Death Cults and Hard Candies

The MRE, or Meal Ready to Eat, is an individual meal ration given to members of the military who are forward deployed or in a training environment where other sources of food are unavailable. Each MRE comes with a main meal, a side dish, a dessert, and an accessory pack containing coffee or tea, a spoon, seasonings, and a small pack of toilet paper. At the time of my peak MRE consumption, there were 24 different menu items and like anything else with variety, some were better than others. There is a pecking order that exists in the Marine Corps, and it is reinforced when a new box of MRE’s is opened. The Corporals and senior Lance Corporals will go through first and select all the best meals like Beef Stew, Chili Mac, and Chicken Tetrazzini. They are then followed by the boot Lance Corporals and PFC’s who end up with the Cheese Tortellini, Thai Chicken, and Country Captain Chicken. If you have not had the pleasure of living on MRE’s then this won’t make sense but believe me, there is a big difference.

It seems the manufacturers knew which meals were the worst and tried to offset the terribleness of the main meal by including with them the best side dishes and desserts. For example, menu item #4, Country Captain Chicken, tastes like someone else ate some chicken and then vomited their meal into a little metal pouch, bile and all, and sealed it up for you to enjoy at a later time. The upside to this meal was that it came with the side dish Noodles in Butter Flavored Sauce, that when mixed with one of the cheese packets, was transformed into a delicious imitation of macaroni and cheese. It was also the only MRE that came with peanut butter M&M’s, which were so valuable they were one of the highest forms of currency in the combat zone barter system of exchange.

The MRE item which played the most significant role in the Marine Corps ecosystem was a small colorful hard candy called “Charms”. Charms are a square shaped cross between a Lifesaver and a Jolly Rancher that come in a rainbow-colored rectangular package. Marines have a firmly held superstition about Charms. They believe the little candies bring with them death and other curses to anyone who eats them or is in close proximity to someone who eats them. This means the consumption, or the possession of Charms is strictly forbidden. The only acceptable response when one finds a pack of Charms in their MRE is to immediately throw the pack as far as you can away from the other Marines. The desert of southern and central Iraq was well seeded with colorful candies in the spring of 2003. As someone who is not superstitious, I was not originally worried about the curse of Charms, but I followed the custom because of the actual threat of physical violence at the hands of my fellow Marines. Like many traditions, going through the motions at first often leads to real belief, and before long, I too was convinced of the threat of Charms.

Peak Charms hysteria was during the spring of 2003 in the lead up to and eventual invasion of Iraq. We were told Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons which could be deployed in missile and artillery strikes, so we were required to always carry a gas mask strapped to our leg, and wore chemical MOPP suits at all times. Whenever a scud missile was fired at us, the command “Gas! Gas! Gas!” would go out and we would rush to put on our masks. Inside the gas mask pouch were three syringes of some kind of antidote designed to slow the process of dying from certain chemical agents, and a fourth larger syringe containing valium, which was meant to allow you to die more peacefully if the antidote didn’t work. In the initial invasion, the gas alerts were called so frequently they became more annoying than threatening and I even remember sleeping in my gas mask on one occasion. The point is, the Marines were so accustomed to the possibility of choking to death on their own blood and vomit in a chemical weapon attack, that they were not even afraid of the Iraqi missile strikes anymore. But, if someone even thought about eating one of those little colorful candies, their whole platoon would turn on them.

Let’s take a detour back to the year 1519 when Hernan Cortes and the Spanish conquistadors landed in the Yucatan Peninsula. Cortes never had more than 1,200 Spanish troops under his command, but within two years they conquered the entire Aztec Empire which was an advanced civilization of approximately six million people. There were many reasons for this, but one of them has to do with the Mesoamerican practice of cannibalism, human sacrifice, and the worship of death. The subjugated population of the empire were required to turn over tens of thousands of people every year for ritual sacrifice in the capital Tenochtitlan or modern-day Mexico City. When Cortes and the conquistadors arrived with the intent to bring Mexican territory under the control of Spain, he received the support of tens of thousands of Thlaxcalans and other tribes who were ready to serve new masters. Once in power, the Spanish, who were devout Catholics, forbid the ancient practices of human sacrifice and cannibalism, but the worship of death that was practiced by the indigenous people never fully went away. Even now, 500 years later, we still see traces of it which have merged with some of the customs of Catholicism and turned into a new religion.

Fast forward to about a decade ago when I was working as a gang unit officer in east Bakersfield. We have a large Hispanic population that is mostly of Mexican descent, and there are some number of them who practice a cult religion that worships Nuestra Senora de la Santa Muerte (Our Lady of Holy Death), or Santa Muerte for short. Many of this religion’s practitioners are part of the criminal underground, so it is common in police work to come in contact with their shrines and other symbols. These shrines will have a statue of Santa Muerte which is similar to a female grim reaper. She is a skeleton that wears a robe and carries a scythe. At her feet will always be some type of offering that is usually an alcoholic beverage, menthol cigarettes, Fuego Takis, or something of that sort. They believe Santa Muerte bestows good fortune and other types of blessings upon them.

As a descendent of the dustbowl Oklahoma diaspora, and someone who was not raised in a religious tradition, the presence of these Santa Muerte shrines made no sense to me. It wasn’t long though before I noticed the impact they had on my Mexican-American coworkers. They were visibly disturbed and freaked out by them and would get angry if you touched one. Of course, this immediately became a kind of game for the people like me who had no prior experience with the death cult. Some of us would pick up parts of the shrines or trick our scared friends into entering a room with Our Lady of Holy Death just to startle or get a rise out of them. The most common response is always, “I don’t believe in that stuff, but I just don’t mess around like that.”

So, I came into work the other day and there was an envelope with a small bulge on my desk. I opened it up, and much to my chagrin, inside was a pack of Charms. Luckily, my first response was not to immediately throw the sugary squares, but I did find myself thinking, “I don’t believe in that stuff, but I just don’t mess around like that.” The threat of Nuestra Senora de la Santa Muerte had come full circle and now I started to understand the cultural significance of touching the wrong bag of spicy, crunchy snacks. I know it’s a cheap metaphor to compare early 2000’s Marine Corps superstition to a modern-day death cult that draws its symbolism from thousands of years of Judeo-Christian and indigenous Mesoamerican cultures, but I’m a cheap metaphor kind of dude. So, to all my Mexican friends, I’m sorry for all the practical jokes, and I’ll try to avoid the weird little shrines in the future.