor guy filling his glass right on the head, and splashing bug juice for many feet in all directions and hitting many people.

Of course the potent stuff would never wash out of white uniforms, so there were many unhappy people leaving lunch that day!